Wild Dark Shore

by Charlotte McConaghy

“Most of what I do with my days is repair things that are gonna break again soon. I just fix them and then when they break I fix them again. It’s like pushing shit up a hill.” “So why do you do it?” “Because someone has to, or everything just stays broken.”

If this is how he has perceived one conversation we had years ago, then I don’t know how to make sense of a single communication we’ve ever had. It was a time during which I questioned myself and came to realize that the problem was not that I didn’t want kids, or maybe more specifically didn’t want to nurture, to love, to care for, and raise something. The problem, the true heartbreak, was wanting those things and also feeling like I couldn’t in good conscience have them. I thought he understood me. I thought he accepted the vulnerability I battled to show him, I thought we were closer for it, but instead of comprehending the complexity of how I felt—and the difficulty of contradictory feelings—he judged me, misunderstood me, and is now using it against me.

Having kids has come up before, of course it has, but in this moment I can see what it will do to us. I can see that for him they already exist and that by saying no I am killing them. One day soon he will hate me for them, for the children.

And I started to think about how so much of a keeper’s job is to wait and watch, holding men’s lives in their hands. And I’d dream, in those days, that my wife, that Claire was out on a ship at sea, and I was up here watching for her, and if I could just keep the light on I’d show her the way home.”

Is this how you feel after being swept in on a current? Will you change shape and put down roots? Or carry on in search of somewhere better?

I realized how she’d known. She’d fucking learned. She’d had to, because somebody had to keep the babies alive, and so she bloody well got on with it. And now I was going to have to do the same, except without any backup, and the burden of this division of labor became astoundingly, mortifyingly clear to me. Oh, how I had coasted upon the back of this woman, deep in the trenches with her and also very happy to let her learn all the things and know all the things. How many times did I ask her which sleeping bag I should put the kids in? Or where the swaddles were? How many times did I pass over a crying baby, disappointed but also—come on, let’s be honest—relieved to know that they just wanted Mum and that I would never truly be the last line of defense? Then she went.

How telling that seems now. To share a life with someone but to never share the truth of that life, to never express how that life is damaged.

Surely it was his right to know this wound in me, since it was bound, at some point, to become a wound in us? I’d simply worked so hard to leave it behind that I couldn’t bear to bring it forward again, not even to speak it aloud.

I am sick with the terror of this thing, and I think that to survive it must take a fathomless kind of strength. It’s this strength, her strength, that takes the edges of me. Those edges that crumble first into the sea.

I think my husband loved me as a vessel. Not consciously, I don’t think so little of him that I believe he could be conscious of this. But somewhere deep within. A buried truth in the darkness.

I think love expands when it needs to, it adapts, it embraces.

Our bodies are close. I stand almost within the sphere of his. If I look up, and he looks down, I think we might fit together, the lines of us. But we are too cold, we go inside, and the tension of it will kill me, the unfulfilled want. I don’t know where to put it, it doesn’t fit within me.

And I can understand why he might not, in fact, be alright. Why maybe none of us will be, because we have, all of us humans, decided what to save, and that is ourselves.

But here is the nature of life. That we must love things with our whole selves, knowing they will die.