June 15, 2021:
I loved her homework.
Mixing colors on the kitchen table, while she explained how new colors form by combining earlier, simpler ones.
I don't know why she left school. Or why she returned her rented piano. Or stopped listening to music altogether, retreating into her chair, with her television and her tea and cigarettes.
Maybe it was too much. The factory before dawn, undergraduate in the evenings. Or maybe it was too far, once she moved us across town to be nearer her soon to be erstwhile bestie. Or maybe she had already dropped out before then. I don't know. It was never discussed with me.
Or maybe it was depression, her lifelong truest companion. Where the struggle to live a life while feeding a child was undercut by brain chemistry, leaving her with the same cost-benefit calculation I later knew so well. I could do this, but it would leave me so exhausted...
I only knew that at some point her homework stopped, and with it, some of the happiest moments I remember together as mother and son, where the parent taught something to the child, passing on that little bit of human knowledge, and we acted something close to the ancient modes still swimming through our collective DNA.