Little Labors

How the puma affects others, one

A friend has two children with a woman to whom he is no longer married and he is now with a woman who has no children, and who probably wants to have children, though none of this has been openly discussed with me, I am surmising. The two children of the friend are now teenagers, and they themselves have a half sibling already, from their mother’s side, their mother who is known to be appealing but unreliable, able to land, say, in Chicago, before beginning to make phone calls to arrange for babysitting for her children in New York. My friend pays the half sibling’s college expenses. One gets the sense that he fears raising children again with someone who may reveal themselves to be not necessarily internally outfitted in a way suitable for the care of children, but again all of this is surmising, and my friend never mentions thoughts about maybe, or maybe not, having another baby, and knowing him as I do, it is reasonable to guess that he has also maybe not mentioned these thoughts to himself.

One evening, this friend arrives at our home, to meet the puma, when she is fresh, less than two weeks old. He arrives wearing a forty-pound vest. The vest, he says, is recommended as a way to build strength and endurance. It’s just a thing he’s trying out. He just now walked the ten blocks from his home to our home, not too far. But with the vest. His teenage children and his girlfriend are with him too. They are often with him. He is very close to all of them. They say nothing about the vest. He apologizes for being a little late. He had been in a class for potential foster parents, he explains. We have never heard anything about this fostering interest before; it is new. “You always dream of just the normal kid, with no issues, who’s been orphaned by a car crash,” he said explaining his hesitation, but interest, in taking on foster children. “But apparently it’s much more difficult than that.”