I boiled water for pasta and didn’t walk away from it for a single second while it came up, while it was a dangerous thing. I watched it like a good mother, well I was! I gave E a bowl of warm strozzapreti with tiny slices of tomato and carrot sprinkled on top. Here we are, I said when I set the bowls down on the table and I could hear the way my mother would have said it. The way she had said it a thousand thousand times.

After E went to sleep, after B had been fed and put into his crib, I cleaned the counters and wiped the dirty places underneath the refrigerator. I wiped down all the doorknobs with vinegar and water. I cleaned the sink in the guest room and turned the plant a quarter turn, gave it a little water. I couldn’t understand how it could breathe in there, shut up in that dark little room that should be so different, that would be, after I had made it right.

I wanted to be awake and dressed and ready to talk to M about his day when he came home. To ask a question maybe, how was this or that going. Had this important thing happened? Or that?

When I had first stopped working, when E was a baby and I found myself suddenly at home all alone with her, saying goodbye to M at the door, I found myself wondering, during the day, if I should pick up his socks, do his laundry. If I should now, if I was now obligated to. Only when the paychecks had stopped coming in the mail, flimsy funny things and not ever for very much money but printed anyhow with my name on them and no one else’s, did the weight of them become, to me, clear. Not until they were gone and I no longer had to get dressed or even go outside really. Until I just had to stay where I was every second and make sure that the baby wasn’t killed in one of the many many ways I had been told it was possible for such a thing to happen.

Once, when E was four months old, she reached for something, a toy, her stuffed octopus maybe, and got it in her hands. It was the first time she’d ever done that, reached for something and grabbed it. My heart leapt outside of myself. It was the most amazing thing, is the most amazing thing, I have ever ever seen. My daughter doing this, and I grabbed my phone and called him, called M at the office with tears in my eyes and tried to explain the thing that had just happened but as soon as the words left my mouth I saw that I never should have done it. Should never have called him like that.

Wow! he said, That’s great, but his voice was soft and I kept trying to explain what had happened even though I’d already told him, even though he already knew, even though I could hear the sound of keyboards tapping in the background. Even though I was seeing with creeping horror how silly I was showing myself to be, how tiny and bathrobed and silly and alone, and he said more quietly, That’s great, we’ll talk about it tonight. I’m so sorry, I have to go, he said, I love you. He said all these things that were of course exactly right and it was only me who was silly for calling. Yes, I said, of course, I said, and I was so angry for showing myself in that way. For allowing myself to be seen as I was.