Page 40 of Woman on the Verge

Now that the hot flash had passed, my body was chilled with the cooling sweat left behind.

“Nic, do we have to do this now?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Did you have a long weekend caring for your offspring?”

“Nic . . .”

“I was in the hospital with my dad who has no short-term memory and can’t walk.”

“Are we in a competition?”

“We shouldn’t be. Do you think your stress is in any way comparable to mine?”

“Can we talk about this tomorrow?”

“Why? Am I getting ‘carried away’?” I used air quotes then.

“Nic . . .”

“Fine. We can talk tomorrow. But you should mentally prepare yourself for the fact that I might need to go back up there this weekend. So hire a babysitter or something if you can’t handle two days on your own.”

He didn’t respond, just rolled away from me in bed and switched off the light.

Then I said the thing that I’d promised myself I wouldn’t say, because I knew it was petty and sure to aggravate him:

“Grace told me you didn’t brush their teeth.”

She had, in fact, told me that.

He didn’t respond, which just made me feel like a petulant child.

Instead of falling asleep, I lay flat with my arms crossed over my chest, contemplating if it’s possible for two people who have children together not to despise each other on a somewhat regular basis. As with any tragedy, nobody thinks it’ll happen to them—all wedding vows are laced with naivete and arrogance, all newlyweds convinced their love will be different. But then there are the embarrassingly common stressors of kids and jobs and money. Then you must swallow your pride and admit that what you thought could survive anything may not survive the predictable struggles of an ordinary life.

The next morning, Kyle didn’t say anything to me, and I didn’t say anything to him. I was waiting for him to apologize, and he was probably doing the same. Or maybe he wasn’t thinking about me at all. Maybe he was just focused on starting his workday. In any case, the girls made it impossible for me to get too emotionally invested in ourmarital standoff because they were particularly unruly, likely punishing me for my forty-eight hours of absence from their lives.

“Girls! Stop it!” I yelled in my Mom-means-business voice.

Grace had taken a stuffed unicorn from Liv, and Liv was losing her mind. They did not even register my voice. To them, Mom never means business. Mom is a joke.

“Girls!” I tried again. Still, nothing.

Kyle closed the door to his office, separating himself from the chaos, as usual.

I didn’t feel like fighting about breakfast, so I gave the girls bowls of Lucky Charms. The little burst of text on the box—“11 g. whole grains per serving!”—assuaged my maternal guilt. When I was pregnant with Grace, I envisioned myself as a mother who baked granola. I was committed to avoiding sugar, to serving muffins sweetened with bananas instead of cupcakes on birthdays. I was adamant about breastfeeding both girls, turned up my nose at formula. Now I let them eat the stale McDonald’s french fries they find in the crevices of their car seats.

I’ve decided I want to be done with maternal guilt, once and for all. Do fathers ever feel guilty about what they feed their children? How often do they even feed their children? I want to buy myself a gold bracelet engraved with “WWMD” for “What would men do?” I want to stare at it every time I am consumed with self-hatred about how I raise my children.

“I don’t want milk in mine,” Grace said, always adept at finding a problem with anything placed in front of her.

“Grace, you have to eat your cereal with milk.”

“I don’t want milk! I want it dry!”

“Then it’s basically just a sugary snack. The milk has protein and calcium.”

As if she gave a shit about protein and calcium.

People say you should talk to your kids as equals. They say it’s a sign of respect and encourages maturity. I haven’t seen evidence of this being a good strategy. It seems like it would be more effective to talkto them like the immature cave people that they are:You eat cereal with milk. You do now.