Page 5

By the time I go to bed, after a cup of tea or a glass of wine or both, I am still tense with anticipation of the girls calling for me.

This is when Kyle reaches for me, pulling me into his side.

I used to just give him what he wanted, even though I’d been touched all day and I was tired of giving.

“The male ego is a fragile thing,” my stepmom told me once.

Lately, though, I reach into my bag of cliché excuses, a bag every mother must carry around (along with the snacks), and use one of them.

I’m so tired. I have a headache. I have a particularly bad period.

When I do this, he sighs, likely bothered by both the rejection and my lack of creativity in delivering it, and I know I’ll be to blame if he ever cheats on me.

It’s not that I’m turned off from sex completely.

It’s just sex in this context. The context of Wife, Mother, Servant.

I have found myself daydreaming of sex with men besides Kyle on many occasions.

There’s a cashier at Trader Joe’s, for example, a young man who can’t be more than twenty-five years old, who I think about fucking in a back room of the store.

There’s that dad I used to see at day care drop-off, the one who knew the name of his daughter’s baby doll, the one who asked the teacher if his daughter was doing better at nap time.

He wasn’t particularly hot in a conventional way.

He was balding. He wore orange Crocs sometimes.

But he was so attentive . I was convinced he’d make me come with just his tongue.

The fantasies remind me that I’m still in there—Nicole, the person I was before I became Wife, Mother, Servant. They, the fantasies, are what sustain me.

The girls sleep through the night, mostly—there is , apparently, rest for the wicked.

Sometimes I wake up between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m., the insomniac’s witching hour, and then one of them calls for me, as if they know I’m stirring, as if we are still physically connected, tethered in the way we were when they were inside me.

It’s as magical as it is terrifying, much like motherhood itself.

No matter what time they go to bed, no matter if they wake up in the middle of the night, they are up for the day at five thirty in the morning.

Most parents cope with this type of insanity by keeping their eyes on the prize of nap time.

Grace, however, will not nap. Or not in a bed, at least. As an infant, she would only sleep in a swing turned on at top speed.

We had to change the batteries in the thing every week—those fat D batteries that you never have just lying around.

When she grew out of the swing, we tried to get her to sleep in her crib, but she wasn’t having it.

She required motion. We resorted to putting her in the car and driving around aimlessly. The Car Nap was born.

Liv would probably nap on her own, in her bed, but I can’t successfully separate them, so she comes on the drive too.

When the girls were in day care, I only had to do the Car Nap on weekends, which was fine.

Now I have to do it every day. I haven’t told many people about the Car Nap because they say things like “You still do that?” As if I am a terrible parent.

The truth is it’s the only reliably quiet time of my day. So yes, I still fucking do it.

“I don’t want a car nap,” Grace said, her whine extra high pitched because she was in desperate need of the very thing she did not want.

Liv did not attempt to put her distress into words; she just started crying.

“How about we go to another park after?” I said.

Grace jutted out her bottom lip and said, “Fine.”

Liv stopped crying.

“Hold me,” Liv said, reaching up, her little hands clenching and releasing.

She gave me all her weight when I lifted her.

My back ached, but in that moment, the ache was offset by the oxytocin that came with holding her.

She was tired. She trusted me completely.

I’ve come to consider this trust my performance review—I am doing okay because my daughters hold on to me as if I am everything in the world.

In the middle of the day, the freeway is mostly quiet, and it’s possible to drive seventy miles per hour without hitting the brakes once during the Car Nap.

On this day, I looked over my shoulder to see both girls asleep, lulled by the white noise of the freeway.

I exhaled, then resumed the audiobook I’d been listening to, this one a memoir by a woman who left her husband of ten years to be in a relationship—a throuple , they call it—with two women.

I tend to gravitate toward memoirs of people whose lives have completely imploded in some way.

I lost the plot of what I was listening to the moment I drove underneath the overpass connecting the 5 freeway to the 73 toll road.

About a month before, during the Car Nap, this section of the freeway was at a standstill, which led to various whispered curses flying from my mouth.

As the traffic inched along, I saw police cars on the overpass, next to a tan minivan parked on the shoulder with the driver’s side door open.

The southbound side of the freeway was completely closed, empty of cars.

When I got closer, I saw why—a white sheet draped over what I’d later learn was the body of a woman who had jumped to her death.

I couldn’t—and still can’t—drive by that overpass without thinking of her.

She was thirty-seven. Her name wasn’t published.

I thought of that minivan, wondered if she had kids, if she was a stay-at-home mother.

I looked back at the girls again. Still sleeping, open mouthed, doe-like eyelashes fluttering, fleetingly angelic. Nothing has ever made me so choked up as marveling at the innocence of my daughters. Is this why we have children, to reconnect with the purity we lose to the world?

I shut off the audiobook because I couldn’t focus, and turned to my next recurrent thought process: leaving Kyle.

It’s actually more like daydreaming than thinking.

There’s a rosy glow to the visions—me as an empowered single mother in a cozy townhouse, utterly exhausted by “doing it all,” but in a kind of romantic way.

Life, after all, would not be logistically easier if I left Kyle.

I would be truly alone, as opposed to just feeling alone.

Maybe that would be better, though. As it is, he’s there , so I can’t help but expect more from him.

If he wasn’t there, the burden of expectation would be gone.

In my visions, the girls and I would bond, cuddling on the couch together after our long days.

It would be very Gilmore Girls . I would cherish our time together more because there would be less of it.

Kyle and I would agree to fifty-fifty custody because we are decent, fair-minded people.

We would commit to always putting the girls first. With my sudden influx of free time, I would have the opportunity to relax, to work, to have coherent thoughts, to read a goddamn book, to do yoga and banish my fanny pack of fat.

And I would have the opportunity to miss the girls.

Every mother should experience the complex luxury of missing her children from time to time.

On this day, I enumerated grievances in my mind.

I thought of how, while I’m making dinner, Kyle watches reruns of that tasteless show with the comedian who makes jokes about YouTube videos.

I thought about how he complains when I do meatless Mondays.

I thought of how when I ask him to make dinner, he does something like salmon with a cream sauce, even though I’ve mentioned how I feel about combining fish and dairy.

I thought of how he goes for early runs without asking for permission.

I would ask for his permission if I wanted to go for a run because I would consider the impact of my absence, how it would give him the responsibility of getting the girls up for the day.

He never seems to consider the impact of his absence.

I thought of how he hates when I use lube for sex, even though I tell him I need it because of dryness related to the probable perimenopause.

I thought of how he never asks what that’s like for me—to lose my youth, to have that lovely rug pulled out from under me.

I thought of his stupid coed softball team and how he kept right on playing after the girls were born.

I thought of how his leisure is a given and mine is gone.

I thought of how we are always jockeying for position.

I thought of how I never win. I thought of how we are not partners; we are adversaries.

Just as I concluded that this was the definition of irreconcilable differences , a cry came from the back seat. I could feel my blood pressure rising. Sometimes I wonder how close I am to a stroke.

“Mommy?” Grace whined.

It was too soon for her to wake up. I usually get a full hour of quiet. I didn’t respond, in hopes she’d fall back asleep.

“Mommy?” she said, louder this time.

I shushed her, gripping the steering wheel tighter in anticipation of her waking Liv.

“It’s not time to wake up, sweetie,” I whispered.

She shrieked and thrashed as if she were a caged animal in need of escape.

“I don’t want these,” she said, pushing against the straps of her car seat.

In the rearview mirror, I saw Liv’s eyes blink open.

She appeared confused before her face scrunched into a look of utter despair.

She began wailing as Grace attempted to get out of her car seat.

She’d done this before, a Houdini-like maneuver that caused me to summon a yell from deep in my core, something that could only be described as a roar.

“Grace, no. We’re on the freeway,” I said/roared. I did my best to sound calm. Three-year-olds are no different from people on ledges.

“I want out !” she said, kicking the back of the seat.

Liv wailed louder.

I had no choice but to get off the freeway, to relinquish my hour of peace.

But then I decided I did have a choice.

I decided that I would go home and I would tell Kyle to watch the girls for a half hour while I ... did something. Or nothing. In silence. And if he hesitated, just the slightest bit, I would tell him it was over. I imagined the conversation:

It’s over, Kyle.

What’s over?

This. Us. It’s bullshit. I’m done.

What are you even talking about?

He would probably say that last part with a little laugh meant to poke fun at my hysterics. Then he would hammer the nail in his coffin by telling me to calm down.

My heart pounded as I drove through our neighborhood, wondering if he’d want to keep the house, or if we’d sell it and split the proceeds. Would I stay in this neighborhood? If not, where would I go? How would our divorce affect the girls? Were there therapists for toddlers?

“Where are we going?” Grace asked.

“Home,” I said.

“But I want ice cream.”

“Ask Daddy when we get home. He can take you.”

They had no response to this. They were intrigued. I had never said this before.

I pulled into the driveway, my heart still racing. I knew Kyle could see us pulling in from his office window, but he wouldn’t come out. He probably didn’t even realize that we were back sooner than we should have been.

When I unbuckled Grace, she squirmed away from my attempts to hold her and ran toward the house, likely curious to encounter this mysterious version of her father who was going to take her for ice cream in the middle of a workday. Liv, still tired, was dead weight in my arms, nuzzling into my neck.

I followed after Grace, and once inside, I heard Kyle’s voice: “You guys are back!”

“Mommy said you’d take us for ice cream,” Grace announced.

Liv raised her head from my shoulder to see the reaction.

“Oh, she did?”

Kyle’s eyes were on me, his eyebrows raised, asking for my consent. In many ways, I am his mother too. I nodded.

“Well, okay then,” he said with a smile. “That works out anyway because Mommy may need to call Grandma Merry.”

Merry—short for Meredith—is my stepmom. I hardly ever talk to her and didn’t know why I would need to now.

Liv squirmed in my arms. “Down,” she said.

I put her down, and she and Grace went into the kitchen to pack their backpack for the ice cream excursion.

“Merry called,” Kyle said once the girls were gone. “She said she tried your cell and you didn’t pick up.”

His eyes looked concerned. I sat on the guest bed next to his desk. When I checked my phone, there was a missed call from Merry. It must have come in while I was roaring on the freeway.

“She said something’s wrong with your dad.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. She said he’s acting weird. Memory issues or something. I told her you’d call.”

“Okay,” I said. “You’re taking the girls now?”

He stood from his chair. “I’ll take them.”

He looked at his watch, one of those sporty watches that counts your daily steps. Kyle has the brain space to consider his daily steps. I can’t fathom this.

“I need to be back in an hour for a call,” he said.

“Okay. That works. You know I can’t stand to talk to Merry for more than twenty minutes.”

This was once one of our bonding things—talking about how draining my stepmother could be. I’d just dangled this bait in front of him, welcomed him to take it, to partner with me again.

Instead, he just said, “Nic, she’s not that bad.”

This was the day I marked as the beginning of everything that would come.

This was the day that would serve as the dividing line between before and after.