by Rachel Del
“Since when do you care about that kind of stuff?” she asked, and rightfully so.
“I don’t… I didn’t.”
“Right.”
“It was just embarrassing; you know? Like showing up to a costume party in a scary costume and everyone else is dressed for a masked ball.”
“We’ve been making fun of these type of women for years, Lil, and now all of a sudden you’re complaining that you’re not one of them?”
“I’m not complaining.”
“You most certainly are.”
She didn’t understand, of course. She could never know what it meant to be a part of Thomas’ family. There were things I was expected to do and a certain kind of woman I was expected to be. The wedding...the job offer... had only been the beginning. I had quickly realized that.
“So Tom got you the leather jacket because, last weekend, all the other women were wearing them?”
“I suppose so.”
“Are you okay with that? With him trying to make you look like the rest of them?”
I had laughed openly then, appalled by her response. “Oh that’s not what he’s doing, Chris,” I said. “He saw how upset I was, how out of place I was feeling, and he was just trying to help.”
“By turning you into one of them?” she scoffed. “He’s helping someone alright, but it’s definitely for his own benefit.”
I stared at her for a moment, willing myself not to say the first thing that came to mind. Instead, I said “And what is that supposed to mean?”
She took no time at all in responding. “It means that he wants you to fit in with all the other wives so that he can check off another little box on his 'perfect life' checklist,” she said. “He’s gone and found himself exactly what he wanted...a wife that he can shape and mold into whatever he needs her to be.”
I couldn’t bear to tell her just how right she was. Thomas had never openly asked me to be anything or anyone other than who I was, but it was apparent in everything he did and said. The job offer had only been the beginning. Still, admitting that to myself was one thing. Admitting it to others was an entirely different ball game. So I said, “It's a leather jacket, Christina.”
A long, deep sigh passed her lips. “I wish you could see that it’s so much more than just a jacket.”
I hadn’t wanted the holes in my marriage pointed out to me. I already knew they existed. What I wanted was to forget them – if even for a moment – and focus on what truly mattered; what all of my energy should have been spent focusing on; becoming a mother.
It consumed my thoughts on a daily basis. I had never wanted anything more.
Of course, like many things in life, it wouldn’t come easily.
Days after my argument with Christina, I would hear Thomas’ voice from the bedroom, "Any luck?”
I placed the cap on the used pregnancy test and tossed it into the wastebasket beside me. “No.”
I waited for him to walk into the room and wrap his arms around me the same way he had for the past ten months.
“It’ll happen next month. I can feel it,” he said, his face burrowing into my neck.
I cried a lot during those months, convincing myself that losing my mother at 21 was just the start of a painful life that would now include the inability to have a child of my own. Thomas did his best to console me, but it was of little use.
Already a part of me had broken off and drifted away, never to return.
It didn’t take long for him to tire of my talk of ovulation schedules and basal temperatures. Our attempts at getting pregnant had begun on the beaches of Maui, fueled by seemingly endless mojitos and newlywed desire. They had quickly turned into something scheduled and monitored, stripped of their natural beauty.
Five
Thomas
The fourth time I found myself in Clare’s bed I knew two things to be true. First, t she had been right that first time around: we were unfinished. And second, I was in serious trouble.
Something about Clare felt safe. Familiar. Easy. I knew that if I let myself, I could easily slip back into my old life with her, knowing that it would fit just like a pair of comfy slippers. She knew the real me; she had been there first, and knew what she was getting into when she had accepted my proposal.
I had thought that Lily, too, had understood, but it didn’t take long for me to realize my mistake.
Lily had no idea.
She hadn’t known the kind of man I was.
She hadn’t known what would be expected of her.
She hadn’t known where my priorities lay.
And as I looked over at Clare’s naked form that day I thought for the first time: this marriage isn’t going to work.
It wasn’t about Clare. It never was. It was and always would be about me.
“It’s funny,” Clare said suddenly, tearing me from my thoughts, “I would have thought that Lily was exactly the type of woman who ultimately, could make you happy.”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” I said, but she continued on.
“You don’t even know why I left, do you? Why I called off our engagement?” she said. She pulled the blankets around her body and leaned against the headboard. “You were – and still are – a great man, but I knew that I could never make you happy. I was too much for you.”
She paused, gauging my reaction, continuing when I said and did nothing.
“You needed someone softer. Someone kinder. Someone who possessed at least one maternal bone in her body. I learned early on that I was never going to be that person for you.”
“And so you left.”
“And so I left.”
I was quiet for a few moments before speaking again. “If it’s going to work with anyone, it will be with her.”
“Then what are you doing here?” she said.
I went home, showered Clare off of me and climbed into bed next to Lily’s sleeping body, scared by all that I was feeling...and all that I was not.
**
During the four years we had been together, Lily and I had developed the bad habit of taking our anger, stress and frustration out on each other.
Her pregnancy only exacerbated the situation.
“What is wrong with you today?” I asked, incredulously, after she had bumped into me a third time while moving about the kitchen. But truthfully, I wasn’t sure I really cared. It had been three, long weeks since I had seen Clare, and I was firmly on edge.
“I’m really mad about being pregnant today.”
Though I knew it was insensitive, I couldn’t help but laugh.
The look she shot me should have knocked me dead.
“That’s great, Tom. Real nice of you to laugh at me.”
As she stormed off, tossing a damp tea towel at me on the way, I had the passing thought that I should follow her and apologize. But it was just that; a passing thought. And one that I didn’t act on.
We had been trying for more than two years by the time she finally got pregnant. I was surprised, having assumed that it just wasn’t going to happen. I had actually convinced myself that it was better that way. I had always pictured children in my life. However, every negative pregnancy test in the trashcan conjured up spontaneous vacations, a clean and beautiful home, endless and uninterrupted nights of sex and no shortage of sleep on the weekends.
Clare.
And then there it was: a positive pregnancy test, confirmed by Lily’s doctor later that week.
Lily cried for three days straight; she was so happy.
Clare, I thought.
Six
Lily
I had always thought that I knew the kind of woman I was and that nothing – including marriage, or the end of it – could change me. But I wore that marker of separation the same way that I wore the dead mother mark. I let it define me. I let it consume me. I allowed it to negate all the good in my life.
What no one tells you about the beginning of the end is how goddamn quiet it is. How lonely. How much y
ou want to cry, but can’t. How much you feel, but how little you seem to be able to express.
I walked around like a zombie for days, lost in my own sense of misery and bewilderment. Apparently having been the one to make the final call to end my marriage did not exempt me from feeling like hell.
Our house, which had once been a hotbed of activity, a resting place between people and places, was still and silent. I’d spent the two years since Ben’s birth mourning for my free time, and suddenly I had more of it than I knew what to do with. And it was in these moments that I felt my resolve cracking and crumbling.
If Thomas had only apologized, I would have invited him back home with open arms.
**
He didn’t tell me right away that he had overheard me on the phone, speaking with my boss. Instead, he stewed in his anger for too long. By the time he pushed aside his empty wine glass and looked at me from the corner of his eyes, I knew without a word being said that he had heard me.
“What were you doing talking to Jason? You said you were going to stay home with the baby.”
I sighed inwardly. “That wasn’t decided, Tom.”
“That’s what we agreed on.”
I had wanted to scream at him then. I had wanted to tell him that he had no idea what it felt like to grow a living thing inside of your body; to have your emotions run wild; to spend your entire day and sleepless nights worrying about whether or not you will have what it takes to keep a living, breathing baby alive.
But I didn’t tell him any of that.
“Alright, you know what? You’re right. I’m just going to stay home; be a mom and a wife. Forget my job. That’s what you want, right?”
I thought about that moment in time a lot. It had felt so clearly like the fork in the road. Take a right turn and our marriage would survive. Take a left turn and we wouldn’t come out in one piece.
Maybe if I had taken back what I said, if I had shrunken back into my shell like he wanted me to, then our lives would have turned out differently.
Instead he said, “You have to stop this.”
“Why? That’s what you want.”
“It’s not what I want, it’s what make sense,” he said and rose from his seat as though it was the end of the discussion. I got up and followed him out of the kitchen.
“Because you decided that it makes sense, not we.”
It was the worst argument we’d ever had, and our anger took on a life of its own.
It came out in the way I noisily loaded the dishwasher after dinner, in the extra hours that Tom would spend at the office, getting home long after I had retreated to bed, my weary, extended body unable to take anymore. We couldn’t look at each other, could barely hold a conversation longer than thirty seconds. I had had too many years to think about becoming a mother, and nothing about the way things were at that time were what I had pictured.
I knew so much more about Thomas by then, more than he realized. I knew that while he had faked it well, the news of my pregnancy had been too much of a surprise. I knew that he had begun to fantasize about a life without children. A fantasy that I had crushed in an instant. A fantasy that I had never wanted any part of. Children had always been in my plans, and he had known that. I wasn’t sure what had changed, or when.
For days I allowed myself to feel it all. The hurt, the anger and above all else the disappointment. For the first time in our marriage I had begun to question whether or not I truly knew the man that I climbed into bed with each night.
“I want to stay home with the baby, at least at first,” I told him a week later. “I just don’t want my whole identity to be as someone’s mom.”
He didn’t respond, so I continued.
“I’m scared to say that out loud, but I’m more scared that if I stop working I will lose myself...that I will lose the parts of myself that make me me.”
I had wanted Thomas to understand, but I knew enough to know that he couldn’t. And I knew that it was asking too much to expect him to understand.
“I wish I could stay home with him and that it would be enough for me, but it’s not. I know it’s not going to be.”
Seven
Thomas
I had never imagined that my life would turn out this way. Not in a million years. I’d had it all figured out, the way I did with everything. I was always in control. Until now.
For a man who had wanted out, who had invited a third person into his marriage, who had worked against his wife in couple’s therapy, I was shocked by how much it hurt to be without her. I carried her absence with me everywhere I went.
It was there, in front of me at the office, taking up one of the two empty club chairs sitting opposite my desk.
It was there, in the silence, that greeted me as I walked through my new front door.
It was there, in the empty fridge and pantry, and in the empty bottles of red wine that filled the sink.
It was there in the way my son looked at me, now.
I had failed him. I had failed Lily. And I had failed myself.
**
Listen: I’m not the kind of guy who likes to focus on his shortcomings – in fact, I avoid thinking of them at all – but I was terrified of turning into my father. Despite his success, or perhaps because of it, he was a cold and ineffectual shell of a man, who continued to put everything in his life above family. I didn’t want to be that type of husband, that type of father. I wouldn’t be.
But it was harder than I realized, this whole not-turning-into-your-parents struggle.
Benjamin Thomas Gardner came screaming into our lives on a breezy April morning, all nine pounds eight ounces of him. I knew immediately that I was in over my head. I’d heard stories of parents who fell in love with their children the moment they laid eyes on them suddenly, just like that; unable to imagine their lives without them. I felt none of that. As I held his surprisingly firm body in my hands that first day, I tried and failed and tried and failed to feel connected to him.
I assumed that all I needed was time to adjust to my new role in life. But when, three days later, I pulled the car that was holding my new family into the garage, I felt like I was hovering above my body, watching someone else’s life play out in front of me.
To the outside observer I was the doting new father and loving husband. I greeted guests at the door, thanking them for the almost always, nearly inedible plate of food they presented to me. I introduced them to our newest addition. I smiled when necessary, ooh-ed and ahh-ed at all the right moments, and made certain that no one ever knew what I was really feeling inside.
Lost.
Lonely.
Afraid.
Trapped.
Clare, I thought.
It was true that Lily and I had our problems, but all of a sudden – or maybe slowly, almost invisibly – we became different people. Where she was once independent and witty, always surprising me with one thing or another, she had become withdrawn and touchy, so focused was she on her new role as a mother. She rarely let Ben out of her sight and it seemed that beyond the subject of him, we had nothing to say to one another.
Though time had shown me how to love my son, I felt as though I had lost my wife to him.
I’m certain that in Lily’s eyes I, too, had changed.
In the same way that she was no longer the Lily I had married, I could no longer be the Thomas with which she had promised to spend her life.
So I walked through my days knowing one thing to be true: that if we didn’t find our way back to each other somehow – and soon – our marriage wouldn’t survive.
Eight
Lily
Thomas thought he was so clever, the way he tiptoed around me, lying his way into Clare’s bed. The truth was that, by then, I had had enough anyway. Thomas had, long ago, stopped being the man I married. He had become his father; cold, as in not touching me for months and distancing himself from his family. He thought I didn’t know; thought he had been so accomplished an actor that I missed hi
s struggle when he looked at us. Thomas was with us in body, but never in mind, never in heart.
“I fought so hard,” he once said to me, “I tried to be the kind of husband and father that you needed me to be. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”
His true love, I had recognized, was his work. There was no room for anything or anyone else. We were headed towards the end.
**
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Christina asked. I didn’t have a good answer for her. I didn’t even have a good answer for myself.
“I guess I wanted to believe it wasn’t true, and if I didn’t say the words aloud then maybe it wasn’t true.”
“Thomas was cheating on you,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief. “How long have you known?”
I was ashamed to tell her that I had known for too long.
“I don’t mean to sound insensitive here,” she began, “but...why stay?”
I told her that I’d thought about that every spare moment since Clare confessed. I told her how I found myself staring at my husband from across the room, as though I was hoping that I could find the answers in his still handsome face. And I told her that every night that I tucked Ben into his bed, staying long after he was asleep to study his beautiful, innocent face I knew that he was my priority. He needed his parents. He needed us to be happy and well.
I told her that if I had left at that moment, if I had called off our marriage and we had gone our separate ways right then, that my anger would rule me. It would dictate my future. Our future.
“I needed to stop being angry so that I could begin to understand.”
