No Thaw

It’s really cold outside, and the snow that I shoveled a million years ago is still there, a-blockin’ half my driveway and causing the babes still to clamor for “snow snacks!”
You can’t let innocent babies nosh on week-old snow, right?
And my beautiful-fairy-stepdaughter’s mother will still not let her visit us and just took away her phone for the umpteenth time.
It’s cold and all I wanna do is eat.
Had a great weekend visiting all the grandparents—you can’t believe (oh yes you can) how much nakhes they get from those babies.
It’s hard to get back to work today as the yucky icy rainy whatever that is that is falling from the dullest sky ever click click clicks down.
I’m not sure sometimes that this is really happening—this brilliant red-headed beauty is actually being kept prisoner.
Her mother knows how much pain she is in.
She’s run away a few times already out of desperation.
She cries all the time and has missed way too much school.
She is being threatened on a daily basis with “hospitalization.” The kind where they khop you in the middle of the night and keep you under sedation until you “come to your senses.”
By that time one’s chance for a normal entrance into say, NYU, is long over.
She will be 17 next week and nobody is helping her.
We tried but we have run out of money.
We secretly Skype—she looks cold and bundled up.
They say it’s going to be in the 20’s for many many days.
She told us, this beleaguered young lady that her mother is deliberately keeping
the house cold because it costs too much money to heat.
I guess the 700 thousand dollars, yes that’s right, that the mother spent on the courts
came right out of utilities.
She is an heiress with millions more and nobody can reason with her and her lawyers are making darned sure that no one does.
When we can’t sleep at night from sadness and anger and desperation and frustration and the sick unfairness of it, the cold makes our teeth gnash and our bodies curl up like scared puppies.
We try and tell her to be strong and we tell ourselves to be strong.
We try to send warmth through Skype.
Spring is a long way away.