I’ve never gotten close enough to my ex-wife to know the color of her eyes. My ex-wife has always been my ex-wife. My ex-wife has only spoken to me once. My ex-wife has a pointy chin and curly hair.
My stepson loves my ex-wife. My ex-wife dresses exactly like me; if we were friends I’d love to swap clothes. She wears floppy straw hats to my stepson’s soccer games and drapes herself in blankets to stay warm. I, too, am always cold.
On a metal bleacher, she draws in sketch books during soccer practice. I met my ex-wife two years after her divorce. My stepson disappears into my ex-wife’s house and his emotions wrap around her like a scarf. He turns into armor, a walnut shell, a pup protecting the line of her fence. My stepson disappears into my ex-wife’s house for seven days in a row and I only glimpse him at soccer matches. During these seven days my stepson won’t hug me at the end of games because he unconsciously doesn’t want to upset my ex-wife. Maybe consciously? My ex-wife grows pumpkins in her backyard and on Halloween my stepson paints them to decorate their porch. I cannot see the pumpkins growing behind their fence but enjoy the sloppy, evil faces each October.
My ex-wife won’t acknowledge my daughter in public. My daughter; how can I protect her from the ache of never knowing her own brother’s mother? From a brother’s mother who doesn’t want to know her? I can’t protect her but I can try to prevent the ache from melding into an anchor. How can I help my stepson feel the ache of his mother never wanting to know him as an older brother instead of pretending it isn’t there? Can I? His ache is on the other side of the walnut shell. He barks at his ache when it approaches the fence.
My stepson is a child of many rooms: In one room he’s an only child; in one room he’s an older brother; in one room he’s given permission to get Bs when in another he’s expected to get As; in one room he walks his dog along the reservoir while in another he’s dogless; in one room he’s encouraged to play hockey but in another he’s forbidden; in one room he must take showers on Sundays and in another he always unloads the dishwasher. Each room has a trapdoor behind which my stepson stores heavy feelings. All of these rooms are like train cars snaking around a dark mountain. When does he get to stop and unpack them? At dinner I ask him to describe the rooms I can’t see. The rooms he’s spent the most time in during the seven days at my ex-wife’s house. He tells me this year the grasshoppers are eating the tomatoes ad pumpkins they’re growing. That nothing can keep the grasshoppers out. That he shoots them with a salt gun.
I’ve texted my ex-wife and asked if she’s open to walking through the train cars together for my stepson’s sake and she responded, At this point, he has acclimated to life in two separate households that maintain a respectful distance. My ex-wife won’t pull into the driveway but will pull up to the mailbox. I hear my ex-wife is an amazing baker. On Fridays my ex-wife bakes sourdough bread with my stepson. I am happy for my stepson and mildly envious of their rituals. Envy is inaccurate—it’s just—I feel my own precarity in ways my ex-wife never will. My ex-wife’s transgressions have always been forgiven or at least dropped behind trapdoors and forgotten during their Sundae Sundays.
Yet I worry minor missteps or misunderstandings could fog love’s mirror I hang in all his rooms I can reach. In these rooms, I quietly cook my stepson breakfast every morning, shop for snacks every Sunday before he returns, wash his clothes every week and make sure his soccer jerseys don’t go in the dryer, keep a running list of movies and TV shows I think he’d like to watch with me, and during dinner ask about his art projects and plots of the books he reads. But if I check in about whether he’s brushed his teeth or suggest he should wait to eat dessert until he’s finished eating dinner, my place in the family may be questioned depending on my tone or his mood.
How does one earn the right to hold someone else accountable? Do I mean earn the trust instead of right? How can I show my stepson that accountability is a form of love, a deep investment in the person he’ll become? Zach Schomburg wrote, What I plant / I bury, but I think the opposite is true: what I bury, I plant. A bulb doesn’t feel smothered by the dirt it must burst through. But when there’s pushback, can I protect myself from feeling hurt without also closing vulnerability’s door? Let my ache be a little doorstop!
Through the open door hidden flairs of despair turn into another day of attempts: Here are the scrambled eggs and strawberries, here is the lunch for the backpack, here are the texts with friends’ parents making plans for my stepson on the weekend, here is the bike excursion to the penny arcade, here is the matinee we’ll see together on a boiling summer day, here is playing in the grass with my daughter while my stepson dribbles up the field into the sunset, here is the listening party for my stepson’s song, “Arctic Matinee,” here is his reminder to pick the underwear up off the bathroom floor and here is where I hold my breath. I’m trying to make my reminders as gentle as possible while remaining consistent as a season, reliable as catmint.
I have rituals with my ex-wife’s milk box: Every other Monday I leave my stepson’s soccer bag in my ex-wife’s milk box so he doesn’t have to haul it to school on Switch Days. I leave homemade dog treats for my stepson’s dog in her milk box. Twice a year I leave International Travel Parental Consent Forms in my ex-wife’s milk box. This May, I left half of a leftover elementary school graduation cake in my ex-wife’s milk box since my stepson only had one slice before Switch Day. I pick up raincoats from the milk box, I collect cleats from the milk box, I gather forgotten computer chargers from this milk box. My ex-wife’s milk box both is and isn’t a metaphor. I have never seen milk in my ex-wife’s milk box but I’ve been assured it’s delivered once a week. When I walk up to the milk box I try not to upset the dog behind the door who has excellent hearing and a clear bark.
My ex-wife does not want me to knock on the door because she does not want to open it and speak to me. Does she know the color of my eyes? My daughter does not share this color. They are exactly like her brother’s. My daughter runs around the bleachers my ex-wife sits on and doesn’t know her wobbly legs circle her brother’s mother. What is a respectful distance to a child? How much ache does the word acclimate hold for our children? When my stepson tells my ex-wife about his week with us, he describes his experiences using I instead of we. Incompletion is his safety net, a family album of seven days with pixelated faces.
I hope my stepson learns to place his own emotions in front of protecting others. This wish clings to me like a lonely fog and I, a helpless weathervane. My daughter’s daycare is also infested with grasshoppers this summer and she makes sense of them by comparing their sizes to her family so, for instance, brother-size is a bigger grasshopper than sister-size. Some are light green and some are brown and wherever she steps in the daycare’s yard, sister-size and momma-size grasshoppers leap out of the way. My stepson wants to kill them with a salt gun because they’re destroying his garden but he restrains himself in front of younger children. He catches them for his sister to examine and she points, Brother-size.
I love the ritual of reading to my stepson before bed. I love when my stepson offers me his cheeks to kiss after we turn off the lights. My daughter only lets me kiss her if she can choose between the biggest kiss or the tiniest kiss. I don’t understand her obsession with sizing but it must be how she relates to the external world and she’s delighted when anything is sister-size.
It’s not that I want to be friends with my ex-wife, it’s that I would do anything to help my stepson feel like the tops of his train cars have blown off, that the sky’s brightening each room, that the train has slowed in a field and tall wheat weaves through the windows. When I picture this myself I can only see the Little Blue Engine in The Little Engine That Could because I read it to my daughter every morning when she asks for her choo choo book. Adults remember the iconic lines, I think I can I think I can I think I can but they often forget the gold and black engines that pass by first, refusing to help. How the dolls and the funniest toy clown you ever saw were brought to tears before the blue engine shows up, merrily.
It’s not actually a book about believing in yourself. It’s about humility and having faith you can help others when called upon. The funniest little toy clown won’t give up even when the other dolls are crying and it’s the toy clown who chases after and flags down each of the engines. It’s actually a book about the perseverance of humility—accepting you need help and being vulnerable to both those who can and can’t help you. My ex-wife has only spoken two words to me, Hi Julia, as she walked past without stopping at the end of the soccer season. My stepson tries to teach his sister how to kick a soccer ball and is so patient when she continually picks it up instead, an accidental goalie.
My stepson’s voice is deepening and he talks about saving his allowance for cologne. I constantly worry my stepson feels relieved when he returns to my ex-wife’s house because my daughter, who adorably says chouch instead of couch, who hugs her brother tightly around his knees before bath time, also asks for the same song repeatedly and touches any of his things brought out of his room and cries when she’s tired. I worry this essay reads more like a list of grievances against my ex-wife when I’m really trying to write about grief: the ache of diminished access. How to be a whole family with my stepson and how to be a whole family without him.
I remember my parents reading The Little Engine That Could to me and their desire to have me relate to the blue train that could, but what I feel now is admiration toward the funniest toy clown, with his billowing jumpsuit of green polka dots as he races between the tracks, goofily unflappable against rejection. This weekend, I’ll show my stepson how to turn a walnut shell into a miniature ship—twist in a twig-mast and unfold a deck of moss—how to sail it down the creek—how to see it as something other than a shield.
And what if the last car on my stepson’s train is filled with grain. What if, together, we could open the side hatch, let the grain seep out like tiny tan tears to bury. What if this train could plant a field of wheat. What if, the funniest toy clown thinks, years from now, the train returns to this route, cuts through high-waisted wheat, slows down, and we all disembark, opening our palms to touch the awns? There is room for more than grief in the grief room.
Julia Cohen's latest book is Freak Lip (TRP, 2026), a memoir-in-essays. She is also the author of I Was Not Born (Noemi Press, 2014), Collateral Light (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2014) and Triggermoon Triggermoon (BLP, 2011). Her nonfiction and poetry appear in issues of The Georgia Review, Southeast Review, The New England Review, Fugue, Heavy Feather Review, Boston Review, and BOMB. Julia Cohen lives in Colorado with her family and tends to her xeriscape garden.
This is beautiful. So many deal with this, but there is often little alternative. In a perfect world it wouldn't be this hard. But you have your children, even if not always all the time, and that matters. Wonderful writing.
Most of the way through this lovely poem, I thought the voice was a man's. I was disappointed in myself for this sexism, but I'm glad to have had so gentle a teacher.