Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

she is mean and gorgeous and breathtakingly good at math; she has inside jokes with her friends about inexplicable things like Gary Shandling and avocado toast, paints microscopic cherries on her fingernails and endeavors highly involved baking ventures, filling their fridge with oblong bagels and six-layer cakes.

The power dynamic in their household is not unlike that of a years-long hostage crisis.

She feels, too, unbelievably tired, stymied by gravity; so much of motherhood has, for her, been this particular feeling, abject disbelief that she’s not only expected but obligated to do one more thing.

Parenthood was a persistent cruelty, a constant, simultaneous desire to be together and apart.

she takes a tentative seat a safe distance away on the chaise, because daughters—daughters you nursed, daughters you bathed, daughters whose sleeping teenage hair you now kiss at twilight when you creep into their bedroom just to share the same oxygen at a time when they aren’t conscious—are physiologically averse, at seventeen, to touching their mothers.

I’ve always been worried that I could be screwing him up without even knowing it because it’s never been clear to me exactly what I’m supposed to be doing, like everyone else has this skill set but I got passed over, so everything takes—more work. Like, sometimes just to feel things I have to work at it, things that I think normal people feel innately.”

To acknowledge any of this would be to ruin everything, so Julia sits, sometimes, in complete stillness, trilling, like a rock absorbing sunlight: the marvelous fact that, for an hour, her daughter is her friend.

She didn’t particularly love the current swatch of time in her own life, but for Ben it was extraordinary, so many synapses firing beneath the surface, cells growing and shape-shifting. A perfect person, progressing. That was motherhood: she would stay here forever, mired in her own unhappiness, if it meant his sweet sleeping head didn’t move from where it rested on her stomach.

“You’re constantly worrying about things that aren’t your business, but they’re never the things you actually want your mom to worry about; it’s always—like, things we’re perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves. You assert yourself then, when we don’t need you; and then when we actually need you you’re too busy worrying about the stupid other stuff to be there for us.”

She finds herself unconsciously rationing her own syllables in Alma’s presence, aware that each time she adds one she increases the margin of error that she’s going to say something inadvertently offensive to her daughter’s hair-trigger sensibilities.

This was quite literally the tack she’d taken—anything but Anita—in regards to her own mothering, but surely she’s done better, surely she can’t be a catalyst, given how hard she’s tried, for an anything-but-Julia approach to child rearing.

she knows that short of reabsorbing her daughter into her own body there is no way at all to protect her,

You could get used to not having someone in your life but you could never completely stop wanting them there.

She had a tendency, she knew, to turn people into her enemies before they’d actually had a chance to wrong her, just for the sake of cleanliness.

he of all people is supposed to know: that she isn’t a bad person, just occasionally bad at being a person.

Julia had not taken much with her from her early life, but she had learned, by example, that it was easier to get mad at someone than to tell them you were scared.

I mean, she and I never quite understood each other, I guess, or maybe it was that we understood each other too well, I’m not sure, but at some point we— I guess we both just ran out of whatever it took for the two of us to—coexist.”

It doesn’t mean I don’t love you is what she’d say to Alma, to Ben; she has spent years making sure they know what they mean to her, telling them without telling them that she may not understand her feelings about most things, but that she knows, like nothing else, how she feels about them.

She forgets to worry about the big things sometimes, the massive potential for peril that exists beyond the tepid roster of nonproblems with which she usually concerns herself. It’s easy to grow complacent, to allow yourself to dwell in the dull dramas of the everyday and lose sight of your own unimperviousness.

Closeness and distance at the same time, antipathy and affinity, love and exhaustion. The way time moves, glacial and breakneck, the way two people fit together in a bed, in the hours after their son is born and the hours before his wedding. Unbelievable things, really, and so many of them; she’d like to stay here with him, making a list, but there isn’t time; they have to go.