Fault Lines

by Emily Itami

Parenting is savage—there is no other activity on earth that you could get up to do four times a night for two years straight, and at the end of it be merely in the running for mediocre.

My children. My life’s work, my greatest loves, orchestrators of total psychological trauma and everyday destruction.

Is it normal to fluctuate so quickly between feeling tender toward your husband and fervently wishing him a violent death?

On occasion, my whole life can feel like a pileup of unintended consequences.

I look nearly the same as I do now, just happier. What an unforgivable thing to say, when my life now is the way it is. Maybe not happier exactly, just as if my edges haven’t been so finely polished. Less demure, less taut. Freer.

We smoke. We drink. We swear. I put a lot of questions into a particularly secure box in my mind where a lot of other shit is stored, and focus on the hedonistic pleasures of the moment. It’s ideal.

Having a secret makes me feel like nobody owns me, and that any opinion of me could always be inaccurate; no one has the whole picture, so it’s like trying to judge somebody’s appearance from a shard of broken mirror.

Since I am only inwardly insane, I divulge none of this, obviously, but accept it coolly and offer my condolences about the divorce.

Maybe in all those years of happy marriage, Tatsu thought that Nice Wife Mizuki was the Real Me and was disappointed when the fault lines started to appear.

Nice Wife Mizuki is a version of the real me, for sure, and in all those years, I thought there was a strong possibility she could become the main model. Why not? What are we, apart from the stories we tell ourselves and other people? I know all too well that I’m a flimsy construct, a flamboyant play set shot through with exaggerations and inconsistencies and secret compartments full of unsavory surprises. I made myself that way.

How many times have I wished I could be outside myself, outside all my limitations and neuroses, so I could make a different decision and live a different life?

as soon as the children were born it was blindingly obvious—your heart can’t break unless it has something to love. The way you love your children, they take your heart with you everywhere they go. Suddenly you realize just how cruel, just how loud and brash and harsh and illogically cruel, the world is, and it turns out that other mother was right. When they laugh, when they cry, when they’re ill, when they grow, every moment they adore you and every step they take away from you—the whole thing is completely heartbreaking.