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I didn’t know that when I married her. I saw her as she showed herself to the world: fun, smart, sexy. Funny how those things are often a smoke screen from one’s true self. It’s easy to act all those things. Up for adventure. Head nods at complex scenarios when she’s not really listening. Ready for bedroom play even when there is no bedroom. In the beginning, Sophie was all those things. I didn’t know they were a construct. I thought they were key parts of who she was.
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The truth is far more complicated than that. I love my wife. I hate her too. I loved the idea of us. But—and this is hard
admit to myself—that was a while ago. Before Aubrey. After she was born, our life pivoted away from us to become something else. I’d become a father. Sophie, a mother. I learned that mother is more than father. Mother trumps everything. Father is a role. Father is biology. Mother is sacred. Motherhood consumes every bit of a marriage. Every last crumb.
But learned personality traits aren’t often based on present reality but on a past from which there is no escape. Our marriage is quietly rocky. Silently in shambles. I love her without a scintilla of doubt. But Sophie? I don’t know how she really feels about me. If she loved me at all, she’d have never done what she did.
When you have something that you carry inside and never talk about, you don’t ever unleash it on a stranger. And since you’ve never talked about it, you don’t know
even how to really frame your thoughts. You fear that your words will tumble out in a way that will only make things worse.
ones that test the limits sometimes do the most amazing things in life. That’s what I’ve always thought.”
It is always easier to sleep at night if the monsters outside your house only knock when you give them cause.
Thinking and dreaming of what happened is a far different experience than giving voice to events that haunt you. You cry when you tell someone something. You shake. You get sick. You seek comfort. When you don’t speak about it and just think it, you don’t fall apart. I
