Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Or I wanted to understand how to live a life that I was not the star of, to learn to recede into the background and be what my children needed from me and every time I came close I felt a vast abyss and ran in the opposite direction. Or I wanted to feel relevant again, like I mattered.

The world diminished a woman from the moment she stopped being sexually available to it, and there was nothing to do but accept that and grow older.

she was also someone who had been driven crazy. Maybe it was the insult of childbirth. Maybe it was the overwhelming unfairness of what happens to a woman’s status and body and position in the culture once she’s a mother. All those things can drive you crazy if you’re a smart person.

would wonder, globally, how you could be so desperately unhappy when you were so essentially happy.

I would admit to finding small joys with the other women in my neighborhood who were in their forties and all felt like exiles of relevance, too.

I would try not to put too much weight on the moments that are the worst in marriage: when one of you is in a good mood and the other can’t recognize it or rise to its occasion and so leaves the other dangling in the loneliness of it;

during the cooldown, when the teacher played the Eagle-Eye Cherry song or the Sade song, now our bodies were moving more slowly, lumpen, leaden, and we would see just exactly what they had become: people trying to remember something but not quite able to.

Was this what enlightenment felt like, an understanding that life is a cancer that metastasizes so slowly you only have a vague and intermittent sense of your dying? That the dying is happening slowly enough that you get used to it? Or maybe that wasn’t life. Maybe that was just middle age.