Page 111 of Woman on the Verge

“Come on, girls, I need you to help me out,” I say, my voice almost as whiny as theirs.

“What if there’s a monster in the closet?” Grace says. She forces her lower lip to quiver.

“Grace, there is no monster in the closet. Do you want to look again?”

Both girls hide behind my legs as I open the closet door. I flip on the light to reveal no monster.

“But what if a monster comes later?” Grace asks.

“Monsta?” Liv says, brows furrowed.

“There are no monsters in this house, remember? This house is full of—”

“Love!” Grace shouts.

That’s what I tell them: there are no monsters because this house is full of love. This house is also full of a fair bit of resentment, and they seem to have forgotten that their own mother is the Monster.

“Mommy, where’s Ella?” Grace asks.

Ella is one of her dolls. Actually, several of her dolls have gone by Ella at various times. I don’t know who the current Ella is.

“I don’t know, sweetie. Where did you leave her?”

“I thought she was in here,” she says, turning in a circle, scanning the room.

This happens a lot at bedtime—toys and dolls cannot be located. There is an escalation of panic. This is another of Grace’s procrastination techniques.

“Grace, we’ll find her in the morning, okay? I’m not going up and down the stairs twelve times looking for things.”

Grace falls to the floor, as if my attempt to set a firm boundary has delivered a blow to her kneecaps.

“But Ineedher!”

“Why don’t you go look in the usual places? You need to keep better track of your things, remember?”

When I look over at Liv, her eyelids are at half mast. Liv has recently become unable to physically function past a certain time. It is a blessing. Grace’s ability to summon energy long past the time she should be sleeping is a source of ongoing torture.

“I’m too afraid to go look by myself.”

She likes to pull the fear card when she is really just lazy and wants me to find the damn doll.

“I’ll go with you, then. I’m not going to do it for you.”

She stands, assumes a confident posture that does not align at all with her emotional display of a few moments ago.

I carry Liv, her sweet little face resting on my shoulder, because if I try to leave her alone in their room, I risk a meltdown that will send enough cortisol through her veins to keep her awake for another three hours. Grace walks ahead of us, and I follow her through the living room, then the kitchen, where she finds Ella sitting in the toy baby stroller. She cradles the doll in her arms, says, “Hello, my darling. Ready for bed?” in this adoring voice. Perhaps I’m not doing so badly at mothering if she believes this is how moms interact with their babies. Then again, she may just be imitating a YouTube video.

With Ella safely secured, I wrestle them into their pajamas and brush their teeth, then start book-reading time. A few pages into the first book about a giraffe who learns to dance, Grace protests:

“I don’t like this story.”

Books have become much like snacks—often rejected for no good reason.

I give her other options, and she selects a Berenstain Bears book in which the cubs have a bad case of the “gimmies” and their dolt of a father makes it worse by giving them whatever they want.

Halfway through the book, Grace protests again:

“I don’t like this one either.”