Chapter 36 #3
As I drove through the winding mountain roads back to the ranch, humming softly to keep Jessa’s hunger snuffles at bay, I tried to visually map out the rest of my day.
By the time I got home, the children would all be awake, the two boys smashing wooden blocks over each other’s skulls while Caleb had his daily thirty-minute-long homeschooling lesson with Clementine.
God made dinosaurs! Skyscrapers give you cancer!
Clementine’s shirt would probably be inside out; Stetson’s diaper would probably need to be changed.
Caleb, meanwhile, would be itching to head out to the barn; most of his favorite livestreams got going around midmorning.
And so he would leave me with the kids, and I would ask Clementine to watch Samuel while I took care of Stetson and Jessa, swapping out both diapers, applying rash creams, breastfeeding Jessa, giving Stetson a warm bottle of milk.
By this point all the children would be desperate to go outside, to have outdoors time, and so I would stand in the grass watching them roll and play and laugh.
That would be a good moment for me to be able to plan out the recipe.
And then we would have lunchtime, and then nap time, and everyone but Clementine would sleep for two hours, at which point I could set her up with a book on the couch and tell her it’s Mama’s quiet time.
Two hours, plenty of time to film. And then the children would wake up and need to be fed and diapered and entertained all over again, but yes, as long as I took advantage of nap time and didn’t make any mistakes with the recipe, I could be finished with filming by four, maybe five at the latest—
“Natalie?”
I turned around. It was nighttime. Caleb was in the doorway, holding a bucket and an ice pick. At the same time, we said, “What are you doing?”
A long silence unfolded.
“Clementine came to the barn,” Caleb said. “She said she hasn’t eaten.”
As if on cue, Clementine stepped forward from behind Caleb. Bitch, I thought before I could stop myself, followed immediately by: No, of course not, just a child, just your child. I was so tired.
“You forgot to make them dinner again, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t forget.” I gestured at the roast in front of me. “It’s right here. It’s almost ready.”
Caleb looked genuinely concerned. “It’s nine at night.”
I blinked. The floorboards slanted. I rested a hand on the countertop to keep from falling forward.
I gazed helplessly around the room. Stetson and Samuel were asleep in the playpen, stretched out on their bellies.
One look at the baby monitor showed Jessa in her crib.
Thank God, I thought, before I could censor my own thoughts.
Thank God I put her in the crib. “I must have lost track of time.”
He looked incredulously at me. “That’s all you have to say?”
“I,” I said. “I—I—”
“Natalie,” Caleb said fiercely. How rarely he said my name aloud.
I paused. Then I said something awful, something I’d been thinking for weeks: “I think we maybe need … a nanny.”
“Our children don’t need a nanny,” he replied immediately. “They need a mother.”
Checkmate. No acceptable counter to that. I nodded, properly chastened. He was right, of course. What kind of mother couldn’t take care of her own children?
“No nanny,” Caleb repeated. Then my husband’s expression softened, and he also placed a hand on the counter, as if to steady himself, and I realized he was exhausted too.
Giving himself a moment to recover from his own constant performance—not of the role I had thought he would take on (hello, cowboy!), but of something much subtler and therefore more demanding: that of a hardened Christian man.
He didn’t play with the children anymore, not in the same way he used to.
Sometimes I caught him looking at them wistfully, especially toddler Stetson or baby Jessa, but he never actually acted on his longing anymore.
He couldn’t. Real men didn’t do things like that.
“We can have a full-time babysitter, I think,” he said tiredly, rubbing one eye. “Babysitters are fine.”
Clementine was standing by the baking dish now, quietly eating a roasted carrot. I crossed the room toward my husband and wrapped my arms around him. Our first hug in years. Then I began to cry.
The woman in the videos, with her flipbook of smiles?
That was Online Natalie, and she was designed to be good at being alive.
Nothing was hard for her: not motherhood, nor marriage, nor building a business, nor serving Him.
All of it appeared to her as a series of tasks to be accomplished each day, at the right time, in the correct chronological order.
Online Natalie started each morning by giving thanks for all the Lord had given her. She greeted her children lovingly each morning. She had sex with her husband every night. She was tired all the time, but it never made her ugly or angry or bitter. It only ever made her more beautiful.
And she was right there, wasn’t she? Standing, smiling, beckoning. Any day now, I would wrap my fingers around her neck and pull her forward. Let her topple into me.