Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

I did want it. Or I wanted it mostly. Or I wanted it in the background. Or I was bored. Or my personal hierarchy of need had advanced to the point where once you question the necessity of the stable marriage, the only way to go is down. Or I was just destined to be a miserable person, no matter what marital state I was in. Or New Jersey is a place that people choose very often over New York and I should just get over it. Or I just wanted some independence and some time alone to watch whatever I wanted on television without being judged. Or I wanted my abdomen to look less like a topographical map of Sarajevo. 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. Or everyone else could hear a U2 song from her youth and smoke a cigarette and not lose her life to nostalgia for a time that probably sucked just as badly as now did. Or all I had was a brief midlife crisis, maybe not so different from Rachel, and even our midlife crises had to be confined—hers in search of one good night’s sleep and a man who wasn’t threatened by her existence, and mine having to outsource my own unhappiness in service of something that looked like helpfulness to an old friend but was actually neglect of the family I’d opted into voluntarily.