The Weird Kid

Amanda and I both had babies at the apartment complex. But we didn't talk.

One day she walked up to where I sat with a tiny Smudge on a tiny square of grass outside my door. She had a baby slung under her arm. She said, looking at the ground at my feet, "Wassup. Amanda."

I didn't have any friends who use the term "Wassup" non-ironically before Amanda. I didn't have any friends that listened to rap except as a way to understand artistic urban motivations. And no friends that would think of using the word "hump" in place of "fuck" to protect little ears in the room. I needed a friend like that.

And now I'll tell you of a shit storm, and the woman who is surviving it.

I thought her daughter looked different. Her little head seemed asymmetrical. I learned she had tubing inserted in her skull to drain fluid, and she was cross-eyed. She had been born 3 months premature, (not due to any maternal misdoings).

Amanda and her boyfriend of 10 years spent 3 months at Ronald McDonald House in Portland, caring for their baby through an incubator. The baby came home to our dingy little apartments, healthy but for feeding tubes and soon-to-diagnosed Cerebral Palsy.

Amanda was happy, though. Her baby was alive, she would marry her boyfriend in August, he had a good job, her family was close to her but not so close that their bad habits affected her new life. She was done with parties, uninterested in drugs. Her apartment was spotless, her meals were healthy, and her walls covered in sweetly framed portraits and snapshots of her family.

I went with her one day in July, and we found a wedding dress. She seldom smiles, but she kept grinning at her reflection in the 3-way mirrors. She would buy it after she brought her mom to see it.

Her mom never say it. She died the next day. She collapsed in the shower from an epileptic seizure and never woke. She left 5 children, all teens except Amanda.

And Amanda's 2 year old baby sister.

In the misery of the aftermath, her boyfriend said the wrong thing to her, told her it was time to quit grieving and start taking care of him again. She slapped him. He moved out.

She has been asking forgiveness for 6 months. He still pays for half the apartment and takes the baby on weekends, and so I will not condemn him at a immature douche-bag dick. She loves him, only him, since they were 14. She sleeps with stuffed animals pressed into her back, to trick the emptiness.

She doesn't work, as there is no longer any family to leave her baby with. Her family disintegrated with her mother gone. Her father cannot recover, has no job, and walks around the house he may soon lose, like a ghost. He, in this state, is the main caregiver of the now 3 year old. Her teenage siblings have mostly drifted away. Her 16 year old sister remains in the house, angry, rebellious, incapable of helping.

Amanda is unusual because she is in an utter shit swamp, and none of it was her fault, unless you blame her for who she fell in love with. The slap? She shouldn't have. Although I believe forgiveness and empathy, in it's purest form, was created for a situation like that.

And she never complains. She never asks for anything. Doesn't compare herself to other people. She just keeps surviving. With no one to call for support, losing the two people she needed most within two weeks of each other, one to death and the other to weakness of character (his).

I'm no savior. The best I can do is spend time with her, and pay her to watch Smudge. But I'm no mother or sister or husband.

It has not escaped me, that this life of mine, the one I keep thrashing around in and kicking at and screaming, "MORE! Not enough! Not good enough!!" is everything, all, she ever wanted.