chapter twenty-three
Once the baby is one—old enough to be away from me and my breasts—the week is bisected and its two halves are wrenched apart. My husband gets one and I get one. We have both moved again, into more permanent apartments, and we parent our tiny humans mostly in solitude, a few blocks away from each other. The sadness is indescribable. I wonder every day at the ever-blooming swells of this particular pain, which is revelatory, downright psychedelic in its complexity, its nonstop novelty.
I feel I have extended the hardship of the early years of parenting by creating a situation in which I must do most of it all alone, and with the knowledge that I am persona non grata among my in-laws and some of our friends. Sometimes K is there and sometimes he helps. Often, it’s a help simply that he is wild and entertaining. The juxtaposition on the sofa of my children’s open faces, soft curls, and bright clothing against his hulking, weather-beaten form amuses me. He is willing to really play with kids and dogs—the kind of grown-up I like best—to get down on the floor and make silly noises, humiliate himself to entertain others. He makes the kids laugh until they can’t breathe, their gaspingest, most contagious laughter, giving them jostling piggyback rides and giving voices to their battered army of stuffed animals and figurines, making vampire fangs out of green beans. He learns the name of every Beanie Boo, and he is treasured like a mascot or a zany uncle, but not what I need him to be: reliable. The man of the house. Even just another adult of the house. Instead, his is another swirling energy I must corral when it’s time to set the table or get the kids into the bath. He is one of them. In time, I see that K is beginning to fall in love with the kids, and sometimes I think, If he won’t stay clean for me, he might for them. I try hard to create the conditions for him to experience a transcendent happiness, a feeling of familial love and coziness worth rearranging his chemistry for. Settling in to the new apartment, I line one long wall with white IKEA bookshelves and take three nights to fill them with my impressive, curated collection, Instagramming the result. Inside that tiny frame, my life looks so neat. I try to make this new spot a proper home, even though it’s in a terrible neighborhood and we hear gunshots almost every day. One day I arrive home to find our street cordoned off, cops gathered around a corpse, and I see a brief flash of the body, a vermilion smear against a pale blue T-shirt, as I round the corner. I think about movie murders I’ve seen where the killer plunges a knife into the victim’s middle and yanks upward. I wonder if that’s what I’ve just seen. I don’t know what I’ve seen, but the red of it, the raw meat of it, lingers in my memory. Sometimes the cops knock on my door after something like this has happened, presumably to ask whether we know anything. I never answer.
Inside, music. Lively when I’m cooking, to fight the rain, or on a Saturday morning to shake the sleep out and face the day. Quiet after the kids have gone to sleep, when I stop going back and forth to the freezer and just bring the whole bottle to the coffee table to more readily replenish my martini. Well, “martini”—a short juice glass of vodka with olive juice and three olives. I’d long ago dispensed with the vermouth, with any ceremony at all, and just made them swiftly and salty as seawater, lipstick scalloping the edge of my glass with each briny sip. Like we did all those years ago, K and I spend hours lying on the couch listening to and bonding over music, trash-talking, comparing the catalogues in our heads. Combined, it feels like we know every song ever sung. We talk about the band we might start someday, one of those bands that’s just a solemn-looking married couple in tight black clothing staring blankly into the camera. Never caught smiling on film.
On the weekend, I drag the kids to the farmers’ market and fill out the week’s cheap supermarket haul with a few vivid bunches of organic produce. Cabochon ruby–like radishes, dirty matte-golden beets, and stout Mutsu apples the color of fading celery. Once home, I set out fresh flowers and put the fruit in a jadeite bowl. A jam jar of garden growth even adorns the chartreuse kids’ table where I serve them their oatmeal. K and I found it on the street on a walk one day and brought it home and cleaned it. Eventually, I found some used toddler-sized chairs to go around it. We call it the Tiny Table Café. It sits right in front of the tall bookcases and is visible from the kitchen. When the kids are eating or coloring there, with the cluster of mismatched picture frames hanging just to their left, my son with his mop of sandy hair, my daughter just growing out of babyhood and into teetering toddlerhood, they look like they could be in a Scandinavian design magazine. I think to myself that maybe motherhood is just this, creating these frames, the little vistas you can take in that look like pictures from magazines, like any of a number of images that could be filed under familial happiness. They reflect back to you that you’re doing it—doing something—right. In my case, these scenes are like a momentary vacation from the actual circumstances of my current life. Children, clean and clad in brightly striped clothing, snacking on slices of organic plum. My son drawing happy gel-pen houses, the flourishing clump of smiley-faced flowers beneath a fat yellow sun. To counter the creeping worry that I am a no-good person, I must collect a lot of these images, postage-stamp moments I can gaze upon and think, I can’t be fucking up that bad. Can I?
I find a new Al-Anon meeting where I don’t see anyone I know and I try to attend it regularly, although I rarely find it as comforting as I’d like to. I give other women in the meeting my phone number and try to make friends, to form the kind of easy, bubbly community other people in there seem to have. It strikes me that everyone in the meetings seems healthier than I am—no one speaks of living with an active addict—but then I think that’s probably my victim complex talking anyway and that’s why I’m there in the first place. I pull the old books of daily meditations off my shelves and vow to at least read these, even if I don’t make it to meetings, and to try to absorb their teachings. I know that I suffer from what these books would call “distorted thinking,” an overinflated sense of my own capacity to change people and a hopeless, helpless anger when I can’t. I know that K’s drinking and using take up too much space in my consciousness and that I must find a way to make myself both bigger and more humble, to get “right-sized,” as they say in the rooms, in relation to him and to love. I don’t know how to do it for myself, but I have to do it for my kids.
Every day, there is the pulsing awareness that their father and I have broken the snow globe of their childhood, let its glittering contents, all our intentions and hopes, seep into the floorboards. But still—or maybe because of this—I want things to be nice. Safe. Snug. Pretty. The strength, the tenderness of this desire is so poignant it sweeps in with force, makes my knees buckle as I stir pasta at the stove, sprinkle cinnamon into the two small plastic dishes of rice pudding. They want to be with me, on me, at every single moment, and I am forever picking them up and putting them down, patting their heads and smoothing their cheeks, kissing and kissing and kissing them while they squeal, clenching my teeth to manage the urge to consume them whole. I learn that this feeling has a name: cute aggression. It’s the intensity we feel when we look at babies or puppies or other adorable living things. The cute aggression I feel toward my babies is overwhelming, and mixed with my depression it sometimes alarms me. I am too animal—weighty and earthbound. I lumber around and want to eat my young.
Thinking of my husband doing this same thing, trying to make a home, but alone, as a young man, devastates me. That sensation also sweeps insistently in and threatens to topple me. Like those plastic giraffe toys we had as kids—you would press a button on the flat bottom of its pedestal and the stiff giraffe would simply fall apart, collapse suddenly at its string joints. I’ll think of my husband and grimace for a second, feel my face contort into almost-tears, my body go briefly limp, and then I’ll swallow the emotion and resume the task at hand. I am such a raw nerve that parenting alone—just the idea of it, that anyone has done it ever, has ever been widowed or abandoned or merely bored—feels like the saddest po
ssible thing. The quietest thing. The Cheerios and the wipes and toys, a dozen handheld train cars, a chasm of hours between Saturday afternoon and Saturday evening. Coming home from the playground and opening the door into the cool darkness of the apartment, time spreading barely forward, slowly as spilled honey on the tabletop. The days are long but the years are short, they say about these early years of parenting. (Who says? My mother, for one. But she always seemed so happy doing this work, happier than I could hope to be. Weren’t you ever bored? I ask her. Bored? She seems to think that isn’t the right word. No, no, I don’t think I was bored.) Thinking about adults putting on a happy face for children, or worse, being unable to put on the happy face, is devastating. That we maintain this dishonesty with them, that we must. I have a longing to protect the kids from coming into some consciousness of the fact that taking care of them is difficult. I always imagined that keeping that fact from them was an essential part of good mothering. But parenting an infant and toddler alone is so depleting that I find it difficult not to let them in on the dirty secret that they are a challenge, that this is really fucking hard. There is much levity in our home, but it is shadowed by my sharp sighs, performances of my own oppression. I become the martyr mother who invokes her own ceaseless labor in order to extract sympathy, puttering around, muttering under her breath, refusing to take a load off or stop narrating her list of tasks. K’s presence exacerbates this impulse. I want him to see how hard my life is, how much easier he could make it, how unjust it is that he won’t. I have this idea that he is a bad man who is stealing my time and energy—that is meant to be a feminist reading of what’s happening, but the truth is I don’t conceptualize my time as mine in the first place. He can’t steal something that I don’t consider my own.
Over coffee, an Al-Anon friend tells me that she thinks she’s growing healthy enough in the program to leave her alcoholic marriage. She no longer fears being single or living alone—she is ready. But, she wonders aloud, half-joking, now how will he see me suffer? If a codependent falls in a forest and there’s no alcoholic around to hear her…
Separation, which almost always marks the beginning of a divorce, is a liminal space. Order dissolves and categories become malleable, subject to redefinition, to new meaning. Everything is makeshift, jury-rigged, partial. Everything is changing. Simply dropping the kids off feels too traumatic to do quickly, so we hang around for a while when we do it, wallowing like buffalo in each other’s apartments, looking around at newly acquired objects, following the action slowly, at some remove—in order, I suppose, to acknowledge our status as a guest, a trespasser, and to mark the transfer of power, signal that the other parent is now the one chiefly on duty. We are reticent, not wanting to carve out too definitively this new experience of our failed love, our post-relationship friendship. Are we friends? Who knows. We are friendly, sometimes very, then abruptly not. My parents always described their own divorce as amicable, and something about even that word sounded defensive to me, like who asked for an adjective? But now I find myself doing the same thing, even if only to myself. I feel the need to prove to myself that we are capable of kindness and grace in the midst of the mess we’ve made. See, we get along, I think, standing in his apartment watching him pack the kids’ bag. One of us laughs at the other’s joke. It’s going to be okay, I think. We can do this!
K has promised so many times that this is the beginning of our life together, that he will care for me as no one has before, but in reality, family life grates on him, and he breaks from it often, sometimes on short notice. Won’t be home for dinner, he texts at five o’clock. See u later tho. Can’t wait to see your beautiful face. If my face is so beautiful, come home for dinner, I want to say, but I don’t. He comes and goes as he pleases and I do the heavy lifting, literal and figurative, at home. I should get, by now, that the way things are is the way they’re going to be, but I’m still scandalized daily by his selfishness and his nonparticipation. Don’t you want us? I thunder inside each day. Don’t you want this life? Occasionally he gets so angry he gathers his things and leaves, saying something cruel and slamming the door on the way out. I turn away from the kids so they won’t see my face, their pathetic mother’s eyelashes fluttering in pained surprise. (Why am I still surprised?) A small panic beats its wings in my chest as I think about the damage these moments must be doing to them. My parents never, ever did things like this. Not in our loving, liberal household, where anger was considered crass.
K mostly lives with us, but when he’s drinking a lot or doing too many drugs, I tell him he can’t come around, that I don’t want him near the kids if he’s fucked up. Every adult is fucked up, he says. Not like you, I counter. He is always quick to point out in an argument that my husband and I are also heavy drinkers, that we haven’t been perfect parents, that he is no different. The shame I carry about my nightly alcohol consumption is bad enough that I entertain this point whenever he makes it. I’m aware that I could be better, could always be better, that I have fucked everything up beyond repair in some fundamental and essential and life-shaping way for my children and that that can never be denied. At the same time, I can’t see my sauvignon blanc or even my nighttime vodka the same way I see heroin. The sweating glass I refill while waiting on the chicken to roast, chopping fresh herbs for the salad. I mean, come on. I can’t see my own pencil-skirted professional reality, my ex-husband’s demanding nine-to-five job, in the same context as K with his bloody jeans and bag of works stuffed deep down into the front pocket of his messenger bag, which smells encrusted with dirt and wear. Does he really have the gall to compare himself to us upstanding citizens? It just happens to be socially acceptable that you need a few drinks to feel normal after a day spent interfacing with humanity, he has said more than once. What if I need a shot of heroin in the morning in order to even consider interfacing with humanity in the first place? I roll my eyes, but some part of me understands what he’s saying. My vice, somewhat arbitrarily, happens to be legal. But the gesture always repels me, makes me mentally cling to my husband, to pine for him a little bit. I miss the nights eyeing his empty IPA bottles, wondering whether he’d polish off a six-pack, knowing nothing about the evening was likely to substantively change if he did. With a few notable exceptions, we were civilized. We cared about our health. We had entire worlds to manage. And there was the love we felt for our children, a force that bound us together in spite of everything and forever.
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• • •
K’s substance use was incompatible with normal adult life. Alcohol made him surly and unpleasant, then fun, then horrible, all in one drunk. Either he was incapable of drinking it in a quantity that would soften his edges, or he had a kind of allergy to it—AA frames all alcoholism this way, as an “allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind.” There was no moderation. He slugged down hard alcohol, preferably mixed with Red Bull or juice, in Big Gulp quantities. If it was pills, he was droopy and smiley and unreachable, in the kind of state in which people fall asleep holding a lit cigarette and accidentally burn down their house. If it was dope he was nodding, his eyes rolling back in his head or closing intermittently. Or speedballs—he got those beady eyes. I banished him when things got like that and the frequent banishments stood in for the thing I knew I should do: break up with him. But I was doing the thing that codependents do: having a relationship with his potential. Having a relationship with the fact that I knew if he could put down drugs, he would be good. He could be great! I could perhaps love him into a greater greatness. I convince myself that it’s more damaging for the kids for him to disappear altogether than to disappear and reappear as he had been. I do not break up with him. Instead, I further cleave the pieces of my life apart so that they can keep humming along. For stretches of months, when the kids are with me, he is not. I keep us busy with playdates and host dinners for friends. There are grown-ups around, my sweet friends, who come with long baguettes and pints of organic be
rries and vanilla ice cream and smiles for the kids and keep us company. On switch day, I take them to their father’s. We linger and make chilly small talk as they eat their chicken nuggets, and I leave and am free to be with K. For years, I cry after dropping off the kids. When I first get back into my own car, even the sound of the door closing is poignant and sad, and the ensuing silence is so total it chokes me up. I cry because I already miss them and I cry because I hate myself. I don’t linger in this pain, which has a funhouse quality. To cope with it, I have already made plans.
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• • •
Some days, I want the disease of loving him to be removed and I don’t want to have to practice it. I don’t want to have to walk up and down through the “searching and fearless moral inventory” of the Twelve Steps. I want something as swift and decisive as a bullet. As a drug.
But also, I am proud of the independence I’ve had to cultivate. I have learned to make a home by myself, have learned that I am resourceful, that I can spend a Sunday painting a Craigslist crib and keeping children entertained at the same time. I may not be able to free my mind from obsessing over him—whether he is clean, whether he’s at work, whether he would cheat on me, whether this is worth it—but in spite of the changing weather patterns of his drug use and his affection, I have become a badass. Alone with both children, I cook, hike, take road trips, host parties and playdates and sleepovers. I fly home to the East Coast and look at myself in the mirror of the airplane bathroom during a turbulent spell, rocking my daughter and waiting for my son to finish on the toilet and I feel like superwoman.
Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls Page 20
