Saint Nobody

One night while I was in graduate school at the College of Charleston, I was hanging out with some friends from home who had also relocated to Charleston. We were at Brad and Alicia’s on James Island. Alicia and I took Geology together in undergrad, and I used to work at the jazz club next door to Brad’s bar. Fio and I had daughters around the same age, and they had attended a church day school together as toddlers. I had known her husband, Patrick for quite some time, and I hated her ex-husband, Todd, almost as much as she did, for different reasons.

It was a cold night, and we were drinking, don’t remember what, but we all had a lot of it. I remember being outside on the deck, clouds flying through the twilight, barely slowing enough to flirt with the moon.

I had lost all support a month or two earlier—my daughter’s father’s mother died, and she had been my greatest help, my greatest friend. I was out of my mind with disenfranchised grief. Her son and I were still entangled in our volatile, convoluted, chaotic relationship, and he didn’t allow me to attend her funeral. I released balloons on the beach with my daughter and the Book of Common Prayer instead, with no one there to witness my grief, just my four-year-old daughter, whose loss was greater than mine. Before you get started about balloons being bad for the seagulls, let me jump into that thought to say fuck the beach pigeons.

So Elizabeth was gone, and Sam had left me holding a very large bag with no one to help carry it or unpack it, and i was overwhelmed. My daughter was having a sleepover at another friend’s house that night.

Everything was fine, until they started talking about hiw broke they were, moonlight filtering through the trees as the possibility of not going on vacation was lamented. I was currently facing financial dilemmas like “Can I afford this box of cereal and a jar of peanut butter?” and I got upset.

Attempting to comfort me, Fio said I was a saint, that everyone could see how I put my daughter first and sacrificed for her.

It lit a fire of rage inside me like you would not believe. I didn’t then, don’t now, never have, never will desire to be a saint in anyone’s eyes. I already had too much responsibility; now someone was adding sainthood to it? Absogoddamnlutely not.

I cried. I screamed. Everyone though I was crazy because I was. But there was one thing I knew for sure, and it was that nobody had the right to add expectations of goodness to how I was carrying my load. I just wanted them to stop poormouthing to someone who was truly in a pickle. By the time I left, I couldn’t even tolerate hearing my name on anyone’s lips.