14. It Is What It Is

October 2021

Despite my abhorrence toward evasion, I find avoiding unplanned encounters with Henry easier than tackling another conversation. I’ve made it clear to Henry that I don’t want to see him. It’s the ‘why’ that is troubling. I continue to pocket this thought, pulling it out again to brood over it. He continues to reach out, circling around without telling me the truth. Teasing the both of us; apologizing for crossing a line. I ignore him until he tosses out a crumb that feels real. I pick it up, consider it for a moment, then leave it for him to swallow. Of course I know what he’s up to; it frustrates me that decades later I still can’t put him away for good.

The worst thing about knowing someone is what happens when that stops. You very quietly leave the other behind, no longer granted access to each other’s lives. Or worse, if you still exist on the periphery, you catch glimpses, looking from the outside in, standing at their window with the doors quietly and firmly latched shut. At first, it’s amusing. Oh, there they are, at a party.

One of you will test and flex by liking a photo, learning by accident when the other is in or out of a relationship. An old friend tells you when the other is changing jobs, engaged, married, or pregnant. We’ve hurt each other for over two decades without looking each other in the eyes.

Henry always exited first while I searched for private moments to rage and grieve for letting him do so, refusing to show him how he hurt me once and again for years. There was the first time, and then the abacus continued, marking each exit with a bright-colored bead. I let him in each time, knowing how it would end, hoping but never surprised when he left. Stupid Girl. Grows up to be a stupid woman.

He tested the lock. I opened the door. I wanted it to be the opposite. Just once. It was small of me and there. But then, I did block him when I married Adam. I was a stalwart in love and loyal and uninterested in Henry’s parlor tricks.

When I met Adam, he was beautiful. We found each other and thrilled each other, falling in love quickly, his heart just slightly ahead of mine. I admit that is what I needed — for him to get there first and say it first, having banged up my heart for a decade over Henry and a few others, tripping my way through my twenties. With Adam, I had no doubts. Needed no reassurances. Was absolute in knowing that he kept my heart safe and would never discard it. We played with each other well, teasing and exciting ourselves. If Henry reached out, I would smile, almost in fond remembrance, but I was not tempted.

Adam courted me for three years, and we grew and learned together. Hot and heavy. We were incredible. We were fire. How I loved our sex life. We listened to each other’s bodies. We played. Our hearts knew each other. We told secrets and made plans. It was lovely. We were beautiful together.

Sometimes, we argued, unraveling problems and cleaning up any messes left behind. Most of the time, I was the one to broach the topic. Anything potentially uncomfortable — Adam avoided initiating the conversation, waiting until I brought it up, hoping it would go away on its own. This was a byproduct of his childhood. We worked on it in spurts. Picking it up, this problem of fear and avoidance, then setting it aside. In his career, he would tackle problems without hesitation, enjoying the challenge. With his family, his friends, and with me though? He didn’t run away as Henry did. Still, the anxiety was there. I should have named it, recognized it for what it was. But I didn’t know then. Couldn’t figure out the diagnosis, as though my finger hesitated to pull it out of Adam. Lack of knowledge or my own avoidance. I don’t know which it was.

He proposed to me in a field of wildflowers when we were alone.

We faced challenges together. A job loss or frustrations with our careers. We supported and tackled. When I bled further along in my first pregnancy, I leaned into my fear and let myself feel so that I could move forward while Adam held me up and soldiered on.

“Penny for your thoughts?” I would ask him, handing him a coin with a wry grin after I cried that day. He laughed and stuck it in his wallet. “For later,” he told me. It turned into a pile of unspoken thoughts. Then, a mountain of copper.

I should have noticed it then. I saw it, but not what it was. Thought it was healthy? No, but I didn’t pursue it further. Pushed through to the end instead. Get to the baby, I told myself. Jane was our reward. Soft and lovely. We breathed her scent into our hearts and dove into parenthood.

By the time we got to the beginning of Covid, Adam was buried by the weight of every feeling and thought. He was afraid to voice them, became so hindered by his fears, hiding them from me and worrying in the dark about how I would react to each one. I would have loved to hear all of them. Would have strung them together to weave a song with his words for us to sing together. I wouldn’t have cared how dark the melody got. It was maddening to watch this slow change happen when I was unable to get him to tell me the truth. I pushed and dug. An inch of dirt at a time but not making significant progress, getting frustrated along the way. He backslid so often. Speaking then retreating. I opened my bag of tricks and tried every one to help him. Nothing stuck for long, they were only temporarily helpful. The intimacy changed. The exhaustion of newly minted parenthood, which was at first the reason, had slowly become our excuse. Then there would be a glimmer and I would cling to it, relieved when I saw it.

“There he is,” I would say, and we would fall back into bed. It was good. I recognized him again. I felt pleasure. We course-corrected our relationship. Adam seemed happier, stronger, and more open to discussing things. We tackled our days, high-fiving and laughing. We shoved the horrors of the pandemic away from Jane as best we could through all of this, showing her only that we were our usual selves with each other, even as we were falling apart.

Then Beth was in me. And her heart. It broke us, sending us to opposite corners. I showed him all of my ugly thoughts. I said here, look at these. Please see this for what it is, I begged. Speak them with me.

Adam told me everything would be okay. Once was fine, helpful even. It was his only line, though, so frequently used that I began to worry that I might not have believed or heard him if he had told me that he was scared.

It angered me; each time he spoke words of reassurance, I was alone in carrying on with both hope and fear. I saw the problems from all angles and spoke of all of them. I left no thought unturned in my mind, so that I could look beyond. He refused to do so, channeling his faith into science and God. Believing that this was strength, but it was only an half-truth. Instead, he left me alone to say all the words, which became a betrayal because I knew he felt the same way and withheld. I knew that this repression was something he’d been taught. I had overlooked it sometimes, in the past. Only this time, I needed more from my person.

I wouldn’t cry in front of Jane. She was so young and we hadn’t told her about Beth’s heart yet. We were waiting until we knew when Beth would have her surgery. Adam was playing only the role of strong, silent, supportive husband. I had no one to cry with, only someone I could cry to, which caused me to bury and retreat, until I didn’t share my tears with Adam. I gave myself time to weep in the car after yet another doctor’s appointment, masked and alone, while Adam watched Jane. Those days were harder. The repression choked me. I wanted to know if he was aware. Began to question his sense of reality. Adam wasn’t made of stone though he acted like he was. Bitterness and anger crept into my heart, slowly, each time I tried to pull an emotion out of Adam, because I knew it was in there. When bitterness creeps into your marriage, it roots itself, snaking quickly around you, lengthening and festering. I began to lose interest in intimacy, retreating and shelving my words, then my body, then my heart. Tucked them away quietly.

Having had such a healthy appetite for sex and enjoying this part of ourselves for so long, it was hard to watch this happen. Like witnessing it on a screen, from a distance, the filmstrip frayed on both ends. Some slow decline of love as portrayed by an obscure director. In black and white, of course. The Death of Sex & Love. Or: Why Are These Two Kids Fucking Shit Up? Don’t They See Where This Is Going? Clearly American and longwinded with its attempt to amuse its audience, or if French, it would just be called Merde.

Why give him sex or a lens into my heart or mind when he was withholding, delaying, and hiding. Why try. These shifted slowly from questions to statements. I lost interest in trying as I was alone in that effort. Then I stopped. We became co-parents and roommates under the same roof, with rings still on our fingers. Pretending to be in a happy marriage while we held our breaths and waited for Beth’s doctors to guide us through each month to her eventual surgery. And then what? Days were fragmented by moments that were deemed easier or harder.

This happened over the first year and a half of the pandemic, though there were early warning signs beforehand. Then, one day, I looked at Adam. He had faded. All of the things that I had wanted for us had started changing. How I wish we had stopped the bleeding sooner. I channeled my focus on the kids, work, and healing my body. We broke our days up into parts. Kids, work, chores, exercise. Press the repeat button. Protect the children. Ensure their happiness. Keep the germs out of our house. I determined to get us through the shit of Covid and what we would have to face with Beth’s heart. The pandemic elongated each day and everything felt amplified, including the devolution of our relationship. So that each stop and start in Adam’s ability to let me in, felt sharper, slicing through us until our skin turned thin and small moments felt large.

I retreated from Adam as he retreated from me, but I was starving for attention and knew he must be too. We would try. But eventually, we stopped. I began to count the number of times in a day that we showed each other our hearts, until days would go by without intimacy of any kind. Then weeks. A month. We would walk to the bed and start. He would make the wrong face or an odd sound, or would move in some way that was foreign to me and I would lose my arousal. We would fumble through it or I would lie there and cry because nothing he was doing would work. He would see it on my face, my eyes distant and brokenhearted. We would give up and go back to the minutiae of our day, folding towels in silence, or offering up words of assurance. But so disappointed.

Just tired. Next time. Two heads nodding. Two smiles that would haunt me.

What was so sweet and good was changing. Resentment crept into our marriage. I lost patience with Adam. It started to show. I spoke harsh words. He did the same. Soon we were taking turns in a game of Who’s Being The Asshole, coming back to each other to apologize, crushed by how we were changing our relationship. He buried his head in the sand. The romance was slipping away from us, and each time he repressed, I began to not care. Or cared, but the hurt began to mute me. He was ignorant of some of it. I was angry at his ignorance. How could he not see it? Or if he did, how could he not do something to save us. That was the greater betrayal.

Then Adam forgot it was my birthday, something new, and the feeling was unfamiliar and left us both uncomfortable, when I spoke up. Our anniversary came in the same month, and he fumbled it. He kissed me briefly on the lips, and I was dry; my insides felt like dust. There was no lust for him. He leaned into a hug and rubbed my hips briefly, before I moved away, angry at this lackluster attempt. We watched a movie instead of doing anything. He fell asleep on the couch. I didn’t try to wake him up. Slowly, I gave up on him and felt betrayed. Maybe he wasn’t attracted to me as much as he used to be? The ugly thought a worm in my brain, tunneling itself further into me and setting up camp. I was less interested in him, if he was going to be this sluggish, or unaware of how I was seeing him; seeing us. I watched him recede quietly. We did nothing to stop it from happening and some muted version of our marriage evolved. We poured ourselves in Beth and Jane and work and that was it. So, fine, the worm said, let it be just comfortable. Just routine.

I started to look for the line between day and night and wished I could see it from space. And that is how Henry snuck in through the cracks.