Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm by Mardi Jo Link

by ourselves for a few months. This is what penetrates my naive Rebecca of Sunnybrook brain stem as I turn to face the bearded social worker.
    “But we have an agreement,” I say, concentrating hard on keeping my wrath at bay. From my wealth of past experience in conflicts with the opposite sex, I do know that irate women fare poorly in arguments with logical-sounding men.
    “Let’s take a look at it,” the social worker says, his beard bobbing up and down when he speaks, “and we’ll just see if it meets the standard guidelines.”
    Regardless of the agreement that their father and I have worked out, the default arrangement for two working parents who divorce is still for their children to spend one week with one parent, and the next week with the other parent. This arrangement is called “week on, week off.” I have overheard mothers at the boys’ schools use this term, and it sounded like “weak on, weak off.” And I know that I cannot, will not, be weak.
    Without my sons I won’t even need the farmhouse, because I will die. I will die if I have to be without them for a week, and then another week, and then another. No blood, no guts, and no mess, I will simply sit down again in my flowered chair and cease. Although the mission of the Friend of the Court is to protect children,I look around this social worker’s claustrophobic office and know that I am here for one single, selfish reason: to save my own life.
    The Friend of the Court encourages divorcing parents to work out a custody arrangement themselves, and though Mr. Wonderful wanted week on, week off and I wanted him to volunteer for the first manned space mission to Mars, we have managed to compromise. He will have regular “parenting time,” but the boys will live mostly with me. This is our agreement, but the social worker still has to put his okay on the schedule.
    I unfold the paper and hand it over. The social worker, the Beard, smooths out the creases, reads through it quickly, and then turns to his computer. Typing away, he tells us that we are only one of his nearly six hundred cases and that if all goes well today, we will never meet with him again. That is his goal.
    And this is the first thing he’s said yet today that I understand. Because I don’t belong here, in these clothes, in this room, or with these men. I belong back on the Big Valley, waiting for my kids to come home from school. I belong in the garden, or in the kitchen, opening a package of our own ham, thawing sweet corn, and cooking them a good dinner.
    Mr. Wonderful is leaning in his chair, tipping it back, and his arms are crossed behind his head, making his sweatshirt ride up. His pale belly reveals too much and I have to look away, but not before I feel real regret for our sons. What noble boys they are, in spite of their parents’ bickering. I wish I were bold enough to kneel down on the floor in my skirt and grab the chair legs and yank his world right out from underneath him.
    Is this what a “good mother” thinks about? Probably not. I look over at my husband. He looks calm. Rational. And not at all like he is plotting any such thing against me.
    The social worker’s computer is loaded with a software program called Prognosticator 19.0, and all he has to do is key in the variables—number and ages of the minor children, income and monthly expenses of the mother, income and monthly expenses of the father, custody schedule—and his computer does the figuring. There is actually an algorithm for lives like ours. Who gets whom, and what, and where, is calculated not by this man’s supposed savvy about parent-child relationships, or by the reason for our divorce in the first place, but rather by a mathematical formula.
    The printer prints and the social worker hands us copies of paperwork that we are expected to read, agree to, and sign, right here, right now. And I try to read through it, but the text blurs and all I see is: “This case has been calculated with