Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

“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. What I was doing. And you can’t account for it in any mathematical way.”

Alma resists being woken but is also chronically prone to sleeping through her alarm—a clip from “Blitzkrieg Bop” that blares, startlingly, on a violent loop, almost fatally scaring Mark and Julia no matter how far they happen to be from their daughter’s room and yet somehow failing to wake Alma—so she runs late almost every day, which means Julia, who drives her to school when she runs late, also runs late almost every day.

im the daughter and mother all in one

Julia would be late to work for the rest of her life for just a few quiet moments like this in the car with her daughter, who isn’t elementally an asshole, not on an atomic level,

just—with her chewed-down nails and her ridiculous shorts—seventeen.

It was so much easier to be this way—had always been easier to be this way—than it was to look at anything directly.

Bedtime with Alma used to be an unbelievably tedious production, hours of reading and singing followed by a breathtakingly slow creep backward through her bedroom door, an interminable back-and-forth of I love you. Alma never wanted to be the last one to say it, always wanted to be the last one to say it;

I’ve done everything I possibly could to be there for you; every single thing I’ve done I’ve done for you and Ben and us, our family, that’s how I show you I love you, and I do it constantly, and you still fucking did this to me. So it doesn’t matter that I love you, and it doesn’t matter whether you love me if the way you love me allows you to sleep with someone else, all right?

I’m asking you to trust me, even though I know that’s going to be hard.” “It’s not, though,” he said softly, and with such sadness. “That’s the other thing that I— I do trust you, second nature.

her mother did not have patience for the happinesses of others, even if the others were her daughter. She wondered what it would be like to have a mom who forced herself to snap out of it for the sake of her kid, but instead she had this mom, who wasn’t interested in snapping out of it, who cast her a flat sidelong look across the couch.

The sight of Ben by himself stops her in the doorway. She’s seen him in a suit before—a smattering of Nordstrom dressing rooms, graduations and job interviews—but something about it now strikes her, a blow to the gallbladder.

He smiles at her, and suddenly there’s a song in her head, the theme from The Muppet Show, his warm tiny body in her lap, It’s time to light the lights.

She goes over to him; in lieu of throwing her arms around him and attempting to absorb him back into her body,

the love of a mom for her son!!! And how fast it goes by!!! Rowan can't ever get married

Her partner in crime, Ben. The one who’d accompanied her complicitously through the darkest and most shameful moments of her adult life: cradled in her arms as she wandered woozily around the apartment at night, entertaining thoughts of disappearing while she slowly hummed him pop songs; strapped into the backseat while she wept in the parking lot of the Whole Foods; taking over when she got too tired to finish reading to him from Harry Potter, too young to read but making up the story as he saw fit—then he found a werewolf in the woods, and it was really funny and then really scary but mostly funny ha ha ha and then everyone went to bed, the end, Mama. Mama? “Mom,” he says now, and she wonders if he ever remembers the late-night times of his toddlerhood when she would creep in and lift him from his bed and rock him back to sleep in the glider, Mama’s nuts about you, chipmunk. Mama wouldn’t understand the world without you in it.

cant breathe

when Ben walks into the kitchen and she thinks—just for a minute—that he’s his father; she will remember them in the moments that follow that second of misrecognition, moments of such cavernous aloneness—such unbelievable pain—that she almost starts laughing.

I am crushed💔💔