Happy and You Know It

by Laura Hankin

Claire Martin didn’t want to throw herself in front of a bus, exactly. But if a bus happened to mow her down, knocking her instantly out of existence, that wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world.

she liked Fucking to Forget almost as much as Drinking to Forget.

To Claire, babies were like seeds. Interesting for what they might grow into but, for the moment, just dry, dull kernels.

“We’re not like other playgroups—we’re a cool playgroup.”

But then Thea had come out of the closet, and everyone had been so awful to her, and Claire had begun to wonder how a religion that was ostensibly about love and forgiveness could advocate icing out the best person she knew.

Baby Reagan was a pretentious little show-off as far as Amara was concerned.

But she couldn’t relax. She was a woman, she was black, and now she was a mother. She had to be twice as good—no, three times as good—as everyone else.

She was never alone. She was so lonely.

“I’d argue that thoroughly weighing an action makes choosing to take it even more rewarding.”

“He doesn’t give a fuck. All the most interesting people are that way.

when all she had wanted was to go back to her carefree, childless life,

she would feel very deeply how smart she was despite growing up in a world that gave girls so many opportunities to feel less than.

It struck her that bringing a kid into a marriage was like getting a huge promotion, but with no raise and still having to do all your old work of being a good partner too.

“If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands.”

Not that they were smarter—Amara firmly believed she could trounce the average man in a battle of wits—but because they weren’t primed from birth like women were, told that they could be anything they wanted to be while handicapped at every turn by invisible forces, told that they were more than just their looks while also culturally programmed to believe that their value was tied to their desirability.

Because even though fathers stamped children with their last names, the world didn’t ask as much of them.

Women had to grapple with a choice that men never did while remaining uncomplaining and generous so that they didn’t nag their husbands straight into the arms of less complicated lovers.

Modern women of privilege had to claim that their manic exercise routines were about strength, not a body ideal; that their beauty regimens were all natural, designed for emotional balance and skin health, rather than for looking nubile for as long as possible.

She’d been a bad mother. And that, it seemed, was the worst thing a woman could possibly be. A prostitute who moonlighted as a contract killer could be redeemed if she was doing it all so that she could tuck her child into a warm bed every night. But a woman could be charming, immensely intelligent, ambitious, strong, and head-turningly gorgeous, and if she screwed up her parenting, the world deemed her a piece of shit.

Maybe, over the course of even the best marriages, you acquired a collection of secrets that you walled off in a little section of your heart where your partner would never be allowed to go. And you did everything you could to keep the walled-off section small, to keep the secrets from slipping out of it and pervading all that was good and open and free in the rest of your heart, and you just made it work.

some badass bitch inside of her threw her arms open and howled into the wind.

For the briefest moment, Claire felt a pang of sadness at how things would never fully be the same between them again.