47 Days #2
“And I can’t say I one hundred percent don’t wanna be a mom anymore ’cause the truth is, I’m unsure about almost everything.
But the one thing I am sure of is you. You are the one thing I know I want and have always wanted…
and if that means a life without children, I accept that completely and will never bring them up again…
. I didn’t put kids on this vision board.
I didn’t want kids in high school, and I know I might’ve just grown up and changed my mind.
But I honestly wonder if I made my mind change ’cause… I just wanted to be normal.”
Her chest was heaving; she was trying to get oxygen into her lungs. She stopped talking; there were no more words to offer him. She took in his unreadable eyes and suddenly became aware she was standing in front of an awfully attractive man holding a vision board she’d made twenty years ago.
“I…,” Danny began.
She became aware of the gorgeous Craftsman behind him, the three women staring out the window, the black curl falling over his enigmatic eyes, his body language: He was pulled back away from her, his hands helplessly hanging by his sides.
She was too late. She had not said the right words.
He needed her to say she was 100 percent certain she did not want to be a mom anymore, but she could not say that; she could never lie to him again.
There was no fixing this. She took a step backward toward her car.
“I don’t know what to say, Rhea, can I…? Can you give me a little bit of time to process everything you just said?”
His words hit like an arrow. She let out a soft, guttural moan as she took another step back. Her gaze swept over him—his mouth, his body—and she ached with longing. She was fifteen years old again, trying to shake her mother awake, but her mother was gone forever; he was so close but out of reach.
“Of course, yeah, sorry for barging in on you like this—”
“No, no, it’s okay. I’m so glad you came over, I just—I’m sorry…. I just need a little bit of time,” he repeated.
She got in her car. With a shaking hand, she moved her gearshift in and out of drive six times and drove away.
—
Danny reentered his house; his sisters did not even try to pretend like they had not been watching the whole time.
“What happened?”
“You okay, Dan?”
“What’d she say?”
“Why’d she leave?”
All his nieces and nephews were sprawled on his living room floor in sleeping bags, watching Frozen. Fourteen little eyes briefly glanced up at their uncle, then resumed watching. On screen, the characters sang “Love Is an Open Door” as Danny shut the door.
Since the breakup, his sisters had been coming over more frequently.
They knew his relationship with Rhea had been far shorter than any of his other significant relationships; they also knew the heartbreak was far worse.
He greatly appreciated their company. He had grown weary of living in this spacious house by himself.
Right before they broke up, he’d wanted to ask Rhea to move in with him, but he hadn’t wanted to scare her.
He looked out the window at her taillights receding.
“Can we do anything, Dan?”
“Wanna talk about it?”
“Did she wanna make it work?”
“Leave him alone—”
“He might wanna talk about it—”
“Just give him space—”
“We’re here for you….”
“Thanks, I’m, uh, just gonna take a second….” He headed upstairs and closed his bedroom door.
He wanted to fling himself onto his bed and cry into his pillow like a little boy; instead, he sat on the edge of his bed and cried into his hands like a man.
It was the first time he had cried about the breakup.
He was not very good at crying, almost as if he had been greatly discouraged from the practice when he was young.
He’d spent the last 125 days longing for Rhea with a fierceness that was nearly impossible not to satiate. He craved her face and her voice. In order to prevent himself from calling, in his phone, he had changed her first name to Do Not and her last name to Hurt Her.
He was trying not to keep her trapped in a dead end.
He was trying to protect her. He felt like he would do anything for her…
except the one thing she wanted. He’d heard everything she’d just said, and it really did seem like she had genuinely opened herself up to the possibility of a lifetime without offspring, but how could he go back into that relationship, wondering if she would flip-flop the entire time?
He could not survive another breakup. He could not take more months away from her fertility or hear her weeping like she had in his truck and be the cause of all that pain ever again.
When he saw her standing in his street, he thought she was injured.
He thought something was very wrong, and she came to his house because she needed him.
He was overwhelmed by a savage instinct to destroy whoever had hurt her.
But the only person hurting her was him, because he could not give her that one thing.
He had devoted the past four months to sorting it all out. He knew he could not go back to her without being willing to be flexible and freeze embryos…. He had to dig deeper to figure out if it was possible to loosen his rigidity.
Her question tormented him: “Are you afraid of being like your father?”
So, he took that question to his therapist, set aside all his other excuses for not having children, and opened himself up.
Together they discovered Danny could not bear the thought of a child growing up as lonely and scared as he had: being raised by two parents who were too busy and apathetic for parenting, feeling not good enough, feeling unheard and unseen, never receiving a soft word or gentle embrace.
And, yes, he was afraid of repeating those same mistakes.
He had been recovering from the damaging influence of the Beckett household for two decades. The cruel combination of emotional neglect and intense pressure to perform left him utterly broken. He went off to college feeling like an unlovable object whose worth depended on a letter grade.
After college, he tried many modalities to assist his mental health, and they all helped: therapy, meditation, yoga, journaling, breathwork, screaming into pillows, and writing down his lovable qualities over and over again.
He did this in cursive because his hypnotherapist informed him that cursive goes deeper into the subconscious.
He’d gained confidence, he’d learned how to enjoy life, but getting there had been excruciating, and he could not risk tasking a young, innocent life with the same grueling journey.
He already had to endure witnessing the Beckett curse get passed on to his nieces and nephews.
All the striving for perfection, competitiveness, incessant talking; every mental disorder his parents possessed was showing up in subtle ways in all seven of those sweet children.
He tried to compensate by being an affectionate, attentive uncle, but they were not his children, and there was only so much he could do.
And was it even possible for his own children to avoid the curse?
He still dealt with insecurity, anxiety, neurosis, and depression. If his children inherited those issues, it would be his fault. Seeing his struggles show up in a blameless child might break him. But a life without Rhea might break him as well…
When he woke up with Ekele jammed against his body while Rhea softly read to Chichi, his heart felt whole.
It was as if lonely little Danny, who grew up in that cold house, was getting a second chance at having a family.
And this time, the dad was Danny, warm, loving, and playful, and the mom was Rhea, smiling, cuddly, and kind.
Would his heart ever feel that whole again?
A loud sob escaped his fingers; he did not know he was capable of making such a dramatic noise.
He quieted when he heard his bedroom door open.
He did not look up but heard all three of his sisters enter.
Two sat on either side of him, and one crawled on the bed behind him.
They laid their heads down on his shoulders, and for once, they did not say anything at all.
—
Rhea’s Prius was in the right lane, heading northwest on the 101 freeway. At every exit, she slowed down, wanting to descend the off-ramp and head back to Danny’s house, but she compelled herself to continue onward.
She began repeating a mantra at each exit: “I am in the present moment. I have a wonderful life. I am healthy. I have great friends, a job I love, a home I love, and I am beautiful.”
She sobbed while she said each word, but the mantra spurred her forward.
By the time she got home, she had recited the mantra eighty-nine times.
She kept going, sobbing while saying her mantra aloud as she climbed up fifty-two steps.
She sobbed and said it while she made butternut squash risotto.
She sobbed and said it while she ate the risotto.
She played music through Bluetooth speakers at full volume.
She sobbed and yelled her mantra while she danced around her house.
The harder she danced, the harder she cried.
She flung herself around, twisting and writhing, letting song after song move grief through her body.
When she was finally too exhausted to continue, she picked up a throw pillow and screamed all her anguish into it.
She put down the pillow and picked up her new tools.
With dry eyes, she began rebuilding her closet shelves.
She worked late into the night, saying her mantra every few minutes.
She felt tremendous pride when she stood back to take in her finished shelves.
She put everything back inside her closet except one item.