Page 145 of Woman on the Verge

They did not think I would be back.

I am back.

I am back.

I am back.

Chapter 29

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 leftCometo 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. Shesays 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 toCome, 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 girlscontrol 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 fromCome, 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 isnotspending 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?”