My Husband

by Maud Ventura

I shouldn’t have let you go, I will never let you go, don’t let me go, etc. The expression is often used as a form of regret: I’m angry at myself for having let you go, I should have made you stay. We think it’s our fault if the other person leaves us, that we could have done something to stop it. We imagine that we could have acted in such a way as to preserve their desire to be together.

Miserable and powerless, I witness the transformation of our couple into a family.

When my husband went back to work and I found myself home alone with a newborn, I felt like a prisoner, trapped in the role of mother, which I had no desire to play and for which I had no talent.

I do my best, but most of the time I’m too busy being in love to be a good mother.

on Monday, blue objects appear with more intensity in my field of vision, and on Wednesday it’s orange things. Tuesday, I searched high and low for my yellow notebook, the one containing the scientific vocabulary for my translations, in vain. Thursday, I found the notebook on the entryway table: no surprise, it took until the yellow day for that yellow object to appear. It’s as though each day of the week places a filter in front of my eyes—a film roll with its own grain, or a certain sensitivity to light. Each morning, my entire landscape shifts in hue.

my desire to love has always been so great that for each person I’m with, I love with the same intensity. To console myself over one, I leap into the arms of the next, incapable of being alone. Only my dependency on love, rather than on one or the other of these men, was a constant.

(Why is it that something is bearable for months or years, and then one morning we wake up unable to stand it for a second longer?)

But being an excellent father does not automatically make you an excellent husband.

It’s easy to identify a first time, but we rarely know when something is happening for the last time.