I sometimes imagine my husband dies in his sleep. I do. It’s horrible. I’m horrible. Think what you will, but the truth is I have colorful but gloomy fantasies about how he dies until I hear one of my girls calling for her daddy. Lickity split, I make the sign of the cross and send up some vows. Oh, Mother, I know Your Son gave up His body to make amends for us sinners, forgive me--again? I’ve decided to think of Him as a Her, another reason for you to judge me, but don’t. Hear me out. You might find that our stories are not that dissimilar. On the subject of celestial beings, the truth is we don’t really know if God is male. For all we know there is a Mrs. behind all of his accomplishments.
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It’s one of those mysteries in life that keeps me up at night—as is imagining my husband’s demise—but until recently these and other off-color thoughts were buried inside my head. Back when I was crisp and living in my own skin, I was a raging sea of ideas, dreams, and passions. As the years passed, I changed and those types of thoughts that didn’t fit my wifely life, I buried. But not now. I don’t accept life at face value anymore. It’s not as if I have all the answers or know what’s going on inside my head. These days I’m striving to rebalance my newfound awareness, but I digress from the subject, which includes the dark fantasies that started when I awoke from a twenty-year coma to find myself in the middle of a life that was suffocating me.
An alternative to wishing the significant other dead—it helps if I call him SO (significant other) and not by his name—is imagining him leaving me for a sporty younger model. There are variations on the theme, but it films like this. I pull into the drive at the end of the day to find him standing next to a shiny three-piece set of monogrammed Louis Vutton luggage. It and he are waiting for me in front of the garage door, looking as if they belong to a Manhattan co-op with a doorman and not the driveway of a suburban track home built in the late nineties. In my favorite scenario, I pull into the drive and scream a silent halleluiah before slipping down and out of the SUV he just had to have for road trips, the ones we have yet to take. He doesn’t wait for me to speak. He jumps right into the confession.
“Katy, there is no easy way to say this…”
He stutters, then looks down at his shoes, never making eye contact with me. I follow his line of sight to his shoes that look new, too. They’re the expensive kind that probably came from Italy. He pulls out the red silk handkerchief from the pocket of his Hugo Boss suit, bends over, and wipes the dust off the sexy brogue shoes. “Katy, I’m leaving you. I took my share of the savings and sold the Apple stock.” He hands me a check, which I presume is my share. Then a red sporty car pulls into the drive. She’s a blur in my mind because I don’t care what she looks like, but I am tempted to thank her for taking him off my hands. He walks away. I am barely able to suppress the glee that is shooting like rockets inside me. My body is exploding in laugher, which I don’t want him to see, so I start counting the pebbles surrounding my feet. His final words to me, “Tell the girls I’ll write. Don’t worry, Katy. You have a college degree and your blog. You’ll be OK.”
I know, I’m horrible. It’s better than wishing him dead because I don’t have to feel guilty about my girls being fatherless, and there is no praying involved. For the record, the SO is not a bad man. He doesn’t beat me after too many beers at the bar, or bet the weekly paycheck on the horses, buy drugs, watch porn, or any other degenerate low-life activities that have driven me to fantasize about him being anywhere I am not. The truth is that the SO is safe, dependable, reliable, predictable, oh so predictable. He’s a catch my friends tell me. He is a self-made man, not original, but brilliant enough to earn four times the average annual income. I have no reason to complain, and I don’t. I have it all but don’t want it. I suspect there are other wives in the fifteen-plus years of marriage club that share my secret daytime fantasies about their husbands.
He’s not the only part of my life I want to change. I don’t want to be a soccer mom, a school mom, a perfect mom, a bake cupcakes mom, or a mom that lives my life through my girl’s sort of mom. I don’t imagine my girls away. I imagine we live on the beach on the edge of Pacific Ocean too far out for the school bus. Each morning—after toast, juice, and coffee—the three of us jump into my red ’67 Cadillac convertible and drive the fifteen miles to St. Agnes, the only Catholic school for miles. It’s a well-funded school, so there is no need for moms to volunteer to bake, grade papers, or stand in the front of the school drinking foamy-sugared coffee drinks in designer cup-ware. All the moms are working, self-aware, secure, and not interested in pettiness. We wave sincere hellos as we pull into and out of the parking lot, dropping off our kids. None of us is checking the make and model of each other’s car, the size of each other’s backside, the number of carets on the ring finger. We’re respectively enlightened and care deeply about the life that goes on inside our own homes rather than any others. I created an entire alternative reality, then realized it wasn’t enough to sustain me for the long haul.
I struggle daily with reality and my dream world. I have a better than average life and have no reason to complain. Note to SO: If I die, and you have found this secret file on my laptop and are wondering why I wanted you dead or to leave me for the owner of the red sports car, half poor, just know IT WASN’T YOU. It isn’t what it seems. You’re a good man. I have no complaints, or none that merit listing. Although for a while now I have suspected that over the years, you’ve had a few affairs. I don’t blame you if you did, since I think about it all the time as well as imagine you dying in your sleep. Don’t hold it against me. Please. I wasn’t always prone to lavish daydreams about living La Vida Loca. I think about the when and why all the time, but I can’t cite a single incident. It has to do with the sum of the whole and me becoming half or less than a fraction of who I once was. It’s me and not you.
“Mom, what are you doing?” Jenny asks.
I’ve always wondered if my girls and their father are blind. I am sitting at my desk typing. She can see me doing this because she’s placed her left butt cheek on the edge of my desk while her right leg keeps her anchored, and she is starring down at me. “I am fly fishing. It’s such a rush.”
“What are you talking about?” she asks.
"I wonder if we should go see Dr. Mead again.”
“Why? I just had my eyes checked last month.”
“Yes, I know, but your new prescription doesn't appear to be strong enough.”
“Wha…HA HA! Very funny, Mom. I can see you. Geez. You are typing”
She wants something, wants me to tell her that I am doing nothing of importance, to stop and exist for her. For my girls, I will hold my breath in my own world and do what they need me to do or what I need to do for them. I don’t exist for or through them, and never have, but if the situation merits me setting aside what I am doing, they know that I will. “What’s so important you are bugging me? I have a deadline.”
“Mom, you always have deadlines. Marie called…”
I watch her lips open and close but don’t pay attention to her words. I admire her straight-white teeth, which I gave up a three-caret diamond tennis bracelet for. It was worth it. Her smile is radiant. Once in a while I string some rhinestones together and pretend I am all that sporting a one-of-a-kind Harry Winston. I don’t regret using the bonus for Jenny’s teeth, but the woman I used to be sometimes dreams of sparkles and glitter.
“Mom, can we run to the store and pick up some sour cream, onion soup mix, chips and…?”
I hit save on my document. I know the drill without listening. She needs a ride. She assumes I will stop what I am doing and carries on talking, catching me up on the latest high school gossip. I don’t mind stopping or altering my schedule for the girls, but since experiencing my own private Mercury Retrograde, I’ve taken to carving out time in my day that is mine. Like Lucy, from Charlie Brown, hung a sign on her makeshift office that said, In Session. I have writing me-time. The girls acclimated to the subtle changes and the hanging of my Chinese walls that I constructed around me. They respect the hours between 8 and 11 PM as my alone time, but since it’s 3:30 on a Saturday afternoon, Jenny is tapping. I knew, know, and will always accept sacrifice was in the fine print in the wife-mom contract.
It’s not written but implied in the marriage contract a woman sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. Once she dons the lace, walks the longest walk ever, utters the words, later followed by a baby or three, she loses top billing as well as her place at the front of the line. It goes something like this. After saying I do to the one you thought was your ever-after, the one whose lips would see you through to your dying day, who would carry your heart inside of his, as you carry his, would know even if you said no you meant maybe or possibly yes, would love all of you even when your curves softened after babies one and two, you get lost. On the B side of a best-selling ideal, the woman who said I do becomes invisible, kind of like the house elves in Harry Potter. The woman, now a wife and mother, slips down the back of the sofa like loose change.
“Mom, what do you write about so much?”
I slowly pull my head away from the screen of my laptop but stop before jerking my hungry eyes upward. Could she really be interested in what I do? I hesitate before lifting my chin to make eye contact. The three inhales I take before travelling the distance allows me the time I need to brace my heart. I don’t want to risk the disappointment. I love my girls twice as much as the SO, but since they, like he, have forgotten I am a living-breathing entity, there is reluctance on my part to spill my guts. I don’t want to make the same mistake twice, at least not until I am strong in this newly minted improved and reinvented version of the woman I used to be.
I’m not quite a warrior princess or as strong in my convictions--yet. I suspect my strength will flood in once I demand the family's recognition, followed soon after by my acceptance that this life--the one I said I do to--is where I am meant to stay. I hesitate before responding to my Jenny because I recall with bitterness the SO’s reaction to my answer to his question on the same subject. Weak with need to share, I fell for the cooing in his voice. A part of me convinced he wanted to know.
“Wine?” I asked.
His smile never failed to melt my reserve. “Yes, please. Tell me about this blog idea.”
I poured each of us a goblet of Etude, my favorite Pinot. He sipped while I sliced smoked Gouda and laid out designer rainforest crisps on a chipped Spode platter his mother had given us. His eyes bright and not glazed over with boredom, I fell prey to the warmth in his smile. It had been too my years since the last time he had asked me about me with zeal, and I was starved to talk without reserve. If you can't trust the one you said I do to, who can you trust your secrets to? As it would turn out, the strangers in my writing class and the ones I met in the blogosphere are more supportive than the SO. I still curse myself for my bad judgment and falling into him. I realized later that the lapse was due in part to the shiny newness of the possibility, as well as my hunger for his attention.
He sat opposite me on the other side of the kitchen counter while I finished chopping. I stuffed a piece of cheese in my mouth, gulped down half of the wine, and went off about the politics in blogging, about the novel I was thinking about writing, about the class I had enrolled. I must have talked for a solid fifteen minutes, fourteen more than our normal conversations, before I realized I was speaking into silence, bar the occasion grunt. I lifted my head only to find the SO lost in what was in front of him. He hadn’t heard a word of what I had said and was politely muttering the occasional non-committal response to my over caffeinated hype. I knew he hadn't heard a word that night because the following week when I left for class, he asked me where I was going and why I hadn't told him I was taking classes. I was crushed.
I wonder if that conversation ignited my dark fantasies. I remind myself Jenny is not the SO, and I cannot carry my baggage into the current moment. She deserves a chance. I swallow my fear in one big gulp before lifting my head in tune with the second hand of the grandfather clock, my eyes dragging up the rear only to find Jenny waiting where I didn’t expect her. She’s sitting uncharacteristically patient, waiting for me to surface and respond to her question.
“Mom, don’t you want to tell me? Is it a secret?”
Well color me a rainbow. “Let’s go, and I’ll tell you in the car on the way to Marie’s.” The file saved, I lock the computer from prying eyes and follow her into the kitchen to find the SO and tell him about the change in plans.
“I’m taking Jenny to Marie’s house and then going to the bookstore.” Nothing. “Then I am going to Victoria Secrets to buy some sexy knickers and a matching bra. After, I’m meeting my lover at the Marriot.” Nothing. It’s a test to confirm what I already know.
“DADDY!"
“What? Did you say something?”
“Mommy said she is going to meet her lover after she drops me off at Marie’s house.” She pivots on Steve Madden black flats and stomps out of the kitchen. It’s her first girl/woman tantrum. I can’t help but smile. She executes her anger perfectly, down to the upturned chin, pursed lips, and flipping hair. It must be a woman thing, pre-ordained, hard wired in our genes, I muse.
“What is she talking about?” the SO asks.
“Can’t say.” I pick up my keys from the kitchen counter and turn less dramatically to follow her out the door that just slammed shut.
“Where are you going?”
“Jenny told you. Back later. Don’t forget to pick up Connie at 6.”
“Six? Is she still at practice?”
It never ceases to amaze me that he lives in the same house with me and has no clue what goes on inside the walls of our home from sunrise to sunset. I don’t understand how he has forgotten where his youngest daughter is or how she got there or that she needs to come home. I know he loves us. I know he will walk over hot coals, design and build the ultimate science project for Jenny, and draft the outline of Connie’s state report if they ask, but the rest of the day he is deaf and dumb to the sound of our voices, which is now white noise to him and why I see myself as the grieving widow. I remind him where Connie is while inspecting the stained glass panel that flanks the door Jenny slammed.
There is no visible damage to the door, but I know when I slip into the front seat of the SUV Jenny’s shiny new womanly uncontrollable rage will demand harnessing. Also in the fine print of motherhood is advising on men, love, birth control, safe sex, and a woman’s fall from grace. I can’t be sure, but I suspect this is the first time Jenny has recognized me as being a human. It’s also the first time she has noticed her father’s disconnected behavior—there but not there.
This is the perfect opportunity to influence her, drag her over to my side, to tell her what I dislike about being married. For a second I consider the power I am holding in my hand but dismiss it the moment I slip into driver’s seat and see her innocent face contorted but also conflicted. All girls love, worship, and adore their fathers. They struggle, if not fight bare-fisted against the man’s flaws. For some it's an unbearable reconciliation seeing him fall from the ivory tower, which can influence their life choices for decades if not lifetimes.
“He doesn’t listen. Never. He pretends. Grunts. That’s why we have to repeat everything. Isn’t it?
She’s speaking in snorts. Her rage exhaled and re-inhaled.
“Doesn’t it bother you? Does he love us?” Barely audible but heard with mom-bat like hearing.
“You?”
“No. Yes. Yes. Yes. He loves you and your sister, completely.” For the first time in my adult life, I talk to and not at my daughter. It’s awkward to be honest. I am a mother and wife and know my place in those relationships, what is expected of me. With the girls, I am everything and nothing. I am the dictionary, Betty Crocker, Florence Nightingale, Coco Channel, Einstein, Merlin, and Dobby the house elf.
I’m not going to tell her that I woke up six months ago with the realization that I had become a cliché. I married my college sweetheart. The man I stalked on site, sacrificed my virginity to, followed him following his dreams—one endless pursuit to understand his existence and purpose—which amounted to a hefty bank account and a home in the hills, but along the way, I lost sight of my dreams and myself. I am not going to tell her that motherhood, although amazing and unlike anything I could explain, further buried the woman I was before uttering those two words—I do—all those years ago. I am not going to tell her having it all is sometimes like having nothing at all. No, I am going to tell her about discovery, about the many sides of a woman, about a woman’s Xena Princess-like strength, our fortitude, endless love, but mostly I am going to talk about not getting lost inside a life. Lastly, how a woman can find her way back to the center of her own life if only she believes. I’ll ask her not to judge me too harshly or her father, who has forgotten a few things of his own.
Will I tell her that I have forgotten what it was in him that put the need in me, or will I maintain her status quo but share with her what I have learned about creating a life within a life? No. Yes. Yes. Telling Jenny reinforces what I need to remember, which is that it’s never too late to redefine.
BIO:
Brenda Moguez, is writer embracing her inner Xena, Princess Warrior, as she tackles the list of possibilities. She favors writing a story over vacuuming the dust bunny commune growing under her bed. When she’s not sitting on her bed writing she’s thinking about writing. She is finishing the second novel while shopping the first one. She’s lives in San Francisco—with a medium size stint in London— with her family and a fat cat. All but the cat has accepted her passion for writing. You can find her at http://www.brendamoguez.com/, where she explores passionate pursuits in all its forms.
Publishing credits:
I've been published in The Sun Magazine, Infective Ink, Her Circle, Ascent Aspirations Magazine, More Magazine, Literary Mama, Click Lit Review, Common Ties, and I've received an Honorable Mention from Glimmer Train and Writer's Weekly 24 Hour Contest.