But I was in mourning just the same.
The minutes rushed and slid precariously toward that dreaded day in August. But the truth was, he’d been leaving me for years. They don’t tell you that. They don’t tell you that this person—this person you grew inside your body, this person you pushed into the world with superhuman strength and joy, this infant you nursed, the toddler who proclaimed you his best friend, who drew you pictures and picked you dandelions, who leaned against you and fell asleep on you and threw up on you and needed you to bathe him and hold him on the potty and brush his teeth . . . that this person would go away, and in his place would be a young man who didn’t tell you about his life, who did his own laundry, who didn’t ask you to read his papers anymore. Who just didn’t need you anymore.
All because you did a good job. All because your entire life for the past eighteen years was to make him an adult who was independent and kind and self-sufficient, and goddamn it, you did it, and what were you left with?
His absence.
Of course I was proud of my son. Of course I wanted him to be a man, not a snowflake who needed his mommy to get through the day. The clashing mix of pride and sorrow, when you want so much to be able to go back in time for so many reasons, to when you were sure of your life because this child was your life. If there was one thing I had never doubted in my life, it was that I was a good mother, all the way through.
But God, I missed my boy.
That’s what they don’t tell you. That you would leap out of your chair or pull your car over if your phone chimed, in case it was a text from him. That you would lie on his bed when he was out and smell his pillow that last summer before he left. That the sound of his voice actually brought tears to your eyes and an ache to your heart, and his casual “love you, too” was water in the desert.
It’s the wretched contradiction of parenting. Once, you were their favorite human on the planet, and they were yours. For the rest of your life, your child will remain your heart . . . but it’s not mutual. It’s not supposed to be. Your importance is dwarfed by their friends. Romantic interests. Cool professors and great coaches. A spouse, someday, and kids of their own, and you . . . you got left behind at a certain exit on the highway of their life, and all you can do is look down the road after them and remember when you were so needed, so loved, so sure of your place in the world, because you were Mommy, and that was everything.
And for me, the person who was supposed to understand and share all of that, to comfort and reassure me . . . he was screwing a thirty-year-old who loved yoga and drove a car that cost more than I made in a year.
Living with a man who’s cheating on you takes a toll. Trying to be pleasant for the sake of your child, and lying to that child—ditto. Feeling your heart crumble in your chest because your husband took away your future and forced you to live as a bleeding, silent witness to the last summer your family would be intact . . . it was nothing short of agony.
Which I endured for Dylan.
At work, it was fine—I was Lillie the Midwife, the nurse with the gentle hands, warming the ultrasound gel before squeezing it onto the lovely round tummies, handing tissues out for happy weepers, reassuring and full of wisdom for women of all ages.
But the second I left the office or hospital, my mind was buzzing with thought spirals. Even the past wasn’t what I had thought, was it? I would now have to rethink, reframe, remember our past in an entirely different way. Brad wasn’t just ruining the present and destroying my future—he was taking a sledgehammer to the twenty years we were together. After all, he’d proven himself more than capable of lying and hiding things. Was Melissa his first affair? All those times in the past nineteen years when we’d seemed happy and content . . . was he seeing someone else? That surprisingly horrible fight we had over how to load the dishwasher . . . was that a sign that he’d stopped loving me? How long had he been planning to leave me?
Every nice thing I’d done for him, I now resented. I had always been amused by his hypochondria but loved taking care of him—obviously, it’s my career—covering him with soft blankets when he had a man-cold （or walking pneumonia, as he self-diagnosed）。 The breakfasts I’d made him every single weekday until this past spring, when he started with the green smoothies made of what was essentially compost and oat milk. Another sign he’d been cheating. Smoothies. Who wants to drink cucumber and kale for breakfast?
Like every married person, I’d put up with his unfixables . . . he could not for the life of him manage to see the smears of feces he left in the toilet, and nearly every day, I’d go into our bathroom, sigh, and spray Clorox Clean-Up into the bowl and scrub. Before, it was just an irritant. Now, it seemed condescending and mean-spirited—he’d literally expected me to clean up his shit. His habit of leaving a dirty bowl on the counter above the dishwasher, just six inches from actually putting it away. The way he wouldn’t scrape my car off in the winter, though I would always scrape off his. How he interrupted me constantly, then apologized for interrupting but continued speaking anyway, me always tolerating his unspoken belief that he thought he was smarter than I was.