The Most Fun We Ever Had

by Claire Lombardo

How could you grow people inside your own body, sprout them from your own extant materials, and suddenly be unable to recognize them?

And he realized, then, how silly it seemed that you could ever know another person—really know her—and how silly it was to think that he had any idea what it was like to be her, day after day after day.

This was arguably one of the life-saving rationalizations for the institution of marriage, one party consumed with worry so the other could sleep through the night.

And this was what worried her the most: nothing had ever felt as comfortable, as easy, as good as being with her parents, her family. No one, it seemed, would ever regard her with the same enthusiastic awe as her mother; the same quiet, feverish pride as her father. It aroused concern within that she was slated for a lifetime of disappointment from the outside.

They would repeat it for years to come in times of strife: the most fun I’ve ever had.

“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?”

The thing that nobody warned you about adulthood was the number of decisions you’d have to make, the number of times you’d have to depend on an unreliable gut to point you in the right direction, the number of times you’d still feel like an eight-year-old, waiting for your parents to step in and save you from peril.

Marriage, she had learned, was a strangely pleasurable power game, a careful balance of competing egos, conflicting moods. She could turn hers off in order to allow his to shine. Conservation. Reciprocity. She was allowed to feel confident and excited only when he was feeling anxious and pessimistic. If he worried about everything, she was allowed to worry about nothing.

He knew that if anyone waited to have kids until they felt ready to have them, the human race would have died off centuries ago. But again he held his tongue.

Your family could do that to you sometimes, catch you off-guard with their charm and their normalcy.

Social currency was everything in this world, but it could gain or lose value in an instant, and someone could steal your shares right out from under you if you weren’t paying close attention.

“That’s not how it works,” she said flatly. “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.”

And it was weird, she thought, feeling adult and aware, how a thing so terrible as losing someone could yield goodness in the ones who were left.

She felt herself starting to cry, not because she was sad—though she was; it was a sad thing—but because she recognized, at twelve years old, that a part of her had died, too, the part that was normally spared these sorts of details. Because it was the first time her dad had ever told her he was sad and that seemed like a pretty seminal thing, the realization that your parents could feel sad or scared.

And there was something indescribably lovely about this, the baby who’d once jabbed with restless knees at your internal organs sitting beside you on a park bench and benevolently giving you shit, and it occurred to her that it was moments like these that made being alive feel worth it, little blips of contentment amid the mayhem and status quo.

The world as it was would almost never be the world you wanted it to be, and there was a certain pleasure in finding your space in the schism.

And it was striking, how much less alone that could make you feel, because of course to be peopled at all was a high-order gift, but to find people beyond your people was nothing short of miraculous, finding a person away from home who felt like home and shifted, subsequently, the very notion of home, widening its borders.