Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

frequently awakened preemptively dreading whatever was to come and retroactively dreading what had already elapsed,

but because Mark was wearing a tie and had a master’s degree, and because Julia’s woes were frequently foregrounded in dealings with Duplo architecture and coerced carrot consumption, Mark was more vocally allowed to rue his responsibilities; that was just the way the world worked.

she felt bad, bad for looking forward

to being away from their child and bad for not being better at structuring her time, for not filling her free hours with cultural stimuli and age-appropriate acquaintances.

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

The loneliness of motherhood; the deadly ennui of the day-in-day-out.

Marriage was trying; marriage was burying the hatchet. But they had not buried any of their hatchets; instead she’d covered the hatchets with an assortment of decorative hand towels and they were both pretending that the hatchets didn’t exist.

sadness got more confusing as you got older, accreted and layered and camouflaged itself until the source was buried beyond discovery.

Something that has always astounded her, particularly since her children were born, is 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.

I’m obsolete, she does not say. My kids don’t need me anymore; my life feels, once again, like it might be unraveling; I think I might actually, at fifty-seven years old, need a mom, Mom. “I’m fine.”

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.

“I’m telling you this to say that it wasn’t the end of the world for me.

Not what I was envisioning, not what I’d planned on, but it worked out. Things usually do work out, Ollie. They’re almost never as huge as we think they’re going to be.”

Time moved differently when you had a newborn, weeks of minutes, hours and hours and hours of yesterdays and tomorrows.

Everything’s changing; am I not allowed to have feelings about that?”

She’d once feared being close to him but now they don’t know how not to be together, even when they want to be apart; this is perhaps different, she sees now, than what she’s always mistaken for intimacy; they have spent so much time, now, in the impenetrable haze of intuition and misunderstanding and willful blindness that is a long marriage, that she can’t remember what it’s like to be anywhere else.

“Nobody,” her mother said, “is entitled to anything.”

She pondered the word entitled. Her mother brought the glass to her lips and held it there, not drinking, her eyes squinted. “We don’t deserve anything. You understand? It doesn’t matter what we do or how good we think we’re being or if we feel like we’ve earned some kind of—of—medal. Nothing’s certain. Nobody’s a guarantee.”

You’re my mother, ninety percent is being there regardless of whether your kids want you around.

Perhaps it is possible—could her mother be right?—for things to happen and be gotten over.

When you find a partner later in life— I don’t know, I guess you just accept the fact that there are going to be parts of the past you don’t get access to.”

He cares for her in the generous, compliant way you’re supposed to care for the people a person you love cares for, the way she has come to tolerate Brady Grimes, the way she’s grown fond of Sunny.

Don’t you sometimes just feel something for another person? Like you were meant to have found them?

I invited you because it seemed like we could both use a friend. Isn’t that part of what defines every relationship? That mixture of how much you need someone and how much they need you back? It’s never an equal amount. And it fluctuates—ideally it does—because both of those things are exhausting in their own right.

Some people are simply having a harder time than others; why is it so wrong to acknowledge that? To acknowledge that you have something to offer that they might be lacking? Isn’t that better than just leaving them to run circles around the inside of their own heads?”

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.