How I Found True Love in a Bowl of Breakfast Cereal

 

I believe you can often find love in the most unexpected of places. At the age of 20, I experienced a kind of love that I was certainly not expecting at that point in my life. 

I worked as a part-time caregiver for a little girl, whom I’ll call “A.” I cared for A in the early mornings, five days a week, sometimes in the afternoons, sometimes overnight, and at times when I even had to explain her to my perplexed peers and curious professors. It was my job. It paid well. There were many perks, the most obvious one being a family, something that had started to slowly scatter and slip away from me then – my own family. I wish I could say that the reason I stayed with this family was because of the money, or the companionship I found with A’s mother: the street parties, the holiday parties, the Friday parties, the Christmas/Chanukah bonuses, and everything else that went along with that.

 

Perhaps I didn’t know it then, but what drove me to pull myself out of bed every morning at 5am, with only a tiny gulf of sleep between the three or four hours earlier I was sitting at my cluttered kitchen table, head bent over my computer screen, surrounded by books, papers, and empty cans of green tea, pondering the lives of imaginary individuals, that maybe it was a kind of love that kept me doing what I did. I woke up before dawn, and would stumble around my half-lit apartment, grabbing what I needed for the day. I would lift my bike over my shoulder, and step out into the quiet darkness of South Philadelphia. I was barely deterred by even ice and snow. I’d fly north up Broad Street: Jackson, Snyder, Passyunk, Mifflin, Moore, Castle Ave., Morris, Tasker, Dickinson, Reed, Wharton, Federal, Ellsworth, Washington, Carpenter, Montrose, Christian, Catherine, Fitzwater, Bainbridge, South, Lombard, and then east to 13th, where I’d round a small corner onto the even smaller Iseminger St., where my little A slept peacefully. The early mornings with A were often some of the most peaceful moments in my own life then. I would watch her sleep for a few minutes before heading downstairs to the kitchen, where I would slowly stir a pot of oatmeal or Cream of Wheat. It’s best when stirred slow. 

 

I’d sit on the edge of her mother’s bed, where I’d talk her softly into the day. She’d eventually announce that she “was up,” which was my cue to leave. She preferred to come to the kitchen alone. We would eat breakfast together, me eating whatever she didn’t. We studied together, me lost in Shakespeare and Arthur Miller, while she spoke Hebrew over her oatmeal. Other times, we played backgammon while watching silly cartoons. I explained to her that one frame of one of her cartoons took weeks, sometimes even months to create. Almost as hard as learning Hebrew. 

When it was time for A to go to school, we’d stand on 12th street, waiting for her car. We talked about A’s tests for the day, and her weekends in New Jersey, and her classmates. She told me that we should go wake up my classmates. What wicked fun that would’ve been.

 

But it wasn’t as simple as bike rides and breakfast and board games. The mornings started to weigh on me, literally. There were plenty of days where my eyelids were heavy with sleep, and I could barely talk to A without yawning through a sentence. Sometimes, many times, I thought about staying in bed. “Calling in sick.” Perhaps applying for a part-time job at one of the numerous Starbucks’ that I frequented. But I kept going. I figured out how to mold this part-time, full-time job into my very full-time job as a college student. But mid-way through junior year, my first year with A, I felt I had come to a breaking point. I was tired, spent, over. School had become a chore, for so many reasons. I felt my tiny world closing in on me, the two-mile stretch up and down Broad St., A’s mother’s kitchen, the windows in the kitchen, the local news at 6AM, chai lattes, bike racks, bike locks, cigarettes, dirty clothes, tomato pies, Alice Munro, cheap wine, friends’ bedroom floors, the New Yorker, my heavy backpack that never seemed to get lighter, sweatshirts, tea, all that caffeine that made my heart race in the middle of the afternoon, the Cream of Wheat: three teaspoons of butter in the already boiling water, slowly stir in milk. There were moments when I found myself thinking of my own parents, and how my mother must’ve felt all the mornings that she willed herself out of bed every morning. I thought of my father at age 20, not knowing that his young life was being consumed by mania, every day more unbearable than the last.

 

I got a call one afternoon, as I was on my way out of class, from A’s mother, who was out of the country. A was sent home from school early, she told me. There had been an outbreak of lice in the fifth grade. Could I meet A at the house, and possibly wash her hair, and her clothes, and everything else she had touched that day? Possibly even myself? And there I was, on my knees in the still-unfamiliar bathroom, scrubbing A’s scalp, my clothes getting soaked, then drying her long hair, patiently answering her questions. Where do the lice go when they die? What if they laid eggs on her neck? Later that night, when A’s mother finally returned home, and we’d gone through the entire box of Rid, and all the clothes and blankets had been quarantined and washed, A’s mother thanked me. At the time, I thought nothing of it. I was simply doing my job. It was much later that I remembered that afternoon as one of the moments in my life where I felt so much love for someone else. The lice, the laundry, I could’ve run away. But I loved that child.  

A’s mother has a friend that recently told me that if I did anything, I certainly made a difference in at least three lives, whether I realized it or not. Lately I think about his words a lot, as I watch A grow into a young woman, and as I navigate my own uncertain path into adulthood, and the many other forms of love, I know that no matter how dark that path might get, I’ll find my way. I have to. There might be someone else counting on me.

– Deb Long