Chapter 144: Work Life Balance

Late that Saturday morning, I growled and grumbled sitting in my highchair. I was pretty much naked. So was Janet, more or less. A loose t-shirt, nursing bra, and panties wasn’t on the same level as nothing but a thick Monkeez with a stuffer so that I wouldn’t need a change until after lunch, but neither ‘ensemble’ was something we’d want to be caught in public wearing.

Close enough and as good as I was gonna get at this point.

On my feeding tray was a stack of student papers that seemed to be never ending. Spelling tests, math assignments, science quizzes, and social studies worksheets all piled on top of each other. There was one week of school left before Winter Break and the Solstice holiday. For teachers, that meant crunch time to get grades in before report cards.

I was grading papers for Janet while she did loads of laundry, vacuumed the house, and scrubbed dishes. Driving to one to two daycares a day for most of a week hadn’t been the best conditions for household maintenance. I’d been so agitated from our Friday visit to Little Presents that I cleaned my own room and put away my own toys just to prove that I could.

Janet was busy scrubbing countertops and scraping off dishes that had been piling up all week.

Amazons could make a machine that burned all of my body hair off in one go, and special nano-gel that numbed, soothed, and healed the inevitable burns, but they couldn’t make a dishwasher that didn’t require one to scrape off food gunk and sauce into garbage disposal before hand.

Typical.

Why was I grading papers? Was it to feel somewhat ‘normal’ or ‘useful’ or ‘adult’ again? Was it because it gave a pretext for me temporarily losing my restrictive mittens? Was it because I was still feeling dreadful about hurting Janet and was wanting to find some way to make her life easier? Was it because distracting myself with more mundane tasks was better than an idleness where I’d inevitably grow bitter and want to escape? Had I just finally gone ‘full native’ and wanted to make Mommy proud of me in some way?

Yes?

I don’t know. As much as it stings having motivations assigned to you, one can never fully know their own motivations.

What I did know was that these spelling tests were driving me crazy.

Third grade had just done a unit on homophones. Normally, grading these papers was easy. I just had to look at the word and know if it was spelled correctly. E-I-G-H-T definitely spelled eight, but that didn’t matter if Janet had told them to spell the past tense of ‘eat’ and not the number greater than seven.

That meant I had to keep glancing at the answer key like a putz, and make sure that I was scoring it correctly. Couldn’t just go on autopilot with my red crayon in one hand and my thoughts on the other.

It was something of a relief if a kid completely botched a word. I was still cautious enough.

“Okay,” Janet announced. “Dishes are in the washer.” She dried her hands on a dish rag and faced me. “How about lunch in about half an hour?”

My eyes barely left the paper. “Sure.”

Her shadow eclipsed me. “Why are you doing that?”

My heart started to patter. “Doing what?”

Her finger tapped the spelling test in front of me. “That thing where you scribble out the mistake and write the correct word next to it?” Janet told me. “A lot of these mistakes are just mix ups. W-H-O-L-E instead of H-O-L-E. You could just as easily make arrows showing they switch. Or you could just put an ‘X’ next to the incorrect answers and let them figure it out.”

“It’s just how I grade papers.”

“Why, though?”

Lies are so complicated and complex. “If I just put an ‘X’ next to them, they’ll just know they got something wrong. They won’t know the right spelling. If I do switch arrows it gets messy to read after the first two mistakes. It’s not like you put ‘pear’ as in fruit and ‘pair’ as in two of something right next to each other.” A beat while I rattled my brain. “Also, not all the mistakes are switcheroos. This one kid spelled ‘creek’ with an ‘e’ at the end.”

“You just want to prove that you can still read and write,” Janet smirked.

I feigned embarrassment. “No!”

“Are you sure?”

“Two things can be true!”

“They can be. But are they?”

“Yes!”

“Okay…” she said and smiled at me. “If you say so, kiddo.” So weird. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, but if she had talked to me like that before Adoption, I’d have sworn she was flirting with me. Then again, if I’d thought she was flirting with me, I’d have attributed it to a desire to powder my bum against my will (and I would have been correct).

The truth of my grading was far less complicated. I’d started scribbling out wrong answers and writing in correct ones so that Janet wouldn’t suspect me of scribbling out and rewriting correct answers when I was sabotaging her kids’ work. Damn, I still felt like a heel for doing that. What the fuck had I been thinking? I wasn’t doing it anymore, would not do it anymore, but I had to keep up the ruse.

It didn’t matter that those grades were long since recorded, and the papers and corresponding report cards had long since been sent home; I felt compelled to keep up the act. It was my own personal ‘goat’s milk’ except in reverse. It was selfish. It was stupid. It was purely an act of self-preservation on my part.

If Janet ever found out, she’d never let me grade papers for her ever again. My escape attempt had downgraded my wardrobe, my locomotion, and access to my fine motor skills. If she found out I’d been meddling with her kids’ grades out of petty revenge against her, she’d never trust me again and would be completely justified.

I deserved to be punished. I just…couldn’t. I’d already lost too much about myself.

I took the last spelling test and held out the pile for approval. “Done.”

She took them and thumbed through them. “Good job! What’s next?”

I peeled the next paper off. Like the spelling test, it was loose leaf notebook paper, and not a worksheet. “Looks like Math.”

“Okay,” Janet nodded. She put the spelling tests to the side. “Do you want the answer key or do you want to figure it out yourself?”

“It’s third grade math,” I said. “I think I can still handle things like rounding, one-digit multiplication, and pre-algebra.”

“Take a look and tell me what you think, first.”

I analyzed the sheet of paper. On the right side were the numbers one through twenty-three going all the way down. One the left side was complete and utter chicken scratch. “What in the…?” My head snapped up. “Why are you having them write in answer columns?”

“It makes it easier to grade,” Janet shrugged.

“How?!” I practically howled. I scanned the next two sheets and found them no less indecipherable. “Their writing is awful!” I tapped down on my makeshift desk loud enough to make a sound. “I can’t even tell what the question is after number three because of how they’re scribbling all over the place!”

“You don’t have to,” Janet said. “You just have to mark them as correct or incorrect. That’s why I have the answer column.”

I felt myself slump like I was made of melting candle wax. “But it will be harder to show the work when I correct them.”

“You’ll just have to write the correct answer in crayon and not show the work.”

“But-”

“Clark…” she put a finger underneath my chin and tilted my head up to look at her. “Are you wanting to help me grade papers or to show off to a bunch of third graders how smart you are?”

Ouch! Called out and mischaracterized. “It’s not that, I just want to help th-”

“Clark,” she calmly repeated herself. “Let me be their teacher. I’ll know how well I taught the concepts based on their scores and remediate after Winter Break. That’s my job. I need your job to be something else.”

I sighed and grumbled. “Fine. Give me the answer key, please.”

She let go of my chin and dug around the piles of papers for the key she’d already made. “Thank you, baby.” She handed me the answers.

I took them and exhaled dejectedly. “You’re welcome.”

Damn. This was gonna suck. I could at least get the job done faster. From what I’d peeked at, the Science and Social Studies papers were going to be just as banal. Rote memorization of facts and vocabulary. Boring if they got everything correct, depressing if they got it wrong. I thought I saw a ‘color by numbers based on the multiplication answer’ worksheet, too, but that was hardly worth it.

“Are there any essays?” I asked across the kitchen.

Janet was already digging in the back of the pantry for lunch. “Yes, but I have to grade those myself. I’m looking for certain things and it’s easier for me to scan them than to tell. It’s highly subjective.”

A whole host of bad thoughts flooded my gray matter. I could be trusted with marking down basic rote facts, but not something subjective like the quality of a third grader’s essay.

I settled for saying, “I get it,” instead of starting another pointless fight. I graded the first math paper and moved to the second. “Why is this stapled?”

Janet was busy getting out a pot and filling it up with water in the sink. “Some of the kids needed more than one piece of paper to show all their work.”

“But I’m just looking at the answer column.”

“They don’t know that,” Janet replied, completely straight faced. “I wanted to make sure they put in effort and were thinking through the problems and not just blind guessing.” Twisted as it was, I could see the logic. “Macaroni and cheese alright?”

I paused. I was getting sick of the stuff but it was a safe go-to and didn’t require much effort. “It’s not the stuff from the box with the fake cheese powder is it?”

“Ew,” Janet scoffed. “Of course not. I’m making it from scratch.”

“Can I feed myself?”

Janet opened her mouth as if to say ‘yes’ and then looked at the running dishwasher. She lightly facepalmed. “I just put all of your size spoons in the washer. I can use one of mine, or you can use your hands.” A bit of blush rose in her cheeks. “Or I can make you a sandwich, instead.”

I caught her shifting nervously, and nibbling on her lip. Even after all this time she was still capable of hardcore cosseting; wanting me to eat with my bare hands or to be spoon fed. She’d offered the sandwich as a backdoor for the sake of her own conscience.

I did some admittedly manipulative calculus. She always put me down for a nap after lunch. Spoon feeding meant that the mittens would go back on. Best I could logically hope for was getting my mouth wiped, getting changed before being put down in my crib, and spending the rest of the day idle because Janet will have likely finished the housework and grading while I slept. Save for a slight delay on the re-application of the gloves, a sandwich would yield similar results.

On the other hand…

“Will you eat with me?”

My Mommy frowned as if somewhat insulted. “Of course. I’m not making this whole pot just for you.” She moved the pot over to the stove and turned the burner on.

“Things might get real messy if I eat with my hands…” I said.

“I can wipe you down after,” she offered.

“It’s not the same,” I let myself whine. “Baby wipes aren’t enough sometimes. I’d still feel sticky and gross and smell like cheese. I’d need a bath to get it all off.”

Janet tried to mask her interest and failed. “Do you want a bath after lunch?”

Yes! For a second I’d been afraid she’d narrow down the options between spoon feeding and sandwich. “The hot water would help me to relax,” I said and looked away. “Easier to take a nap.”

“I still need to clean the guest bathroom,” Janet said, mostly to herself. “But do I want to give you a bath before I scrub it? Or do I want to scrub it real quick before I clean you?” This part wasn’t cosetting. She was genuinely debating the practical applications and ethical implications of putting me in a dirty tub versus ruining a freshly clean tub immediately with a dirty me.

An opening! “We could take a shower together…”

Janet looked mildly uncomfortable. We hadn’t been that vulnerable with one another since immediately after my escape. That was a decidedly conscious choice on her part. “We could…”

I rammed through with my next thought before she could say ‘but’. “Mrs. Beouf said that breast milk is good for digestion. Good for preventing constipation, too. From all the cheese, I mean. Maybe I could have some after lunch?”

Janet untensed and thumbed at the refrigerator. “I’ve got some ready to go. I’ll express tonight’s batch while you’re napping.” We were back in comfortable territory.

“Or…” I suggested. “If we showered together, I could…y’know….save you the effort…?”

Equal parts temptation and trepidation mixed in Janet’s eyes. “Say what you want, Clark.”

Her eyes were open. I had to close mine. My old savvy would only get me so far. “I want to touch you. I want to be touched by you. Please hold me for something besides stopping me from running around. Please shower with me and let me nurse. Please lay down with me in your bed, at least until I fall asleep. Please don’t put the mittens back on me.”

I can’t describe the expression on Janet’s face. Words like ‘sad’ and ‘afraid’ would be gross understatements. For the moment, at least, both of our masks were off. “How do I know I can trust you?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But can you hold it against me for the rest of my life?”

“That’s not fair,” Janet said. She whispered but it still thundered in our quiet kitchen. “I’ve been going out of my way to help you at least try to find Cassie. And it’s barely been a week. I’m allowed to still be upset with you!”

“To what…?” I cut myself off. I’d almost said something stupid. “You’re right,” I said instead. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Just…” I wiggled my fingers. “Not being allowed to grab things sucks.”

Janet leaned back against the counter. Tiny wisps of steam were starting to rise from the pot. She hung her head and breathed. “It sucks for me, too. I don’t want to be mad at you.”

We were both quiet. If not for the pot refusing to boil over, it would have seemed longer than it was. “I’m not saying stop punishing me if you think I still deserve it. Just…let me have my fingers back when I’m not working for you.”

A new, pitying sympathy mixed with all the other emotions inside of her. “Do you really think you’re working for me? Like I’m making you do chores or something?” I didn’t answer. “Honey, this was my way of giving you a break.”

“Thank you.”

That surprised us both.

“You’re welcome.”

So did that.

“Can we keep it going?” I asked, sincerely. “Lunch? Shower? Dessert? Nap? And maybe I finish grading papers after I wake up?” A second passed. “I promise I’ll be extra messy and cute when I play with my food.”

Janet tried not to laugh at the joke. Some color came back to her cheeks. “I didn’t say you had to play with your food. And I’ve always thought you were cute.”

My whole body turned pink. “Oh…”

“You’re still wearing the mittens to school,” Janet said. But she was smiling, weakly, and nodding along to herself.

“Yeah.” I agreed, feeling calmer and calmer. “I get it.”

“You’re wearing them at home, too, unless you’re in bed or I can directly supervise you.”

“Makes sense. I haven’t earned your trust back.”

“No,” she agreed. “You haven’t. Not yet. We’ll have to see where we stand after Solstice.”

“After Solstice?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

The pot finally started bubbling.

“Shit…” Janet hissed. “I forgot to put the pasta in and I gotta cut the cheese into little cubes so it can melt!”

I went back to grading papers and quietly resolved that I would find a way to convert my chest into cheesy body art if it would make Janet happy. “Take your time,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”