We are the women.
We have graduate degrees. We wear diamond studs. We are marketing executives, and COOs, and partners at Biglaw firms. Each day we are home before six to relieve the nanny, to say thank you so much, good night!,to receive the wooden spoon from her hand mid-stir and make figure eights in the lentil curry that has just begun to bubble and smells of someone else’s far off home.
Our husbands we met in college, at bars in our twenties when we moved to the city. Through friends-of-friends, or dating websites on which we posted skinny photos of ourselves with our exes cropped out. Back then, these sites necessitated essays, pithy answers to quirky questionnaires. What is the most devastating movie love scene? Who’s your celebrity doppelgänger? If you were a fruit, what would you be? Channeling the tastes of our ideal mates, we drafted flirty dispatches designed to ensnare. Obliquely self-flattering and deprecating in equal parts: A mangosteen, we said, if you know you know! Sweet, complex, and hard to get. It, you might say, worked.
We take six months’ leave when our children are born, because our good jobs afford it. We appreciate the time, we do. Our husbands get two weeks but take only one, they’ll take the other after the New Year, they say. We put miles and miles on our high-end strollers, sit down at crowded coffee shops just to leave quickly when our babies fuss. We exclusively breast feed, because why else do we have breasts? We feel useful. And we feel used.
Once we have the two kids, we leave our jobs. What with the nanny’s salary, and the housekeeper, not to mention swim lessons and travel soccer and gymnastics and camp—we have to agree, don’t we, it just makes sense. We don’t miss working as much as we thought we would. The days go quickly, now that the kids are in school. It’s mid-afternoon before we know it, then there are piano lessons and homework and extra screen time, just this once. Our husbands will be home late, and we wait for them for dinner. Once the kids are down and the Sancerre glows gold in the stemware we got for our wedding, annoyances crystalize into anecdotes with which we entertain our husbands over takeout at the kitchen island. And when they laugh, we can believe we’ve done something with our day.
Where life was once be scored by the thrumming soundtrack of Slack alerts, now the Fourth Grade WhatsApp chronicles our deliverables and tasks.
REMY’S MOM:
Reminder, permission slips for the Boston trip due in the portal by tomorrow!
Still some openings for chaperones!
AVA’S MOM:
Can chaperones bring wine, haha?
It’s a kind of comfort, the lack of respect we feel for the other moms. Their insipid missives, the unearned LOLs and HAHAs. We aren’t them, we insist to ourselves, and we wear real pants to drop-off even though afterwards we’re only going to work out.
Our country houses are a respite, a haven. A small-town life we like cosplaying at. It’s strange, at first, the spikes and chasms of wealth in the area. Sprawling compounds interspersed with decrepit shanties; a three million dollar cottage next to the rusted-out trailer with a pit bull on a chain. Farmhouses are refurbished, gunite pools shimmer where tractor sheds were razed. There are so, so many American flags.
The chickens were our husbands’ idea, but we let them have it. The hens remind us of the moms at school—single-minded determination frothed with an air of low-grade panic. When they swarm the feed we scatter at their clawed, yellow feet, we swear we can see in them the dinosaurs from which they evolved.
At first, our kids love collecting the eggs. On Saturday mornings, they slam open the screen door and sprint out to the coop. Tipping open the lids on the rollaway nest boxes, they squeal at the gifts proffered on pine shavings and straw. They’re warm! they cry, and they’re different colors! It’s true; we didn’t know chicken eggs could be anything but brown or white. These are faded teal, and speckled-freckled, and pale mint green. Be careful, we tell the children, who have already begun to grapple and grab: No, the pink one’s mine, I saw it first! The next morning, the siren song of YouTube dog-grooming videos is stronger than that of farm fresh eggs. We go out to gather them ourselves, cradling each in an upturned palm before delicately placing it in a basket lined with hay.
The caretaker’s wife will do this for us when we are back in the city. She lives a mile away, in that rambler with the abandoned toys in the front yard, all peeking out from the quackgrass like plastic, primary-colored mushrooms. It’s not a favor, exactly. But she doesn’t charge us since we let her keep the eggs.
In therapy, we talk mostly about our children. It’s why we started going—when we feared we’d lost the plot. As if we zoned out on the subway and missed our stop. It’s not self-flagellation, we tell our therapists, if things are, in fact, our fault. We yell so much. We’re tired. Our patience lies in tatters, shredded, we could use it to line the nesting boxes the caretaker’s wife is cleaning out as we speak.
What about your husband, our therapists ask us. How are you guys, right now? We’re not sure what we’re supposed to say to this. Do other women tell the truth? That we don’t know if we’re not having sex because we’re not wanted, or because we don’t want to? And we’re not sure which is worse? That we’re—not relieved, exactly, but more… streamlined—when they miss dinner, or cancel date night, or go on a Guys’ Trip to Miami with their friends? That we love them, that we’re not worried, that this is all par for the course, unless it’s not? We’re fine, we say. We’re good. And it’s just as well, because that’s all the time we have for today.
REMY’S MOM:
Reminder, health forms for the spring overnight must have a doctor’s
signature for Nurse Becky to dispense any medication on the trip!
AVA’S MOM:
Even just for Tylenol?
REMY’S MOM:
Yes
AVA’S MOM:
Benadryl?
REMY’S MOM:
Yes
AVA’S MOM:
What about Xanax for Mama? All these confusing forms, LOL!
If we feel old, it’s because we have never been older. When we wake in the morning, we start at the new lines on our face. Our sleep-doped instinct is to wash them off, as if our “anti-aging cleanser” will live up to its name. We almost laugh when consciousness crests. It costs a few thousand dollars, but we can have the lines muted. Buffed. Deepening grooves made slightly shallower with a few poison pinpricks, nothing crazy, just a touch. It hurts, but barely. And we only have to do it two-to-three times a year.
The babysitter is so punctual. She knocks on the apartment door at the prescribed time on the dot; we wonder if she waited in hallway until precisely six o’clock. Coming straight from soccer practice, or volleyball, or debate, she wears enormous sweatpants paired with a tiny t-shirt that could fit our youngest child. She is looking at universities abroad. She might take a gap year. She seems utterly unperturbed by the unknown, by the churning fear that she might be bested by somebody else. It is astonishing how secure she appears in her own worth.
Our soft sweaters graze our shoulders. We wear the cool shoes that pinch. It dawns on us that we have begun dressing for the babysitter.
The shift in our husbands comes towards us like a sheaf of clouds rolling in from the horizon. There’s a quiver in the air, a low-pressure front approaching, we can sense some cold about to come prickling in. Do they think we don’t notice the way they put their phones on the table, face-down? Their inordinate amount of time at the gym? But we are judicious with our concern, conserve it. Who has the bandwidth to batten down the hatches at every teasing ill-weather threat? Marriages are meant to weather storms. Besides, we think, we could do with a little rain.
Have you ever considered, our therapists ask us, that you’ve made things too easy? Been too good a facilitator, and you’re resentful of that? We look into Solution-Focused Therapy. Narrative Therapy. An Ayahuasca retreat. Then we have three consecutive nights of shitty sleep and our husbands have a last-minute work trip to Tuscon. We take the kids to the upstate house by ourselves, figure out how to work the grill. We let them sleep with us in the big bed. Eat whipped cream on our cantaloupe, “forget” to make them brush their teeth. Maybe we’ll feel better if we get off Instagram. If we focus on gut health. Maybe, all we need is a good night’s sleep.
REMY’S MOM:
Reminder, class t-shirts will be distributed after school tomorrow!
AVA’S MOM:
Oh good, just what we need, another t-shirt!
jk jk LOL!
Doctors’ appointments breed like fungus. Ours, and the kids’. Orthodontist, endocrinologist, OBGYN, GI. Therapists and dermatologists. Do we all really need to go to the dentist every six months? In the shower, we massage our breasts in soapy circles from the outside in. With the pads of our fingers, we press lightly, then firm. Friends have found lumps. Such a hateful word. Ugly and base, not to mention misleading. No, it’s not a lump—it’s a stone. A tiny Fabergé egg. A diamond. Water rains on our shoulders and backs and we increase the pressure until it metastasizes into pain, searching for the thing we’re afraid to find, impossible and inevitable, our womanhood petrifying into time bombs strapped to our chests, and, really, how do we live like this?
What our husbands don’t consider is that, if we wanted, we could put our phones face-down on the table, too. We could stop eating late-night pretzels on the couch, shed—or surgically redistribute—the weight we never lost after Baby Number Two. But how derivative. Really, the lack of imagination astounds. When we finally have time for it, our rebellion will be breathtaking.
Our therapists aren’t wrong. We have made things easy. We’ve greased wheels, paved ways, hacked through vicious underbrush to provide the wide and manicured paths of least resistance. Is it resentment to want our due? Each time the WhatsApp pings, our minds slingshot back to the teams we used to run, the clients we used to bill. When our brains were muscles, flexing. Now we send explanation point-laden texts on behalf of the Decoration Committee! or Community Crew! Talk about lumps.
Tickets to the school action are $150 apiece, we buy them and tell our husbands we’re going, get on board. The dresses we buy are a little tight, but not in a bad way. Cut low, heels high. Our husbands can’t give us shit for spending; we saw those Miami charges on the Amex bill. There’s a line at the bar but waitstaff circles with trays of champagne flutes, we take two and drink both ourselves. When our favorite song comes on, we pull each other onto the floor and dance.
I’m coming out of my cage and I’ve been doing just fine!
“You’re drunk,” our husbands tell us, and no shit we say. While we usually traffic in wine-at-dinner drunk, this intoxication is aerobic. Sweat beads at our brows and between our breasts. Spaghetti straps slip, thigh slits steepen.
Gotta, gotta be down, because I want it all!
We have a tequila-soda and a fourth, or fifth, glass of champagne, stab our auction paddles in the air to bid on a long weekend in Napa. The bartender high-fives us when we win. “Really?” our husbands ask, petulant. Don’t worry, you’re not invited we shoot back. When we realize we mean this, we laugh out loud.
Our children are Alternative Learners; Deeply Feeling; Neuro Diverse. They’re Spirited. Highly Sensitive. Strong-willed. They bar their bedroom doors with their bodies and scream I HATE YOU but we’re not allowed to say it back. Later, they want to snuggle, so we snuggle them, because we love them so goddamn much.
Could we do this alone? we sometimes wonder. But just as quickly, we crumple the thought. We roll it up, smash it, fold it into a tiny origami crane and drown it in the sink. Our wedding photos are framed in silver, hang in our hallways on gallery walls. The best ones are saved in our camera rolls, and we post them on our anniversaries each year. What we are trying to prove, and to whom, does not warrant examination. We’re fine, we say, again, again. We’re good.
REMY’S MOM:
Reminder, class party signups on the attached Google doc!
Reminder, bake sale next week!
Reminder, teacher gifts overdue, Venmo me or bring cash to drop-off, TIA!
AVA’S MOM:
Is it too late to chaperone for Boston? Was there a reminder? #mombrain!
We arrive upstate early on a Saturday morning. It’s been a while since we’ve been here—birthday parties, field hockey—the unwieldiness of weekends interferes. But this time we’ve made it work. Our husbands drift to their unfinished treehouses, the ones they started two years ago and said they’d have built by Spring. The kids trundle to the basement; our land sprawls out and out, but they delight in down. The lawn guys must have just been by—those tan, sloe-eyed, twenty-something boys on their ride-on mowers, with the honey-colored hair splaying out from beneath their trucker hats, from whom we always reciprocate an insouciant wave as we bolt inside from our pools to hide. Mowed carpets of grass preen in wide green cabana stripes, like a freshly vacuumed rug or a ski slope, just groomed. In bare feet, we cross their expanse, floral dresses kissing our ankles, the soles of our feet cool and damp with dew. It is a perfect morning, we think, for farm fresh eggs.
It must have been a fox. Or a coyote, maybe. The ones we sometimes hear cackling at night that sound like fiendish teenagers at a rave. The carnage is cartoonish in its level of gore: guts, blood, feathers stuck to the walls and ceiling and tumbleweeding across the floor in ragged, tufted bits. The death stench surges, and we retch. We haven’t cried in a very long time, and we still don’t, though the tinny, metallic fug makes our eyes tear up. Relaxing our grips on our empty baskets, we back slowly away, draw the door closed, turn towards the house. The caretaker’s wife will take care of this. She’ll never know we were in here. We have fruit and cereal for breakfast, and our kids don’t even ask for eggs.
We think very hard, reach back into our lizard brains to try to remember if this is what we planned for. What we wanted, even. We have always been bright and successful. Goal-oriented, high-achieving—early readers, “a pleasure to have in class!” Whatever is happening to us now, we are complicit. But as we unmake our beds in the evening, lower the electric shades on another day, we start as if suddenly woken. Our breath catches, and we cough. Our worlds have become so obvious, yet we feel anachronistic, as if we’re time travelers plunked down in a far off future or distant past. We are continuity errors. Disruptors of the space-time continuum, doing devastation with every breath. Not always, but increasingly often, we look around us. And we think to ourselves, this life, this life. This unrecognizable life.