Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

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

“but the strangest thing I remember about having young children is how interminably the time moves, just these days upon days upon days, and every single one of them feels a million years long, but then suddenly months have gone by, enough time for a new baby to be born or one of the kids to start kindergarten, or college for God’s sake, and it— The amount of time I’ve lost contemplating that passage of time is—well, really kind of astounding.”

But there is no happy medium in a marriage when one party wants to be alone and the other doesn’t. There is no way to have it both ways; someone always loses, and tonight, apparently, the loser is she.

“You can’t bank all of your happiness on a single person. That’s a recipe for insanity on all fronts.”

there’s something about her family’s anticipating her bad behavior that makes her want to behave badly.

This was, she supposed, what happened when two relatively undramatic people married each other and things went south: the marriage didn’t fall into aesthetic disrepair; all of the detritus and carnage simply settled beneath the surface while both parties adjusted their weight around it, kissed each other good morning and delivered civil accounts of logistical banalities.

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.

She is moved to call her mother, perhaps, by the kind of retroactive sympathy you can only feel when you become a parent yourself, when you realize how terrible it is possible for your own children to make you feel whether they mean to or not.

She’d been about to point out to Melinda that she did not specifically have the qualifications required for this particular kind of work, but she felt the spectral weight of Helen’s gaze urging her to be confident, to fake it if she had to. She would come to realize that this was how many people had gotten what they had in life: by lying a little bit, and pretending to be better than they were.

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.

Almost nothing ends up being as big of a deal as you think it’s going to be. Very few things.”

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

She brushes past him on her way out of the kitchen; she has lost track of who, exactly, is allowed to be the angriest overall, but she is content in the moment, given everything, for it to be her.