Things have come to that.
–Baraka, “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note”
I thought it would be different. When we go on vacations I take days to myself, leaving the children with my husband.
It used to only be the two of us when I felt most alone. He’s different now.
We have some time before bed when the kids are asleep. When he’s done talking there isn’t more to say, so I turn over and sleep. He wakes up first, and I can feel him in the doorway of the bathroom, brushing his teeth and watching me at peace in the dark.
All we talk about during the day, in front of our children, is how to end it. The tasks that will bring these hours to a close. The kids notice what we forget and enjoy pointing everything out. The house is dirtiest on Friday nights. My parents managed to clean on Fridays after work, and I try sometimes, but odds are I’ll have to sleep and then power through a Saturday morning, recovering floor space. While he’s taken them somewhere else, out of my way, at my request.
Each of them reminds us of a friend we don’t see anymore. The girl is talkative and often interrupts her own friends; the boy, when walking between us, doesn’t know which one to emulate. There are pros and cons to each. I like to watch him – he’s not yet old enough to stop due to surveillance – take up and put down food, books, toys, my empty shoes.
Sometimes in my bedroom after jerking off I close my eyes and think of all the museums, tourist villages, national parks I’ve walked without them, wondering why I had to go.
I think my husband and I have loved each other three times after our marriage. I’m being precise.
A panel of experts decided we were good to raise children. When my parents come over they are literally amazed.
We go on a lot of trips, our family. I remember going on trips as a child. From the backseat of our car I decided that I had nothing to do with my parents. I saw the empty blue spaces between the altitudes of mountains and wished I were there. My sibling and I were taught to bike, swim, and drive in no order of importance. Now, they live alone, and I have this house.
When my children return from weekends with my parents they seem a little confused. When I’m holding – my husband, or my son at night – I’m very convinced that I’m not my father’s imposter, in a way I guess my father can’t imagine.
Love came easiest – the three times we felt it – to my spouse and I when we were most able to forget all that we’d chosen to do. That gets harder. But I’ve woken up on his chest and recalled what his skin always smells of, the residue of ocean carried on a cold dark wind. I sweat more – I think, if anything, I taste overcrowded. But when we take family photos I clutch his shoulder and he feels like dead weight.
I used to only live in what I dreamed would happen – marriage, for one thing. But in reality, my son sits down at a kitchen table and asks if I would be angry at him if he were straight. He doesn’t mean this question. It’s not something he’s concerned about, but he still wants to say it. And if I don’t take him seriously he won’t believe me.
And then he adds – not like a child at all – that he saw some gay kid get beat up at school and thought that might, once, have been me.
My dad would have never gone off on his own, to walk, or to look at anything – he’d keep to himself but stay in the house, and answer every question you asked. Even when I thought I didn’t have him he was still there, the sight of him asked why on earth did I think that. Growing up he held me a lot – when I needed it, when we were in the sea.
If I had gay fathers, or even if I knew my dad slept with men sometimes, his touch would have been different, I would remember it differently. And maybe my hand on my husband wouldn’t be as sure.
He lets me off, he lets me be alone when I need to, but I seldom speak what’s on my mind because for him – who is left there when I choose – any discontent would be insulting. He never calls me vain. After all, we have parts of each other. I wonder what we do to our children.
My daughter asks why more men can’t be like me and her other father. How young she is, you can get away with answering the truth, that you don’t know.
I heard men talking about women all the time and cringed. They could have been talking about me, but weren’t, for now.
Another parent might teach their daughter to watch out, and thereby numb herself to these things, accepting they will always be. I can’t tell you what I’m trying to do, but I know it’s not that. They seem like nice kids, the two of them, but the world is sicker than that – having us as parents might well be the only act of compassion they accomplish in their lives. I don’t know why I can say that. People might stop talking about faggots in front of my son like they know he has an illness in the family.
The four of us are happy but we aren’t changing anything. Personally, I see that we’re hiding. Or that we should be – which amounts to the same thing. Everybody says we have a right to do this, and even to love each other, but if that right were ours nobody would have to say it. We could, then, choose from many privileges, one of which would be silence: what everybody else does.
In not that many decades, my son, my daughter, will wonder who their parents were and what they couldn’t do.
Before the offices and the paperwork, we decided to have kids in bed, one night when the moon simply entered the window to say it wasn’t new.