Gretchen Waschke - Holding Your Breath

 

So, I got home on a Wednesday night in January, after dropping my daughter off with my soon-to-be ex-husband. And I arrived home to find [sobs] a water shut-off notice, an electricity shut-off notice, and an eviction notice. And it was very cold. I went inside, I took those pieces of paper, and I sat in the middle of my very dark living room floor. It was really quiet, and I found myself somewhere between relieved, because I knew my daughter wasn't there. She was with her father, she was safe, and she was warm, and she was cared for, and I was terrified. [chuckles] 

 

We'd recently come to mostly an agreement about how our divorce was going to happen, and who was going to have McKenna, and what the future would look like for me as a mom, although my ex-husband, soon-to-be ex-husband, had made it clear that he didn't think that I could ever be stable enough for her on my own. I was terrified that he would know that maybe that was actually happening. I sat there all night, and I was like-- I couldn't figure out how I'd gone from where I was, [chuckles] with a home and a husband and three dogs and two acres of property, to almost nothing. 

 

I sat there, and I knew that I'd grown up being told, "It doesn't matter what's going on behind closed doors in your home, you walk out and you put on a good face and you figure it out on your own, but you do what you got to do in public. You make it look okay." So, after not sleeping and being very cold and not having a place to shower or really get ready, I stood in the mirror trying to make some semblance of normal before leaving for work on Thursday morning. At the time, I had an office that was closed, and there were no windows. So, it was like a refuge in that moment. I was hoping that I wouldn't actually cross paths with anybody that day. I was not so fortunate. There was a knock on my door, and I almost didn't answer, [chuckles] but I said, "Come in." And it happened to be a woman who, over time of working together, we'd become friends. 

 

Keisha walked through the door, and she looked me in the eye, and she said, "What is going on?" I looked down at my desk. I couldn't look her in the eye. And before I could stop myself, all of these words started tumbling out of my face, that he'd been cheating on me. The divorce was almost final. My parents didn't want to talk to me anymore. I had no water, I had no heat, and I was about to lose the only place I had to be with my daughter. And there it was. It was all there on the table in front of me.

 

I looked up at her, thinking that she would either laugh or walk out the door, like, “Okay, don't know what to tell you.” I'm pretty sure I held my breath for a million minutes in the five seconds it took her to answer and say, "We got this. I know somebody who needs a housemate." And Sunday night, I laid down next to my daughter, and I listened to her sleep, and I cried, realizing that my community had become my family. [laughs]