Escape Points Read Free

life can be predictable. You cannot plan for every inconvenience, major and minor, every betrayal, every loss. But you can plan to prevail.
    Millions of women around the globe have steered families to success without a partner. Many contend with dire conditions, unfathomable hardships, and circumstances that are impossible to escape.
    Yes, I know I have been lucky.
    I have work I find meaningful. I have family that will help me no matter what. I have friends who inspire me and tell me when I am acting stupidly. I have three sons who are exceptional human beings.
    Colin healed from his severe concussion. He took the ACT weeks later. He passed his classes. His headaches went away. He applied to the University of Iowa and was accepted.
    I heard a story on NPR a while back about a 108-year-old woman who managed to outlive and outwit most of her family and friends. She had what experts called “adaptive competence,” a powerful trait that allows and inspires you to view your life as half-full regardless of setbacks. I think I have that. I know my sons do.

PART ONE
SCRAMBLE
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1
Trash
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2002–2005
    W eldon hurled a new copper-bottomed teakettle into the kitchen trash with a twanging thud.
    “Couldn’t we just keep it and not think about it as his ?” I asked.
    “It is his,” he insisted.
    It was a Saturday morning in June 2005, and the eldest of my three sons, Weldon, had already spent hours ripping through everything in the house that had once belonged to his father; shoving the old clothes, photos, artwork, letters, blankets, a sleeping bag, and a worn blue comforter into trash bags he took outside and dumped into the garbage cans near the garage.
    As a sixteen-year-old high school junior, Weldon did many things that puzzled me. Most of the time I didn’t know what bothered him, but he would usually tell me eventually.
    It had been a year and a half since my sons’ father moved to Europe, eight years since our divorce. Ours was not one of those amicable, let’s-stay-friends divorces. It was tumultuous, painful, contentious, expensive. Three weeks after I filed for an order of protection that required my husband to move out of our house in 1995, he filed for divorce and never came back.
    To the surprise of everyone who thought they knew the handsome, charming attorney who lived happily with his smiling family in the neat brick Tudor home on the quiet street, my former husband had been physically and emotionally abusive to me over a nine-year marriage. I grew tired of apologies, roses, and promises delivered in counseling offices and at home. There would be no second, third, fourth, tenth chances. I lost the will to try.
    I would start over, as a single mother, determined to make a life without fear or uncertainty for myself and my boys, without the unpredictability of a man who could be either the most charismatic person in the room or—to me—the most terrifying.
    After full psychiatric evaluations of both of us, and an evaluation by a court-appointed legal guardian, the judge granted me sole custody of our sons, Weldon, Brendan, and Colin, who at the start of divorce proceedings were six, four, and one.
    The years following the divorce were not easy but also pretty good considering the complications. I worked hard to stay above water—moving from an adjunct lecturer to lecturer to senior lecturer to assistant professor at Northwestern, contributing columns to newspapers, websites, and magazines; writing books; giving speeches and workshops; and editing other writers’ work. I never said no to any offer of freelance employment for pay.
    The acrimony between my former husband and me lessened but never disappeared. There was an undulation of empathy, then curt cruelty. I could never predict either. I considered him to be erratic in his attention to our sons; I learned never to count on him for anything related to the boys. He remarried within a few months of our divorce, had a daughter, a half sister to