I can’t stop shaking my head, and now a cold panic is starting to set in. My mom has lost her mind. She’s having a breakdown.
Who do I call if my mom has a breakdown? I no longer have a father, another parent.
I almost start bawling on the spot, but instead I manage to speak over the lump in my throat.Stay strong, Zadie. Just fix it.“This isn’t making any sense.”
“The thing…I guess…” Mom is stalling like she doesn’t want to have to say the words. Normally I would fill them in, help her where she needs it. But not this morning. I have to understand what’s happening. “I had a workplace…relationship. It went south some months ago. I didn’t expect Brian to threaten to go to the media—Brian, of all people…”
“Who is Brian?”
Mom laughs. Actually laughs, like there’s anything funny or remotely normal about any of this. “A junior staffer. We had…a connection.”
I cover my face with my hands. This can’t be happening. It really can’t.
“If you resign, everyone is going to know.”
Mom stares at me for a second and then touches my cheek. “Oh, honey,” she says, all tenderness. “I’m so sorry.”
“Everyone at school. All the teachers, the parents, your friends. My friends. Your constituents. Yourconstituents, Mom.”
I emphasize that word in the hopes it will reach her. That is a word my mother knows. Even in a breakdown, she will correct her posture, put on her lipstick, anddeliverif there is even one constituent involved.
She nods. “By next week, yes,” she says. “Or even as early as this afternoon, if it leaks.”
“How is this happening?” I ask, looking around at the room instead of her. I am positively and completely mystified.
“How could this have happened? You’ve blown up our lives!” The explosion comes out of me without my permission, and I want to apologize, take it back, make amends. But if I do, she won’t know how serious this is. I don’t think she gets how serious this is.
How can my mother, Wendy Cartwright, not understand the gravity of a situation like this?
And then to my shock and absolute horror, she loses it.
“I’msuchan idiot,” she says, bursting into tears. “Such a fool. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
She covers her face with her hands and just starts to weep, quiet shuddering breaths and heaving shoulders.
I can’t move at first.
And then I reach for her.
“Mom,” I say, panicked. “Mom, it’s okay.”
“It’s really not,” she says, still crying. “My whole career is over. You’re going to have to deal with the fallout—we both will. I was just so fuckingstupid.”
I’ve never heard her curse before. Never heard her break down like this.
Heart beating wildly, I pry her hands from her face.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I promise, even though I know it’s not. She’s right that her career is over. She’s right that we’re both going to have to deal with the fallout. And it’s going to be painful. Especially in this town, with these people, who have always viewed us as other.
I run for a box of tissues, a glass of water.
Mom blows her nose, and finally, finally, she can speak again. “I just don’t know what to do from here. What do Ido?”
For one second, I’m afraid she’s really asking me.
Asking who and what she is now without the career she has worked so hard for, because the truth is that I don’t really know.
I am afraid, in my heart of hearts, that she is ruined.
