{"id":60850,"date":"2013-10-02T13:23:57","date_gmt":"2013-10-02T17:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=60850"},"modified":"2013-10-02T16:16:48","modified_gmt":"2013-10-02T20:16:48","slug":"radio-silence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/10\/02\/radio-silence\/","title":{"rendered":"Radio Silence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Highway<\/a><\/p>\n

I am driving west on Highway 51. It\u2019s Tuesday, the day before Indie\u2019s ninth birthday, and as I pass the city limits of Stillwater on my way to Oklahoma City, I switch from the Sinatra station, the one playing \u201cI\u2019ll Be Seeing You,\u201d to the seventies station, the one playing Marshall Tucker Band\u2019s \u201cHeard It in a Love Song.\u201d\u00a0I\u2019m gonna be leavin\u2019 at the break of dawn<\/i>.\u00a0I rarely listen to the song now, though sometimes when Indie is in the car, I\u2019ll let it play, even sing along, assume the next time she asks me why he left, I can say, \u201cYou know that song, the one about the guy who never had a damn thing but what he had, he had to leave it behind?\u201d\u00a0She\u2019ll know the song.\u00a0So many times, when she\u2019s singing along to Ambrosia or Bread, Jackson Browne, especially America, in the car, I ask her how she knows all the words to those long-ago songs, and she always has the same answer, \u201cYou sing all the time.\u201d He used to tell me that, too. I change the station to NPR.<\/p>\n

I recognize a familiar voice:<\/p>\n

\n

The American family has changed. The nuclear family in the house across the street is still there, but different kinds of families live on the block, too: unmarried parents, gay parents, people who choose not to have children at all and, of course, single parents.<\/p>\n

A new Pew Research poll asked Americans about these trends and found almost 70 percent believe that single women raising children on their own is bad for society.<\/p>\n

Of course, there is a wide array of single mothers. Some women choose to raise children by themselves. Others find themselves without a partner through divorce or abandonment. But when seven in ten believe this is bad for society, it makes you wonder.<\/p>\n

So we want to hear from single mothers today. How do people treat you? Tell us your story. 800-989-8255 is the phone number. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION<\/small>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I grip the steering wheel and glance at my cell phone in the cup holder.\u00a0I keep my eyes out for a rest stop. <\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

Abandonment:\u00a0if there\u2019s a box that single mothers check to identify their status, that\u2019s the one I\u2019d check, but Neal Conan\u2019s mention of it is the first time I\u2019ve ever heard it publicly acknowledged. I settle into to my seat, take a sip of my latt\u00e9, and turn up the volume.\u00a0I am making the curve near the trees, so I am close to the I-35 junction.<\/p>\n

All the single mothers I have known have been single in self only, but not in parenthood; there are weekends, alternating holidays, weeks in the summer.\u00a0Even I have documents that refer to me, the custodial parent, and him, the noncustodial one, documents with our names, our Social Security numbers. Such distancing rhetoric.<\/p>\n

I wonder if the rest stops in this area have cellular service; in north central Oklahoma, phone calls often drop behind the barren, intermittently burned landscape.<\/p>\n

When Indie turned two, I went to my third-floor office at school and found a box leaning against my locked door. He had sent her a book and a letter.\u00a0It was the first, and, so far, the only contact he made with us. I keep the letter and the book in a box for her, along with the dress she was wearing the last time he saw her, a plaid, quilt-patterned sundress, size six months. In that same box, he sent me a check for three hundred and fifty dollars. I tore it in half and dropped the pieces into the trash can beside my desk.<\/p>\n

When Indie asks why he left, it feels the way Hemingway described good writing, that the seven-eighths beneath the surface is what truly moves the narrative. I try to be honest, yet fair, recalling the counseling the State of Colorado required\u2014a parent should never speak in negative terms of the other parent.\u00a0The child bases her identity on who she comes from, so belittling or demeaning the other parent belittles the child.<\/p>\n

He and I never married. So while we didn\u2019t have to go to court to get divorced, we did have to establish a custodial agreement. Actually, we didn\u2019t; that day in court\u2014the moment when the elevator doors closed behind him\u2014that was the last time I saw him.<\/p>\n

In the past nine years, Indie and I have talked about him only twice.\u00a0He moves silently through the rooms of our minds, banging against the furniture, knocking on the door, calling in the middle of the night like a phone ringing in a distant room.<\/p>\n

Last year, Indie suffered from recurring dreams of a robber coming into the house and leaving. After I asked a few questions, I got up the nerve to ask her, \u201cIndie, do you think the man might be your father?\u201d She said yes.\u00a0The robber, the unknown man who kept showing up unexpectedly, the one who kept leaving, was him, and what he kept stealing was a part of her life.\u00a0I told her I too used to dream of him, standing outside the front lawn of our house, a symbol of his continued presence in our lives, but not in our home. She said she dreams of men outside the house, too.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

Conan is pointing out the fact that our president was raised by a single mother. His guest, a Pew Center senior researcher, Mr. Moran, responds:<\/p>\n

\n

MORAN: Exactly right. It doesn\u2019t mean you can\u2019t grow up to be president. It just means that the chances\u2014the likelihood that bad things will happen is increased if you grow up in a single-parent household.<\/p>\n

CONAN: Did the same results obtain if you said: What if they\u2019re raised by a single father?<\/p>\n

MORAN: Interesting. We did not ask\u2014we didn\u2019t ask that. Since most single-parent households are by women, it\u2019s\u2014the real issue is single moms.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The real issue is in the survey, the glaring omission that mirrors the very men who leave, who refuse responsibility for their children. Whether the reason is addiction, those men whose relationship with booze or drugs is more important than any they might have with their children; those men who get a whole new family, or choose a new love; or, the one that applies to him, the \u201cgrass-is-greener-on-the-other-side-of-that-hill,\u201d Marshall Tucker Band mentality.\u00a0For so long, I was sure that was it, though years can create dangerous coordinates in emotional geometry, as time and distance meet on a plane of constant unknowns.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always been good at math; Indie, too.\u00a0She was multiplying at the age of three, figuring out that if she had twelve sourballs and I allowed her three each day, she could enjoy cherry sours for four days.\u00a0Perhaps, like me, she is fascinated by solving for the missing factor.<\/p>\n

Solve for X.<\/p>\n

X + Y = Indie.<\/p>\n

If Y = me, how many steps will it take to solve for X.<\/p>\n

In this equation, X is an empty set.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 7 percent of ten million custodial mothers do not receive child support.\u00a0That\u2019s one in fourteen.\u00a0I am one of them.<\/p>\n

Nineteen percent with a bachelor\u2019s degree or more do not receive support.\u00a0Only 26.9 percent have at least an associate\u2019s. I have a Ph.D.<\/p>\n

Thirty-four percent have never been married.\u00a0Check.<\/p>\n

Twenty-five percent are forty and over.\u00a0I\u2019m thirty-nine.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

A man named Alan from Fulton, New York, has called into the show.\u00a0His voice is sincere.<\/p>\n

\n

ALAN: Well, single fathers run into some of the same things that I\u2019ve been hearing on the show, that, you know, just the way that you can actually do that by yourself, you know, without a woman around, in your case with a single mom, without a man around and so forth.<\/p>\n

CONAN: But did you feel the stigma?<\/p>\n

ALAN: More disbelief, I think, or wonder, you know.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Rosalind, Zelda Fitzgerald\u2019s sister, did not think her brother-in-law, Scott, could raise his daughter, Scottie, on his own after Zelda was institutionalized for a nervous breakdown.<\/p>\n

Scottie grew up to claim that had her father not been her father, she could have been an extraordinary woman.\u00a0 More times than not, I am glad the man who left us is not a part-time father, and I understand how much more complete Indie would feel if she knew him, how she \u201cbeat[s] on, boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,\u201d because a large part of her past disappeared before she even began, and there\u2019s no green light at the end of a dock for her to gaze upon, there\u2019s just the gaping distance between her and what she might hope to regain, though it never should have been hers to lose.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

Shelly from Chapel Hill is the next caller.\u00a0She is not a single mother, but she works with juvenile kids accused of crimes.\u00a0Here come the statistics<\/i>, I think, the ones about children raised without a father, the 80 percent increase in drug use and dropout rate.\u00a0I think of turning back to the radio, something a bit more soothing for my drive, like Sinatra, or maybe something upbeat, the eighties station.\u00a0Shelly continues:<\/p>\n

\n

When I\u2014you know, when I heard the Pew Institute study that single motherhood is bad for society, I found that statement really problematic as though it\u2019s the mother\u2019s fault.<\/p>\n

You know, I think the system, our laws, our schools, our judges, are prejudiced against single mothers.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Even though I knew he would have nothing to do with Indie, my lawyer insisted we go to court, warned that the law had grown exceedingly sympathetic to fathers to ensure their rights and that there was little chance he would simply vanish.\u00a0Listen to me<\/i>, I would lean across her desk, he already has.\u00a0He\u2019s gone.<\/i> Yet he was the one who insisted we establish custody, another unknown coordinate of our complicated history, and it was I, during the months leading up to the hearing, who lived in fear that he might take Indie.\u00a0For one, I had a lawyer spouting off case after case of a legal system showing preference to fathers.\u00a0Two, I was in the process of completing an MFA, no stronghold when it comes to procuring employment.\u00a0Finally, I had his words in my head from nights I\u2019d sit on the back porch with a glass of chardonnay, listening to his voice on the phone that it was I, not him, who wander, who move from place to place and never settle.<\/p>\n

Those words come back to me when Indie can name all the states she has lived in:\u00a0Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Kansas, Oklahoma.\u00a0The current one, Oklahoma, has been the longest, four years, and my restlessness and desire to pack up and move on again is balanced only by my accountability to her via income and health insurance.\u00a0Might the fellows at the Pew Research Center, and their respondents, consider responsibility in their survey?\u00a0Surely, the Boulder County Court did not take into consideration that he was the one who had walked out only four months after Indie was born, and he was the one already living a new life across town.\u00a0It was me the judge told to find a job before the June 23 hearing, and that if she chose, she could limit my job search to Colorado,\u00a0that the best scenario for Indie would be to have her mother and father together in the same town and that she would have to approve any out-of-state job I was offered.\u00a0Forget the fact that I was completing an MFA and trusting the academic job market to follow a court order.\u00a0Yet a job I did find, one in southern Utah, and that morning, I had to convince the judge to allow me to accept it.\u00a0No one would listen to me when I implored that proximity was not the issue, that the whole hearing was a nonissue, that he would play father in court and then walk out and disappear.\u00a0My lawyer worried he would not agree to the limited visitation: five days during the summer and alternating Thanksgiving and Christmases. That agreement has only ever been kept by me\u2014in a drawer.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

The other day, Indie and I were at the university library circulation desk, where I was checking on a missing book.\u00a0She picked up a stamper; I\u2019d noticed it before, a stamp with a word on it to signify a book\u2019s status in the system.\u00a0She asked what it was for, and I shrugged. While I wasn\u2019t looking, she stamped the inside of her left hand.\u00a0She held it up to me, the red ink on her palm:\u00a0ABANDONED<\/small>.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

Jack Kerouac refused to acknowledge his own daughter, Jan, claiming, \u201cShe\u2019s not my daughter,\u201d then going to great lengths to avoid child support by maintaining that he was abroad.\u00a0The letters he wrote to Jan\u2019s mother in 1956 were mailed to Allen Ginsberg, who could send them to her with a Casablanca postmark so that Kerouac would appear out of the country. When Jan was only four, Kerouac showed a snapshot of a beautiful, dark-haired child on a tricycle to his then girlfriend, writer Joyce Johnson, who described in her epistolary memoir, \u201canyone could see that little Jan\u2019s resemblance to him was unmistakable, and I told him so.\u201d\u00a0Johnson notes that Kerouac \u201crefused the role of father\u201d and his greatest fear was \u201closing the freedom that enabled him to write.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jan only met her father twice:\u00a0once, when she was nine, when Kerouac finally agreed to take a blood test, which proved his obligation to pay child support, and again at fifteen, when she paid him a visit. A biography, Use My Name:\u00a0Jack Kerouac\u2019s Forgotten Families<\/i>, refers to Kerouac\u2019s detached comment to Jan during that unfocused meeting, telling her that she could \u201cuse his name.\u201d\u00a0Jan described that last visit in an interview: her father\u2019s refusal to move from the recliner in his mother\u2019s living room, where he was drinking whiskey and watching The Beverly Hillbillies<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Jan lived a troubled life, including some time working as a prostitute in New Mexico.\u00a0Having published two novels, both autobiographical and both revealing a penchant for the road, just like her father, she died from kidney failure at the age of forty-four.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

I pick up my phone when I hear Conan begin to recite the 800 number again.\u00a0A woman named Paige is calling in and talking about sociology.<\/p>\n

\n

I do think that sociologically, it does have a lot to do with our culture and the way that our culture views women. I think that it\u2019s telling that the question didn\u2019t get asked of men raising children by themselves. And I think that part of the negative view of women raising children on their own is because of the view that our culture has of women.<\/p>\n

CONAN: Is this about sexism?<\/p>\n

MORAN: Well, we don\u2019t want to demonize single mothers.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I put the phone down, traffic has picked up, and I turn my blinker on to merge right and avoid the overbearing pickup behind me, thinking about how people treat me.\u00a0While there are exceptions, the most common response is \u201cI don\u2019t know how you do it.\u00a0I know I couldn\u2019t do it.\u201d\u00a0But how do you know what you can do unless you\u2019re not given a choice?\u00a0Other common responses:\u00a0faces full of pity or full of questions.\u00a0I recall an elderly woman from down the street in Utah who drove up in her white Buick just days after Indie and I had moved into our house and yelled out, \u201cI hear you\u2019re a single mother!\u201d as a greeting.\u00a0I think of Indie\u2019s teachers, the ones who flash that wincing smile during parent and teacher conferences or blatantly assume I am the deadbeat.\u00a0\u201cUm, do you work, Miss\u2009\u2026\u2009um, what would you like for me to call you?\u201d\u00a0I am the sole caretaker; I am the sole caregiver.\u00a0My background in literary theory informs me that I am Other.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

I take the exit for I-35 south, trying not to get dizzy as I make the full circle ramp to the highway, always sure this will be the time when I will miss the gaps in semitraffic and be forced to the shoulder, both me and the car shuddering.\u00a0After an e-mail from someone named Shelly in Durham, North Carolina, who claims to have taken the survey and answered \u201cbad for society\u201d based upon economic hardship and our society\u2019s refusal to help, Conan announces another guest:<\/p>\n

\n

Mary Pols, a journalist who reviews books and movies for Time<\/em> magazine, also a single mother. Her memoir is titled Accidentally On Purpose: The True Tale of a Happy Single Mother<\/em>, and she joins us today from Maine Public Broadcasting Network in Portland, Maine. Nice to have you with us today.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A journalist for Time<\/em>, I think, probably not a single mother who suffers economic hardship, as I slow to seventy-eight when I notice a Oklahoma State Patrol car in my rear view mirror.\u00a0The officer passes, and I resume at eighty, sure that one speeding fine would not upend the monthly budget of Ms. Pols, who has just commented that her economic status improved once she became a single mother because she was motivated to provide for her son, an incentive that caused her to work harder professionally than she ever had before.<\/p>\n

Now on the main highway, there\u2019s little chance for me to call in just at the moment I want to the most so that I can respond to Shelly and counter Ms. Pols.\u00a0For a brief time, Indie and I lived in Idaho, when I took an adjunct at Boise State after leaving Utah in an insistence that I provide a more diverse and bohemian experience for Indie as she was nearing the age of five, entering kindergarten, and developing a personality that I can only describe as her inner-hippie. Boise State offered me no health insurance and $1,220 a month in my bank account.<\/p>\n

After standing in line at the state assistance office for two hours, filling all the required paperwork, and waiting for the assistance I was sure would come, I received a letter from Idaho regretting to inform me that I made too much money to qualify.\u00a0With the letter still in hand, I called their offices to learn that they judged on gross, not net, and that my salary, as it were, the one that paid me for teaching three classes, the one that was supposed to cover over $400 in daycare and food and $350 in rent (we lived in a one bedroom apartment), was $30 beyond the state limit.\u00a0This after both Utah and Idaho child support agencies had assured me that they had contacted Colorado and were working on my file.\u00a0Boulder County told Indie\u2019s father that morning to pay $634 per month, and before we adjourned, he stood and asked to make one final statement: \u201cI don\u2019t think I should have to pay because I\u2019m not going to see her.\u201d\u00a0Rework the equation; it\u2019s not equivalent.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

Ashley from Anchorage is on the air now.<\/p>\n

\n

I wish I had time to myself. I wish I were able to count on someone else to make dinner, brush the kids\u2019 teeth, put them to bed, et cetera. However, I know I can manage it just fine myself, and it\u2019s very empowering to know that I don\u2019t need to count on anyone else.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m not sure I know how to miss something I never had.\u00a0I pass the sign telling me I have seventeen miles to go.<\/p>\n

The Pew editor notes, in an unsympathetic tone, that it\u2019s the children who pay the price.\u00a0I nod, sip the last of the now cold latt\u00e9, taste the nutmeg particles that have settled at the bottom.\u00a0He\u2019s right.\u00a0The second time that Indie and I discussed her father, she told me that she is asked repeatedly by other children, \u201cWhere\u2019s your Dad?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you tell them?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat he left.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Pew researcher, apparently, has left the show, but not before citing some study that the level of a parents\u2019 education makes no difference.\u00a0I suppose this means that my four degrees offer no brace against the statistics.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mary Pols is telling a story.<\/p>\n

\n

One of my son\u2019s friends at Montessori preschool, you know, he\u2019s just always asking, Can we have a play date with him? Can we have a play date with him? And I kept asking the parents, and I knew that they were, you know, they were very religious people, and I felt that when I had explained my situation to them, they had looked somewhat askance on me.<\/p>\n

And I just had to conclude, after all these attempts at getting play dates and failing, that we just weren\u2019t really welcome at their house. And it made me really sad because my son loved this boy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Adel from Birmingham has called in, tells Conan she is fascinated by the subject. I\u2019m hoping Adel will ruin the curve of divorce, death, and one-night stands and bring abandonment home.<\/p>\n

\n

I find it true in Cub Scouts, as well. And I\u2019ll give a for-instance. We went to a Campboree this past weekend, and when I registered my son, the man who was registering said, And are you registering his father? I said, No, he doesn\u2019t have a father. So his father\u2019s not attending? No, he doesn\u2019t have a father. Well, then who\u2019s going to be with this child? I\u2019m going to be with him. So you\u2019re going to register?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Every form I fill out, I skip the section for Father, Spouse.\u00a0When told once, by a woman at the bank where I was applying for a savings account for Indie, that I forgot to fill out her father\u2019s information, I answered, \u201cShe doesn\u2019t have a father.\u201d\u00a0She laughed, \u201cWell, of course she does!\u201d\u00a0I decided not to affirm the woman\u2019s glee in her knowledge of biological fact.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

I pass the sign that tells me I have ten more miles before I get to Oklahoma City, when Neal Conan asks Mary Pols to make some final comments. It seems I have missed my chance to speak as an abandoned single mother, but Pols is offering a unique story of her own, The True Happy Life of a Single Mother<\/i>. Apparently, in Pols\u2019s case, a girl walks into a bar, meets a guy, gets pregnant, and chooses to raise the child on her own.\u00a0An \u201caccidentally, on purposeful\u201d adventure of going it alone.\u00a0I admire that. The Roz Doyle approach to single mothers. But wait, she\u2019s saying something else.<\/p>\n

\n

You know, my son\u2019s father is, you know, he\u2019s in California. We\u2019re in Maine now. But he has been an active part in my son\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

And, you know, every school that my child has been at has had both of our phone numbers.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If you have the address and phone number of the father of your child and he\u2019s an \u201cactive part of your son\u2019s life,\u201d you are not the kind of single mother that I am.\u00a0Single as in only.\u00a0Single as in one.\u00a0Not one at this house plus one at that house, which equals two.\u00a0I\u2019m saying that in my life, the father is not an option on the school\u2019s who-can-pick-up list, though I\u2019m right there with Pols on those askance glances.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

I wonder if I can make it to the exit and pull into a gas station before she hangs up.\u00a0If I can, I\u2019ll tell her this story:\u00a0One askance look I got recently was in the wood aisle of Lowe\u2019s a few weeks before last Christmas. After roaming around the aisle looking at various widths and lengths of wood, I decided to forgo my I-can-figure-this-out fa\u00e7ade and went over to the large woodcutting machine where I saw a guy with one of those aprons and a Lowe\u2019s name tag. I told him what I needed, different sizes of boards, of wood, because my eight-year-old daughter had asked Santa for wood so that she could build things.<\/p>\n

The man looked at me as if I had asked to put my hand in the woodcutting machine.\u00a0Then he sifted his fingers through the boards already in my basket while I felt tiny and ridiculous in the oversized store, the sheer height of the aisles enough to intimidate those like me who have no idea what most of the stuff in the store is for; though for people like Indie\u2019s father, the kind of guy who took a tool belt to work, it\u2019s a playground, which is why I look around at floor-covering samples and storm doors and think, If only you were here.\u00a0The heavyset man erupts with a \u201cWhat a unique child!\u201d then wants to know what Indie wants to build and if she might want a subscription to Woodworking Magazine<\/i>, disappearing behind one of the large aisles and coming back, flipping through an issue.\u00a0He seems lost in his own love of woodwork, as if he is imagining the possibilities of what she might build, the way I\u2019m sure her father would, the way I saw him do so many times, measuring, configuring, planning.\u00a0Since Indie was able, she has taken things apart to see how they are put together, clocks, cell phones, lamps.\u00a0She tells me she likes to see how things work, and she likes to disassemble pieces and put them together again.\u00a0Words I heard her father say as he went through the same take apart, put back together.\u00a0When he left, he disassembled me.\u00a0It\u2019s still too early to tell how much he took Indie apart.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

Years after Frank Sinatra left his wife and three young children for Ava Gardner, he would tell his youngest, Tina, \u201cI was selfish\u2014my choices would affect you forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

Since I started listening to this program, I have intermittently shouted across the interior of my car and through the windshield to the highway before me, to the leafless trees, their branches craggy and sharp, to the overcast sky:\u00a0\u201cWhy isn\u2019t anyone talking about the absent fathers?\u201d\u00a0And then Mary Pols says this:<\/p>\n

\n

It\u2019s funny\u2014if the survey had said, for instance, instead of, you know, do you think that single mothers raising children without fathers or without male figures are bad for society? What if it had said, you know, are absentee fathers good for society or bad for society?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Finally.\u00a0But the question is never answered, and Mr. Conan tosses to break.\u00a0I take the exit fifty-four miles from where I began, where I come every other Tuesday or Thursday.\u00a0Sometimes, I drive here and turn around, sometimes I eat lunch at On the Border, sometimes I wander one of the malls for an hour or so, and on occasion, I bring my running shoes and explore unfamiliar streets before I have to get back to pick up Indie from school.\u00a0Perhaps it\u2019s a need for some time alone, like Ashley mentioned during the show, the one that has now ended, the one that never mentioned mothers like me.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

At the intersection, I press the first button preset, the seventies station.\u00a0America. \u201cSister Golden Hair.\u201d Indie really likes this one. I sing along.<\/p>\n

Jill Talbot is the author of a memoir,\u00a0<\/em>Loaded, as well as the co-editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Art of Friction: Where (Non) Fictions Come Together and editor of\u00a0<\/em>Metawritings:\u00a0Toward a Theory of Nonfiction\u00a0.\u00a0Her work has been published or is forthcoming from\u00a0Brevity<\/em>,\u00a0Creative Nonfiction<\/em>, DIAGRAM<\/em>,\u00a0Ecotone<\/em>,\u00a0The Rumpus<\/em>, and\u00a0<\/em>Under the Sun. She is the 2013\u20132015 Elma Stuckey Writer-in-Residence in Creative Nonfiction at Columbia College Chicago.<\/em><\/p>\n

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I am driving west on Highway 51. It\u2019s Tuesday, the day before Indie\u2019s ninth birthday, and as I pass the city limits of Stillwater on my way to Oklahoma City, I switch from the Sinatra station, the one playing \u201cI\u2019ll Be Seeing You,\u201d to the seventies station, the one playing Marshall Tucker Band\u2019s \u201cHeard It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":487,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4393],"tags":[189,660,8226,5127,11964,4867],"class_list":["post-60850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person","tag-children","tag-f-scott-fitzgerald","tag-family","tag-jack-kerouac","tag-neal-conan","tag-npr"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRadio Silence by Jill Talbot<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 2, 2013 \u2013 I am driving west on Highway 51. 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