I sink onto a chair and stare at my phone without really seeing it. Part of me is relieved. Emma is better at this. Always has been. Another part of me hates how quickly that relief turns into resentment.
I am helping. I work. I provide. I take the bins out. I do bath time when I’m home in time. I try.
Don’t I?
When Emma comes back down, she looks smaller somehow. Tired in a way sleep won’t fix.
“Unbelievable,” I say, before I can stop myself.
She looks at me like she might actually bite.
“That took you five minutes,” I add, because once I start, I can’t seem to stop.
“It’s not a competition,” she says.
But it feels like one. It always does. And I’m always losing.
We argue on the stairs. In the hallway. Words pile up too fast. Accusations, defences, things we’ve said before. I hear myself saying I work, like that’s a shield. Like it explains why I don’t know what size shoes Oscar wears now. Why I didn’t remember the milk.
The milk.
When she asks, I know the answer before she finishes the sentence.
I forgot.
The look on her face hurts more than if she’d shouted.
“I was busy,” I say. “It was a long day.”
She says hers was too.
I want to tell her I’m tired of feeling like a failure in my own house. That every time she lists everything she does, I hear everything I don’t. That I don’t know how to fix something I don’t fully understand.
Instead, I say I took the bins out.
As soon as it’s out of my mouth, I know how it sounds.
She says I do visible things. Not the thinking.
That lands somewhere deep and uncomfortable.
“I just don’t get why you’re always so angry,” I say, because anger is easier to deal with than hurt.
Then she says it.
That she doesn’t feel like my wife. That she feels like my housekeeper. My PA. The person who makes my life run so I don’t have to think about it.
I open my mouth to argue. To explain. To say that’s not how I see her.
Then she adds, “I don’t want to be needed. I want to be chosen. To be wanted”
The words hit me in the chest.
Chosen.
Wanted.
I did choose her. Over and over. And I do want her. I just didn’t realise I’d stopped showing it.
