He said I had wanted kids and I could take care of them.
He said it was not his problem.
I sat on the couch.
I sat on the couch with my cast in my lap and my son in the other arm and I looked at my husband and I processed, with the specific slowness of someone receiving information that requires significant processing, what had just been said to me.
Derek had wanted children.
This is documented not just in my memory but in actual documentation, the emails and the conversations and the specific evening three years ago when he had brought up having a family for the first time, had been the one to raise it, had said that he imagined himself as a father and that he wanted that with me.
He had also wept when the boys were born.
I was there.
I saw him.
He had held Eli and then Owen and he had wept in the way that new fathers sometimes weep, the overwhelming specific emotion of a person encountering something they had wanted and are now holding, and I had believed in that moment that we were in it together, that the team we had been becoming was going to continue becoming, that the babies were going to be ours in the way that things are ours when both people have invested in them.
The months since had revised this understanding.
He had not gotten up in the night once.
Not once.
He had not changed a diaper without being specifically asked, and when specifically asked had frequently produced a reason why this particular moment was inconvenient. He had not attended a pediatrician appointment. He had not bathed them or dressed them or sat with them through the difficult periods of cluster feeding that lasted two and three hours.
He came home from work and sat on the couch and watched television and expected dinner, which I made, because making dinner had become another item on the list of things that were apparently mine.
I had been managing this.
I want to be honest about why, because the why is important and because I have spent the months since examining it without flinching, and what I found when I examined it was a combination of things: exhaustion that made confrontation feel impossible, the hope that it would change once the boys were older, the specific fear of a woman who has two infants and no income that the confrontation might produce a result she could not manage, and a residue of the love I had for the person Derek had been before the boys arrived, which had made me willing to extend more grace than the situation warranted.
The broken arm removed the capacity for grace.
You cannot extend grace when you have one usable arm and two infants who need to be lifted.
I called my mother.
My mother’s name is Vivienne and she has the specific quality of women of her generation who have done difficult things quietly for a long time and who have therefore developed a practical efficiency that is its own form of love. She arrived the next morning and she did not say anything about Derek that required me to defend him or agree with her, which is one of the specific skills of a good mother, and she helped me through the days when my arm was the worst and the fatigue was the most comprehensive.
For three days she came every morning.
On the fourth day she had a commitment she could not cancel, a medical appointment that had been scheduled for two months.
I called Derek before he left for work.
I told him I needed him to come home by five that evening because the boys needed bathing and I could not bathe two babies with one arm.
He said he was tired.
He said he had come home from work every day this week.
He said that I stayed home and did nothing all day.
I sat very still with the phone in my hand.
I had, over the past four days, while broken-armed and sleep-deprived, managed the following: the feedings, which with five-month-old twins happened every three hours day and night; the diaper changes, which I had developed a one-armed technique for that I would not recommend; the laundry, which had to be done because babies generated laundry in quantities that defied reason; the meals for Derek and for myself; the dishes; the communication with Sandra and my mother about their respective visits; a pediatrician call about Owen’s persistent fussiness; and the management of my own pain, which I was managing with the minimum of painkillers because I was nursing and the doctor had restricted what I could take.
Nothing all day.
I sat very still for a long time after he hung up.
And then something settled in me.
Not anger exactly, though anger was there.
Something colder and more purposeful.
I thought about what I needed Derek to understand.
Not to hear. Hearing was not the problem. I had told him things and he had heard them and had produced, in response, the eye roll and the moms don’t get sick days, which meant that hearing was not equivalent to understanding and that the method of communication I had been using was not capable of producing the result I needed.
I needed a different method.
The specific thing Derek believed was that caring for two infants at home was not work. That it was nothing. That the person doing it was doing nothing, that the time was empty, that the presence of a mother with her children was a form of rest rather than a form of labor.
He needed to understand what the nothing looked like.
He needed to understand it not through my description, which he had already heard and dismissed, but through direct experience.
I called Sandra.
Sandra and I had developed, over five months of her helping me while her son did not, a relationship that was different from the mother-in-law relationship I had expected. She was on my side in a way that she had never stated explicitly but that was evident in every practical action, the showing up, the help that arrived without requiring me to justify the need for it.
I said: I need a favor.
She said: yes.
I said: I need you to come at four tomorrow and take the boys somewhere for the evening. Dinner. A drive. Whatever feels right. I need them out of the house when Derek comes home.
She said: what are you planning?
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