Page 6 of Woman on the Verge

“Mommy is mean,” Grace said.

“Mommy is not mean,” Kyle said, and I wondered if that was the best he could do. He went back to looking at his computer.

“Mommy is so mean that she is now going to make you girls lunch,” I said.

I went to the kitchen, the pitter-patter of four little feet behind me.

“What are you making me?” Grace asked. LikeChop-chop, servant.

“Grilled cheese?” I asked.

She scrunched her nose.

“Gracie want yogurt,” she said with a baby voice. “Livy, you want yogurt too?”

Liv nodded.

Grace has been doing this a lot—talking (and crying) like a baby. The only thing worse than a three-year-old is a three-year-old pretending to be an infant.

“You had yogurt for breakfast,” I told them.

There was that pesky logic again.

“Gracie and Livy want yogurt,” she said again, her request followed by a dramatic “Waaaa.”

Predictably, Livy added her own “Waaaa.”

“Fine, whatever,” I said.

They climbed into their seats at the table, and I gave them each a yogurt cup. I propped up the iPad between them so they could watch strange videos of Asian parents playing pranks on their children, or car tires rolling over containers of Play-Doh.

I considered calling my boss, or former boss, to beg for work. I’d had a Zoom call with her a couple of weeks earlier to “check in.” (That was the subject line of the meeting invite. I’d thought she might have a project for me, but no.) The call happened to be an hour after Liv had scratched my nose with one of her hadn’t-been-trimmed-in-weeks nails. My boss leaned into the screen and said, “Are you ...bleeding?” I was, in fact, bleeding.

There are more injuries involved in parenting than I anticipated, most sustained while the girls are walking the fine line between abuse and play. Last week, Grace said, “Mom,BeADrum!” and then proceeded to pound on me. Yesterday, I was bent over Liv, feigning fascination with an ant, and she looked up abruptly and hit me in the face with her extremely dense skull. I saw stars.

I called to Kyle: “Babe, can you watch the girls for a half hour this afternoon?”

Babe.A relic. A remnant of years past. My continued use of it is representative of our collective denial about our present.

“Mommy, mommy, mommy,” Grace said.

The girls are ruthless and blatant in their attempts to prevent me from having, or sharing, a complete thought. Most of the time, my brain feels like it’s in a car with a teenager learning to drive stick shift. Start, stop, start, stop.

“What?” Kyle asked.

“Mommmmmmmy!” Grace said, louder.

“Mommmmmmmy!” Liv said.

I shouted: “Can you watch the girls for a half hour this afternoon so I can call Michelle Kwan?”

He said, “Ummm,” which meant no. “I have a few calls later, but let me see what I can—”

“Never mind,” I snapped.

I could have turned this into a fight—it is one of my superpowers—but that would have ended with Kyle saying I needed to work on my anger issues.

“Mommy, I don’t like this flavor,” Grace said.