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It was the last day of my old life. The third week of October 2017. The year I turned forty.
Jo was at school. Iris was at daycare. I didn’t know where my husband, Tony, was.
It’s peculiar what I can’t forget. Our bathroom held the sickeningly sweet smell of geranium-scented cleaner. I wore pants and not a dress. Socks but no shoes. A too-tight blouse. Unwashed hair pinned in a bun above my neck. I sat against a wall, where the taupe paint was scratched, an uncapped EPT developing in my grip. I held the test upside down. I couldn’t bear to watch. A gap beneath the door set a rectangle of yellow light across the tub. Two minutes to know what would become of me. Time passed, a whole life. I flipped the EPT over when waiting got harder than knowing. Two red lines on a white strip stared at me. A second test lay in the box. I ripped its foil package open with my teeth. Right between the sink and the commode, I crouched down, swearing in disbelief. I was still breastfeeding twelve-month-old Iris, still recovering from pregnancy and birth, still lonely the way a mother is when she can’t find the person she used to be.
I knew when it happened. The deaths of our fathers had brought us close. Tony and I had fumbled to find each other in our unlit bedroom. He’d reached for me and I held him. There are people in life you feel you’ve known before. I’d never met Tony. He’s a big man, a strong man. He weighs one hundred pounds more than me. His eyes are blue, so clear and blue they seem empty and foreign and unreadable. He’s a combat veteran, marked emotionally with scars of bullets he survived. Tony prefers life be raw and unpredictable and intoxicating with risk—or so the years of our marriage tell. Tony’s father was dead. He didn’t know how to say how much loss hurt.
We fucked sweetly in our bed. He didn’t pull out. I didn’t ask him to. When he comes he unravels. The wall between us drops for a few miraculous seconds. I’d wanted to please Tony. I’d demonstrate my love by taking all of him.
I’d been careless and stupid.
Two more red lines.
I threw the test across the room. Of course, it hit the tile over the bathtub, flying back at me. Our situation was disconcerting. We couldn’t afford another baby. We were like most Americans. No savings, no emergency fund, lots of debt. Lots and lots. Professors at West Virginia University, Tony and I held the exact same position. Identical jobs. Tony made more than I did. And he didn’t even want the job. He was always trying to quit, looking for shinier work. Hollywood writing work. Like so many women, my money was earmarked to look after the children. Seventy percent of what I took home would go to childcare, if we could find it, which I didn’t think we could if we had another baby. It had taken a year and a half for a spot to open in a good daycare for Iris, not an uncommon thing in small towns. Demand exceeds supply. There were so few options. I’d placed Iris on several waiting lists six weeks into my first trimester. Each one was the same: write your name on a line and pray.
Most household tasks and chores fell on me. Night feedings. Bills. Boring paperwork. Someone always needed to be fed or rocked or talked off the ledge of a tantrum. I didn’t have time to be pregnant. I divvied minutes. The night before I took the EPT, Tony stood in the living room and lifted our upright Dyson by its handle, looking it over as if it were some rare thing. He tried to unlock the detachable hose, squeezing it. Seven years we’d owned that vacuum cleaner. And then Tony asked me how to turn it on.
Our marriage—like all marriages, I assume—is complex, its own country. In our country, we were fighting most days. We were broke. We were overextended. We rarely touched. Talk was tense even about the good things, anger clipping our voices. We argued so much we forgot the original argument. Our marriage was hung on fantasy. A storybook about freelance writing windfalls. A few things: I won’t tell you every detail of my marriage, who was good or bad or hurt the other. For my children. For their relationship with their father. My marriage is part of the story; it isn’t the point of the story. Had my husband been a financially stable and faithful, kind hero, the cost of daycare would have been the same, the potential loss of my career the same, the distance and barriers to reasonable health care the same. I can blame Tony for not providing economic stability—or time—for me. The money and time that would have made it plainly possible to safely provide for another child. Reprehending Tony might be briefly satisfying, but to do so is to lose focus, to take an occasion when I was handed shame and doubt solely because I was a pregnant woman, and make it about my husband.
In my tiny windowless bathroom, positive pregnancy test in hand, I thought, this is why women opt out of work. This is why we discourage girls from trying in the first place. I had sex for the first time when I was thirteen, not old enough for sex. I wanted to be a clinical psychologist. The women in my family were waitresses and administrative assistants. I’ve worried all the years after my first pregnancy scare, how a baby might hold me back.
I’d worked so hard. College, though my family couldn’t afford it (I took on enormous student loan debt). Years and years in graduate school. Now a tenure-track job. Tony was going to quit—we could both feel it coming. I was the stable earner in our household. A third baby at forty and my professional life was over. Moments like these, I want my mom. I tell her most things first. Telling Mom is like telling myself. I phoned her, crying. I didn’t want another baby. I wanted an abortion.
“Oh, Christa.” Mom sounded disappointed in me, the way I was disappointed. I’d failed her. Mom gave up every dream of her own for me. She’d worked two jobs or more my whole childhood, never any help. At twenty-three, Mom had her tubes tied, right on the cesarean surgical table. That never sounded extreme. After years of my father hitting her, two was enough. Two was the punch line. My father had wanted my mother to abort me. I never thought that fact anything other than a fact. It had nothing to do with me. It never hurt. I’d imagine a curtain drawn. Everything black and blank and peaceful without him.
A long pause.
Mom said if I wanted another baby, I could do it. If I wanted to focus on the children I already had, I could do that. Maybe Mom was right, though I was leery. I’d called her crying and panicked the morning Trump won too. It had been tense between us; Mom insisted the country would be fine, don’t be dramatic. Nothing would change. It’s always been a man’s place. Four years later we still remind each other how correct I’d been. But never mind. Mom reassured me we live in a free country. Choice is a given.
Copyright © 2020 by Christa Parravani