The Most Fun We Ever Had

by Claire Lombardo

She’d fallen into motherhood without intent, producing a series of daughters with varying shades of hair and varying degrees of unease.

Maybe normalcy skipped a generation, like baldness.

“It’s a strange feeling to have as a kid, like you’re responsible for your parents’ happiness,”

The Sorensons seemed to produce a different kind of chaos from the kind he was used to; a product of having money, no doubt, but there was also an electricity running among the people at the table, facial expressions that meant one thing to a specific person and nothing at all to everyone else,

Violet had begun to view the world, lately, as a nuanced gradient of the degrees to which she wanted to physically harm her sister.

“I think so much of making a relationship work has to do with choosing to be kind even when you may not feel like it. It sounds like the most obvious thing in the world but it’s much easier said than done, don’t you think?”

She thought about him, and she thought about what it meant that she was thinking about him.

She was hard to love and exceptionally easy to worry about and it was an exhausting combination.

“Life’s hard for all of us. Life’s terrible, a lot of the time. It’s not about deserving things but we— I think we’re entitled to feel angry when we’re deprived of things that other people take for granted.”

“Nobody’s ever prepared to care for a child full-time, is what I mean. Nobody understands what that means until they do it for themselves. We’re all just holding our breath and hoping nothing catastrophic happens. And how deeply you get hurt doing that! It’s constant pain. It’s a parade of complete and utter agony, all the time, forever.”

This was what marriage could be, he learned: months of intensely powerful loneliness, nearly a year of isolation that at first felt unbearable but slowly melted into routine. But mostly it was this, the amazing reality of Marilyn’s hand in his, the seamless return to form after such a long stretch of adversity, the weight of his wife against his arm when she knew he needed her. That was the kind of love he had never known until her and, at that moment, remembered how lucky he was to have.

gently. At some point your children crossed a threshold from being children to being real people and it never seemed to announce itself dramatically but rather in quiet moments like this one.

“It’s not always the most logical decision that’s the right decision,”

“I didn’t see it coming. Though arguably I should have. I— It’s funny, the blind spots we have for ourselves.

Her kids would never fully understand her, just as she’d never fully understood her own parents and just as she, in close proximity to this girl, once a tiny baby who’d grown inside her body, would never fully understand her kids.

“I think we allow ourselves to hurt the people we love the most because we know they won’t abandon us.”