Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.