Picture 6
The picture: Me, five months pregnant, with Clementine on my hip.
The caption:God bless this growing family!
27
In Yesteryear,time passes in a slur of good days and bad days.
On good days, I wake up feeling rested. Determined. Optimistic. Confident I can win over the world. And so I move through the hours as the best possible version of myself, the most obedient wife, the most loving mother. When Maeve appears in my doorway, I’m already wide awake and smiling, arms outstretched.Good morning, darling.Together, we pick out my outfit for the day (The same gray, stained, catastrophe of a dress as yesterday? Fabulous!), and then I limp outside to retrieve the stupid fucking eggs from the stupid fucking chickens. At this point, I usually need to pause to have a quick, hard sob, before I wipe the tears off my face and say, “Hello, ladies!”
Then I help make breakfast. I crack the eggs into the frying pan and sit by the fire, nudging the pan around the coals so they cook evenly. When I bring the pan to the table and set it down proudly, showcasing my perfectly scrambled eggs, no one is impressed. No one even says thank you. But I don’t mind! Of course I don’t mind!A good wife never minds!
Instead, I think, with the blunt cerebral force of a spaceship hurtling through the atmosphere,How lucky am I? This life! Such a blessing.
On good days, I amaze myself at my own bravery. I take on each new chore and assignment with the obedient pluck of a picture-book pioneer woman. Ironing and sewing and mopping and wood tending and udder cleaning and potato peeling,la di da, what a life!I ignore the fact that our meals are tasteless and beige and usually consist of two or fewer food groups. I ignore about half the thoughts that pop into my head. Instead, I focus on being a tender mother and a cheerful wife. I never let them see me cry, especially not Maeve, whom I’ve nicknamedmy little shadow,a metaphor that works on the visual level but falls flat on the auditory level. Shadows are quiet. Shadows trail behind you and never remind you that they’re there. Maeve, on the other hand, never stops talking. She always has some new observation to share, some new reason to tug on my dress and say, “Mama?Mama,” with genuine insistence.
Do you see that cloud, Mama?
You missed a spot on that shirt, Mama.
Mama? Are you hungry, Mama? Want a snack?
On good days, Maeve’s sweet little voice is a comfort. A soundtrack to my cheer. Together we say hello to all of it, the clouds and the sky and the fields and the trees, Old Caleb and the boys and Mary, the cow and the chickens and the horse and the muck and the grime and the rain and the soot and the shit.
On bad days, I don’t wake up so much as I lie there, staring wordlessly up at the ceiling, while night bleeds away into morning. On bad days, hope is a four-letter word that floats limply in my thoughts, and life on this ranch feels less like a life and more like a nightmare, a contrived stage performance, a scene that never ends.
On bad days, my thoughts swirl in eddies of relentless panic:
I have to leave.
I cannot leave.
I think he might kill me.
I think I might kill him.
I know someone is watching.
I know no one is watching.
I’m worried I’ll die here.
I cannot die here.
I think I would rather be dead.
And then I get up anyway. I drag myself out of bed and limp self-pityingly through those swirling thoughts and into the horror of another day. I grin fiercely at the children, I give a deep curtsy to Old Caleb, and then my face melts into a frigid glare as soon as they’ve gone past.
A single bad day feels like nine good days packed into one. Time moves so slowly that I often worry the clock in this world might break altogether, leaving me frozen in a single sepia-toned moment. On bad days, I wake up in a panic—I cannot stayhere—and so to calm myself down, I tell myself thattodaymust be the last day;todaymust be the day some celebrity runs up the driveway, interrupting me in the middle of one of my terrible chores, laughing hysterically at my anguish, a man with a massive video camera on his shoulder recording the whole thing.Tomorrow, I will return to a house that smells oflemon-scented cleaning supplies. Tomorrow, I will wake up to a round pregnant belly and the sound of the nannies making breakfast. Tomorrow, I will not have to shit in a rickety old shed outside.
And then the day passes in the same dreary rotation as the day before—chicken coop;hello, ladies;breakfast boule baked to the opposite of perfection; chores; chores; chores; hemming; ironing; sweeping; dinner prep; dinner; stare exhaustedly into the fire until I’m about to fall asleep on my chair—and then the day is over and I walk slowly back to my bedroom, stunned with exhaustion, my clothing pounds heavier from all the sweat and dirt, and I get into bed before I remember, for the millionth time:It didn’t happen today. Nothing changed.
Language fails to describe how this feels. Depression, the very concept of it, falls flat in the face of this experience. The best word I can come up with ispurgatory,and even that feels a bit too tame.
On good nights, Mary brings me tonic to help me sleep. On bad nights, she barely even looks at me, and the darkness of the night, the darkness ofthis life,threatens to swallow me whole.
Which brings me to the laundry.
