How I almost gave up Mother’s Day. Twice.

By Juana Bimba

With my marriage rapidly dissolving came news of my pregnancy, the result of a failed attempt at reconciliation. Faced with the prospect of raising a child alone,I considered an abortion, but my brother talked me out of  it. I might not get another chance at motherhood, he said.

My husband was not a bad person, just a weak, confused asshole who feared responsibility. He kept pushing for an abortion until my 8th month, when he moved out—taking half the furniture— so

he wouldn’t be present when I gave birth. Again, it was my brother who drove me to South Miami Hospital and stuck around until my son was born.

For the  next 7 years, we saw very little of my son’s father. I had to drag him to court for child support; he was claiming the kid wasn’t his. I never told my son any of this until much later; I wanted him to have a relationship with his dad; I wanted him to know he had a father, that he wasn’t a bastard, like so many other Latino kids.

I succeeded;  the guy came to adore my son, (who loved him back, somewhat philosophically) and
to have a cordial, breezy relationship with me. We exchanged Xmas presents and ocasional gossip on the phone. Today, even more is forgiven and forgotten: he died of Covid19 a few weeks ago.

About two years after our divorce, I moved to New York. I had been offered editorship of a new, bilingual magazine and I jumped at the chance of ditching Miami.

I was leaving a glamour gig as a society reporter and columnist for the Spanish edition of the Miami Herald, but the new job was something else, a service magazine about  health, nutrition and the family which required travel for conferences to Washington DC—where, as I was to discover, they sure know how to party.

After the conferences, there were cocktails and galas and clubs. The city was  crawling with
dapper lobbyists on the make, plenty of spare change in their pockets. I played around like a 20-year-old, and as we say in Spanish, que me quiten lo bailao (they can’t take away what I’ve danced).

But for about two years, I forgot I had a son.  Before going off on my excellent adventures, I just deposited him upstairs with my Sicilian landlady and her husband, who eventually began to feel that they owned him. One day, after a vicious fight with the landlady, I realized I’d lost control of the situation and might even lose my son to these fierce, primal people, who boasted slyly about their  shady “connections.”

Overnight, I took a bus to Miami, handed my son to his father and flew back to straighten out my NYC life. The magazine I edited had folded for financial reasons, so now I had no apartment, no son and no job.Today, I’d contemplate suicide, but back then I had the resilience of youth. I just plowed on. I found a freelance gig as an advertising copywriter and moved into a women’s residence in the West Village.

Inexplicably, my son’s medical records now list me as going into the “shelter system”, but it was more like a women’s dorm.You needed letters of reference to get in. It was in a prime location and I made the most of it.  That summer, I shuffled around the West Village braless, kinky mane adrift. I took Cajun dance lessons, met friends for drinks in cute bistros, shopped on 14th street (when it was still a bargain), dined nightly on free tapas and Marqués de Riscal at the Spanish pub next door.

 Meanwhile, my ex was lobbying hard to keep the child he’d once asked me to abort, alleging he could be a better parent since I was such a fuckup. Given the situation, I could see his point: I hadn’t exactly been an exemplary mother. So I seriously considered giving up my son for his own good. And I would’ve, if it hadn’t been for a friend’s cautionary tale.

She was a gorgeous, successful publicist who had divorced a wealthy man. This guy argued he could give their little girl everything she couldn’t, as a single career woman, so my friend agreed to surrender the child for her own good—and never saw the kid again. “Don’t do it”, she told me.”Or you’ll live to regret it”.

Today, I don’ t even remember her name. I do remember that before we’d been introduced, I ran off with her date after a black tie ball in Washington DC. She could’ve held a grudge, but didn’t. Instead, she gave me the best advice of my life, and wherever she is, I wish her the happiest of Mother’s Days. Thanks to her, I determined  to reclaim my son, renounce my evil ways and become the best mother in existence. It was a Mary Magdalene moment.

And I couldn’t have known it at the time, but it was also the best decision for my son. His father would go on to marry and divorce a second time. The second wife was some shrill, tacky thing who bore him a psychologically and emotionally damaged son. For years, both of these creatures were
very much in the picture and they regarded my son as an interloper until his father’s death ended those particular tensions.

Had I left my son with his father, he might’ve been relegated to a Cinderella existence as second fiddle to these two wretches. Another thing: my son turned out to have dyslexia.I was to spend the next dozen years of my life hiring lawyers to battle the NYC Board of Education, so he could get the best specialized schooling in New England boarding schools.

Today, he has a college degree, but had he stayed with his father, my son might still be unable to read and write. His father just didn’t have the education or mental resources to fight for the boy as I did.

And finally, I spared my son the agony of growing up in a dysfunctional household, something I’m all too familiar with (but that’s another story). So Happy Mother’s Day to me, and to all of you who have raised,or are still raising, kids on their own. P’alante!

With my brother Jorge,my son’s first savior.

No Exit. For Now.

By Juana  Bimba

Here I sit, with a bottle of Riesling and an iPad, writing this piece on my tiny terrace—the only sliver of outdoors I dare enjoy these  days. Now that they’ve opened a Covid19 hospital right here on Roosevelt Island, NYC, I don’t set foot outside my apartment.

The current sheltering in place brings to mind literature like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera”,where two aging lovers, reunited at long last, hoist the cholera contagion banner on
their cruise ship so authorities won’t let them dock and they can float around forever.

That’s beautiful, but then there are stories like Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit, which could also apply.In it, three people die and go to hell (a room with no exit) where they proceed to bicker and make each other miserable for all eternity. The play’s most famous line is “hell is other people”.

As in No Exit, I share my space with two others: my son and a male roommate. My apartment does have an exit, but the virus took it away. My son, afraid I’ll die on him, tries to keep me from going anywhere. Needless to say, we have some spectacular clashes, but he’s my kid and we’re Cuban, so we forget about the fight before echoes from the last scream fade.

The roommate is a different matter.

Roommates happen to be a way of life in NYC, where real estate is expensive, and unrelated adults must often share space to defray costs. If you’re the head of household, you try to find a quiet, responsible person.  I, for example, don’t rent to students.

The best roommates are people visiting the city on some kind of training program.  They tend to be mature, intelligent, educated professionals, polite to a fault, but their stays are always temporary. The next best deals are folks who work in Manhattan but live hours away, and need a pied
à terre in the city during the week. On weekends and holidays, they go back to wherever they came from, and you’ve got the place to yourself. Problem is, they’re hard to find.

The rest—the majority— consists of adults who are more or less adrift in life. To me, anyone over 29 who hasn’t settled into some kind of a stable living arrangement and needs to rent a room somewhere is probably damaged goods, or in transition from some personal tragedy. Which makes them
damaged goods. But those are the people who come to your door when you’re renting out a room.

With our current roommate, everything seemed fine initially.

He was a man in his 50’s, never married and living in Long Island with his sister and her husband. He  came to us because he worked in Manhattan and needed to reside closer to his job. At first, the guy worked at night and slept during the day, so we rarely saw him. Then came the virus and his schedule
changed. He now works two days a week and shelters in place with us the rest of the time.

He’s pleasant enough and pays on time, loves our cats, gets on famously with my son and is very quiet—easily one of the best tenants we’ve ever had. But now that he had become more visible, he was getting a touch too friendly. He followed me around, trying to start little chats. If I went to the kitchen at 3 a.m. for a glass of water, he’d pop out of his room and attempt to socialize. I felt stalked in my own home. I wasn’t flattered at all. He looks like the Expedia Gnome with a yarmulke and no beard.  He sounds like Little Caesar’s “Pizza, pizza” character. He has this lecherous glitter in his beady little eyes.

And I couldn’t get away from him, given the present situation. It was like No Exit, live.

For women, few things are more hideous than insistent, unwanted attention from a man they find unattractive. I know it sounds like high school, but men retain the capacity to creep you out no matter how old they (or you) are. My son says I’m imagining things, however,

I’ve been around long enough to realize what people are up to without their having to spell it out.

I tried to be curt and evasive with the roommate, but he didn’t take hints.I once tried to step around him and he moved to block me, until he realized what he was doing and backed off. He kept bringing me little presents of wine and cookies. Then last week, when he showed up with flowers, I exploded and asked him not to give me anything else. He was visibly shocked, but subtlety hadn’t worked, so I had to resort to rudeness. That seems to have worked.

Now he comes in without greeting us, a sullen shadow on the way to his room.  Once there, he barely emerges. Well, that’s fine with me, and it also serves the purpose of social distancing from someone who’s still in touch with the outside.

I just hope he keeps it up until this Coronavirus thing is over and I can find my way to the exit and a normal life.