I can’t keep saying what everyone wants to hear, that I have bad days but basically everything’s okay.  Things are not okay.  I pretend I care only to avoid the fallout of admitting what I actually think and feel.  If I said how I truly feel I’d be an outcast or end up having to endlessly justify why I’m so insensitive.  My wariness of being found out runs so deep I can’t imagine life without it.  All the precautions, the second-guessing, just so I can open my mouth and say, How are you doing today? and give the appearance of someone who gives a shit.  I probably did at one time, way back.  Where that part of me went I don’t know.  Needing to keep up appearances has flattened any honest sentiment.  I fake it.  Boy, can I fake it.  Standing here at the top of the hill watching my kids make their way up to where I am, taking their sweet time, I should not be feeling this.

I’ve just noticed a scrap of paper stuck in the hedge beside me.  On it is one word, a name: Fatima.  How strange.  For an instant, I almost feel the urge to smile.

There’ve been stretches of time where I’ve let myself believe otherwise, but truthfully, I pretty much only care about myself, and even then, not all that much.

As I watch my kids straggle homewards up the hill I’m thinking about this and I’m also remembering this morning when I sat on the steps of my kids’ school with my son Alfie, long after all the other kids had gone in.  I was waiting him out, trying to prove life can be even more miserable and boring than junior kindergarten.  That being in school is boring I don’t doubt.  Lining up, having to be quiet, sitting still, being forced to yield the little independence he has.  But I need him to go.  I need this time for myself.

It worked.  I waited him out.  We sat on the steps and he asked when we could go home and I said we weren’t going home and he opened his lunch and ate part of it and I told him that even if it happened that he did come home with me all the things he liked to do at home he wouldn’t get to do, and I said that him not going in was making me sad and that soon I’d probably be not only sad but angry as well, and he sat there beside me and fidgeted and finally, after just over an hour, he sighed, and said with far less drama than I expected, “Okay.  I’ll go in.”

I walked home with mixed feelings and sat around the house, or tried to, but I felt such disquiet I had to start doing things.  I managed some laundry and hung it on the line.  I looked over the storm windows but figured it’s probably still too early to bother with them.  I removed the table and chairs from the kitchen, unstuck the Cheerios fastened to the floor, then swept and mopped.  I tidied the counter, put the breakfast things away, the eggs, the orange juice, the cereal boxes.  The empty wine bottle went in the recycling.  Holding the cold neck in my hand I wondered what it would be like to get sloshed in the middle of the day, to have no responsibilities, not a single soul counting on me for anything.

A little later I was in the upstairs bathroom, cleaning the sink, when all of a sudden I stopped, looked at myself in the mirror and said, “I cannot do this any more.”

I walked downtown and got a coffee and kept walking.  I found myself in front of the hardware store and went in.  I paced up and down the aisles and smiled whenever I encountered someone who worked there.  I pictured myself grabbing something off a shelf, stuffing it in my pocket and walking out the door.  It wouldn’t have mattered what, just that it came over me, the idea of taking something.  To look at me, no one could have guessed what I was thinking.  We all kept smiling.

Minutes later I was outside.  I glanced at my watch and it was good I did because I needed to get up to the school to get my kids.

When I got to the door of Alfie’s class I could see things weren’t right.  He was crying.  He’d been playing rough with a couple of other boys and was asked to stop and didn’t and was told to go to the corner, this in the last few minutes of the day.  I found this out from his teacher, a nice enough man.  I can’t believe the things I say sometimes, apologizing to him for my boy, feeling I need to.

So here’s me, standing up the hill, watching my kids, waiting for them to reach where I am, a foul taste in my mouth, and this piece of paper stuck in the hedge beside me with the name Fatima written on it.  Fatty-mama.  I can’t believe there’s a piece of paper in the hedge with that name on it.  Like someone put it there for my benefit.  I forget his name, the man who said it like that, “Fatty-mama,” with his west-coast twang and sour smell, the feeling of riding around in the truck with him, the moron, delivering educational supplies to Catholic schools, which is where we saw the name Fatima, and me wondering why it is I’ve always wound up with jobs I think beneath me and still will not shift myself to do a damn thing about it.

So I said sorry to Alfie’s teacher.  Not that I was sorry for him playing rough with the other kids, but rather I was sorry for him being the kind of kid who is likely to play rough like that, the kind of kid who’s years from sitting still on a carpet and really should be off running free, yet here I am letting this teacher have him six hours a day, twice a week and every other Friday, sorry for him being the way he is, and for me being the way I am, making him go anyway.

The teacher shook his head saying not to worry, he could find ways of harnessing a boy’s energy, it was a challenge, yes, but nothing to worry about, and me wondering whether it was at all obvious what an imposter I am.

Outside I tried to get Alfie to put into words what had happened.  He couldn’t or wouldn’t.  He stopped crying and settled down a bit.  I tried asking how the rest of his day went, was there anything good?  “Boring,” he said, and off he went to join a crowd playing by the climber and minutes later there was a tussle at the top of one of the slides when Alfie was denied his turn.

On our way home, crossing at the lights, I watched as one of the students assisting the crossing guard nearly directed a group of kids into the road on a red light.  The girl realized her mistake and pretended it was no big deal.  That often does the trick, pretending it’s no big deal.  That or something else I’ve noticed that works is to just expect things to turn out all right, that someone else is bound to be paying attention.

Once across the street my daughter Kaya, the eldest, found a piece of styrofoam, which she split up between her and her brothers and soon they were all picking away it, speckling the sidewalk as they went.  I told them this was littering.  As usual none of them stopped, but the fight wasn’t in me, and I told myself at least I’d said something.

At some point, I stopped and looked back.  The kids had paused in front of the house where a little gray cat sometimes comes out to greet them.  Alfie swung his foot at it and my daughter shouted, breaking his name into two syllables, “Al-fie!”  Then: “Dad!”  Which meant I had to weigh in and try to smooth things over so we could keep going and get home so they could sit in front of the TV while I got dinner going.

Then from behind me the words, “I thought it was you,” and I turned and there was this woman who used to come round my house when I was a kid, a friend of my mother’s.  I never liked her. but when do you ever tell a person that?  And there she was, mouth open, about to grind out some pleasantry when she caught sight of what my kids were doing, spreading flecks of styrofoam all over the place.  Her mouth hung there a second, her whole body language changing, and she said to them, with something approaching disgust, “You know you’re spreading that stuff all over the place.”  Which meant I had to say something and I did and it came out more harshly than it ought to have.  “Hey!” I barked.  “I told you already.  All of you,” I said, glaring at my daughter.  “Stop it!  Just Stop!  All of you!”

A few minutes later, here I am at the top of the hill watching my kids make their way up.  Yet again I’ve successfully demonstrated what an asshole I am, my willingness to say what’s expected of me, to act how I’m expected to act.

My head is bursting.  I feel like shit, and I see the note with “Fatima” written on it, and it brings back that time of my life, that job, and suddenly I feel the weight of all the crappy jobs I’ve had.  I think about my going down to the liquor store last night, remember the moment when I smashed the window of the car next to mine, having just come out of the store with my big bottle of wine.  Crossing the parking lot was a woman about my age, she’d slowed and bent over, scooping with her hand, trying to catch a white fluff drifting near her foot, laughing as the thing eluded her grasp.  When finally she got it she stood and smiled at me.  I, of course, smiled back, and when I got to my car I took the heel of my bottle of wine and smashed the passenger window of the car next to mine.  On the way out of the parking lot, my heart racing, I kept thinking, God, how stupid, how completely stupid.  As I drove home slowly, aware of the traffic around me, everyone so impatient, I thought of a time, years ago, stuck in traffic with this old girlfriend of mine, and how I got angry because someone whipped past us on the shoulder and I said that it pissed me off and my girlfriend asked, “Why?” and I couldn’t say, I couldn’t answer.  But last night, with all those cars speeding past, I knew.  It was envy.

I glance again at the slip of paper and the name “Fatima” and the whole episode opens before me: A job I didn’t want, a better one having fallen through, stuck in a cube van with a stupid idiot who can’t do the job because when he takes the medication he’s supposed to take it makes him fall asleep, which is especially bad if it happens while he’s driving, and his back is bad, which is great since the job involves a lot of lifting, and I end up spending a lot of time telling myself, I can do this, there’s nothing wrong with working hard, it’s a virtue, look at me.  He can’t read either, so in the end I do just about everything: The driving, the navigating, the lifting, and I know that useless as he is he’s even more desperate for the work than I am.

One school we stop at is called Our Lady of Fatima.  I tell him the name and he mumbles to himself, as if trying to memorize it, “Fatima, Fatima, Fatty-mama.”  Probably the one time in the whole three-week gig I smiled.

When the kids reach where I stand waiting for them, they pass and round the corner.  None will meet my eyes, and I wonder at the value of shoving learning down their throats.  Aren’t they bound to get through life one way or another?  Ridiculous as it sounds, won’t there always be enough people paying attention to where the rest of us are going?

On the corner, facing the backs of my kids as they straggle homewards, I glance up.  It’s a gorgeous day.  I hadn’t really noticed.  Absolutely gorgeous, pristine, anything but a reflection of what’s going on in me, just so no one might guess.

– Joe Davies