Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

wasn’t exactly sure how any of it worked, but she was fairly certain that you were not allowed to dislike your husband because he was a good dad.

then suddenly there was a baby, and she found that she missed the mysterious companionship of his embryonic iteration, missed knowing he was contained inside her,

“You know you’re allowed to be having a hard time, right?” Helen asked softly. “I don’t care if you have one kid or ten. It’s very, very hard, what you’re doing.

Rich people were also, she’d noticed, constantly talking about ways in which they were entitled to bettering themselves.

how truly, consistently bad the universe is at time management; instead of meting out crises at manageable intervals it seems to deposit them in erratically spaced piles, like the salt trucks in the winter, each pile containing a rainbow of miscellaneous emergencies.

Surmountable things, problems that with the slightest exertion of energy could be solved, but problems too that aggregately amounted to a low-level current of mild despair.

She wondered if her mother had felt her heart break for all the things she couldn’t control and for all the things she could, for all the ways her child would come to know the world while not wrapped in her arms,