First thing in the morning, Edie Weiss calls out to her son Brandon. He comes in to her room and they snuggle for a few minutes before they begin their day. It is the warmest vision she has of her life. She has been a single mom for over three years, and it has often been difficult.
When Edie and her husband Mark split up, she went to live with her parents. The support they gave her was grudging and laden with expectations to do things their way. Finally, after ten months, Edie’s cousin lent her the money to get her own apartment. About the same time Edie got a decent job and began pulling her life together again.
She tries to be a father as well a mother to her son. The boy needs a father figure. She will not let him meet her boy-friends because she fears that he will get attached to them and will end up feeling abandoned as he did by his father.
In fact, after the divorce, Mark did not see his son very much. Edie had to take him to court to get him to pay child support. For a while prior to their breakup, there had been plenty of money from the business they started together. But Mark spent most of the profits they earned on drugs. In the last year of their marriage, Edie says she went from a “six figure income” to $5000. Just as she seemed to have some stability in her life, she lost it because of her husband’s addiction.
Edie Weiss’ childhood had been a difficult one. She was picked on at school and she was abused at home. If she came home with bad grades, her father would beat her with a belt; if she misbehaved, her mother would lock her out on the back porch and tell her that she was going to be an orphan. It was cruel irony that it was her parents she had to turn to for help after her divorce.
As a young woman, Edie’s decision not to go to college was a spiteful reaction to her father and his desire for her to get a degree. She traveled and “just fooled around for years and years,” mostly in California. When she did discover college in the mid-1970s, she took courses in crafts and dance and music, “the fun things.”
At present, Edie feels quite alone. She is estranged from her sister, whom she protected as a child from their raging mother. She is not as close to her best friend as she once was. And she simply does not have the time to cultivate the friendships of some of the other moms at the school which Brandon attends. She is determined to do a good job of raising her son, and it is this important task which fills her life and gives it meaning.
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