Page 55

Nicole

Six months later

“Mommy? Mommy? Mommy?”

The girls are back to summoning me every sixty seconds.

The one summoning me in this particular moment is Liv.

We are in the midst of the never-dull, usually agonizing Morning Routine as I try to get them out the door for day care by eight o’clock so I can get back home for a work call at eight thirty.

Michelle Kwan called a week after I left Come to say the ad agency had signed a new client and would love to have me back.

I didn’t even try to play it cool; I just said, “Yes!” before she could finish explaining the opportunity (which is designing advertising materials for a brand of silicone patches that people—mostly women—stick on their faces to diminish the appearance of wrinkles).

I’ll do thirty hours per week and see how it goes.

I’m considering a little side business—photographing weddings, babies.

Yes, I see the irony in memorializing others’ familial bliss, but there’s good money to be had, and I’m determined to pay back Merry whatever ungodly sum we owe for her support over these past several months.

Crystal has been encouraging me to return to photographing ocean waves and rock formations in Joshua Tree.

She says motherhood is inherently hard because of all its practical demands and ongoing sacrifices, but that the real sorrow for most women is not in what they must give to their children, but in what they lose in themselves.

“Mommy?” Liv says, tugging on my sleeve.

The pleas for my attention don’t bother me like they used to.

If my blood pressure rises, the increase is marginal.

I no longer feel as if I’m close to a stroke every time my children whine.

My nervous system has been rejiggered. Crystal uses this bucket analogy.

She says when I came to Come , I had a very small bucket, meaning I was quick to get “filled up” by life’s stresses and then overwhelmed by all that was spilling over, essentially drowning me.

Now my bucket is much larger. I can, in a sense, carry more.

“Mommy?” Liv says. “I have accident.”

Liv is three now and has gotten much better with her words.

We are in the process of transitioning her out of pull-ups and into undies during the day (I am quite content to leave her in pull-ups at night until she is a teenager if it means I do not have to change sheets at 2 a.m.).

There are, of course, accidents, usually right as we are trying to get out the door in the morning.

I put down my phone—I’ve been checking work email—and comfort her.

“Oh, it’s okay, sweetie,” I say, taking a deep breath. I have become quite skilled at deep breaths, breaths that make a slow, round-trip journey through my nose to my belly and back.

It’s okay, sweetie, I tell myself. Crystal says I need to work on self-compassion, comforting my inner child. This still feels silly, but I try.

“Mommy, I’m still hungry,” Grace says, standing before me with slumped shoulders and a pouty face.

“You are? I asked if you wanted more cereal, remember? We’re done with breakfast now.”

One of my strategies for making motherhood less taxing is setting clearer boundaries.

Kyle was right when he used to say I let the girls control me.

They were the puppeteers, me the puppet.

Crystal assures me that establishing rules for the household gives everyone a sense of safety and security.

“Clear is kind,” she’s said again and again.

My first successful boundary has been around mealtimes—I decide when, where, and what we eat. The end.

Of course, the girls don’t always love my rules.

“But I’m huuuungry,” Grace says, letting her head fall to her chest in a dramatic display of defeat.

When I first returned from Come , the girls were overly affectionate and well behaved—little angels.

They were constantly snuggling me and asking me if I was feeling okay.

Grace insisted on bringing me water and snacks at regular intervals.

Liv routinely stuck Band-Aids to every exposed area of skin on my body.

It was, in a word, unnerving. I feared that my three-month absence had completely traumatized them and found myself longing for occasional demonic behavior to assure me we were returning to some semblance of normal.

After about five days, the demonic behavior began to return, along with a touch of the irritability I told myself I’d never feel again.

Crystal says it’s okay to feel agitated by motherhood.

She says the difficult parts of motherhood will not become magically easy, but with my larger bucket, I’ll have an easier time managing them.

Or that’s the theory. So far, it’s held true.

“It’s so weird. I have two favorite things,” I told Crystal in our session yesterday. “One is spending time with my girls, and the other is not spending time with my girls.”

She laughed. “That’s maternal ambivalence.”

“Do you therapists have a name for everything?”

“We try.”

“I guess the fact that it has a name means it’s not that unusual.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Have you heard that Jane Lazarre quote?”

“Who’s Jane Lazarre?”

“A writer. She said that ambivalence is pretty much guaranteed and even natural in motherhood.”

“Do you therapists collect tidbits of information like this in a secret online forum or what?”

She smiled. “That’s actually a brilliant idea.”

When Grace continues to whine and I feel myself getting impatient, I take another deep breath. I remind her again, calmly, that we are done with breakfast.

“What I can do is make an Eggo waffle as a snack for you to eat in the car,” I say. “But we do have to get going.”

Grace sighs. “Fine.”

She is four, which I hope is better than three.

I talked to a mom at the playground the other day who has twin four-year-olds, and she referred to this stage as “the Fucking Fours,” so we’ll see.

I like this park mom. Her name is Gabby, and I have identified her as a potential friend.

Crystal wants me to work on friendships—as in having them. Crystal wants a lot from me.

“I want Eggo too!” Liv says as I place her still-chubby little legs in the holes of a clean pair of underwear.

“Okay, little one,” I tell her.

I put two waffles in the toaster as Grace starts whining again. She is sitting on the floor, putting on her shoes. I buy only slip-on shoes, nothing with buckles or shoelaces. I consider this an act of self-preservation.

She throws one of the shoes across the floor. I take yet another deep breath. It’s okay, sweetie.

“What is it, lovebug?” I ask her.

“I think my feet growed,” she says. “These shoes feel weird.”

Someone on Twitter wrote, “Nobody has more grievances than a toddler on the way out the door.” So I’m not alone in my Morning Routine angst, though I do feel like Grace and Liv are particularly challenging.

Crystal says it’s a type of separation anxiety, and she didn’t have to explain why my girls would feel more intense separation anxiety right now.

Bedtime is also grueling—even more so than before.

Some nights, I let both of them sleep in bed with me to avoid the Hour of Despair.

It’s another act of self-preservation for me, and necessary comfort for them.

At some point, there will be a rule about sleeping, but for now, our bodies need each other.

I help Grace find a more suitable pair of shoes, which are, of course, the exact same size as the other ones. She approves. I grab the Eggo waffles, lift Liv into my arms, and head for the door.

“Do we go to Daddy’s today?” Grace asks, still lingering behind.

She asks this every day, noticeably anxious about the schedule, the back-and-forth.

“He’s picking you up at school today, but he’s bringing you home here. You’ll go to his house tomorrow night.”

She sighs.

I put Liv down so I can hug Grace. The girls and I hug all the time now. As I said, our bodies need each other. It’s like we are reconfirming each other’s presence— You’re here, right? Are you here? —on a daily basis.

“I know it’s hard sometimes,” I say to her.

For today, that little validation is what it takes to get her to follow me out the door.

After drop-off, I rush back home only to discover that my eight-thirty call has been moved to noon.

I check my phone, tend to neglected texts.

There is one from Kyle, asking if we are on for tomorrow.

We are hiring a babysitter so we can go out on one of our prescribed dates.

We schedule these outings every two weeks in an attempt to connect.

So much remains uncertain. There is the basic question: Do we like each other?

We haven’t had sex, and I feel no desire to do so.

Kyle says he feels desire, but when pressed, he admits it’s a more generalized desire, not specific to me.

I take no offense at this; the radical honesty is refreshing.

I told him we feel more like comrades in arms than anything, bonded by the battles we’ve survived so far.

He didn’t disagree, but said, “Aren’t all married people with kids like that? ”

I never feel particularly excited about our dates, but I don’t dread them either. We usually talk about the kids, despite promising not to. We might not have anything else to discuss anymore. Maybe that’s okay.

On our last outing, I suggested that he might want to try a dating app, to see if he feels something with someone else.

His eyebrows shot up to his hairline, and he laughed it off, but there was a twinkle of intrigue, of hope, in his eyes.

I want him, and us, to be happy—with each other or apart.

He asked if I wanted to try a dating app, and I guffawed.

I cannot imagine dating, cannot imagine presenting myself to a stranger—“So I’m less than a year out from a complete psychotic break. What’s your story?”