17. Coping Mechanisms
COPING MECHANISMS
Breakups and breakthroughs don’t usually show up as calendar reminders. Ours kind of do.
Sunday and Wednesday nights are blocked off on my phone now.
Little repeating events labeled “Us” with a heart emoji I pretended to add ironically and then never changed.
Underneath that, there’s the rest of my life: daycare drop-off, sprint reviews, Liam’s pediatrician check-ins, Reid’s game schedule, payment due dates.
We made a plan. We’re trying. The first week after his visit feels like walking on new legs—same route, same apartment, same daycare run, but everything’s a little unsteady.
Not brand-new, not like when Liam was first born and I was stumbling through everything in a half-panicked haze.
Just… unsteady. Like we’re relearning how to move without collapsing.
Our Sunday call starts exactly when the calendar says it should: eight p.m. my time, nine his.
Liam is in his pajamas, hair damp from his bath, clutching his stuffed dinosaur by the tail.
I prop my phone up on the coffee table and angle the camera so both of us are in frame.
Reid’s face fills the screen a second later.
He’s in his dorm room, the familiar cinderblock walls behind him, a pile of laundry threatening mutiny in the corner.
“Hey, team,” he says.
Liam squeals and launches himself at the phone.
“Dada!” he shouts, which comes out somewhere between “Dada” and “Dah!”
Reid laughs, the sound a little too loud through the tiny speaker.
“Hey, little man,” he says. “You getting bigger just to spite me?”
Liam grabs for the screen like he’s trying to physically pull Reid through. I hook an arm around his waist so he doesn’t head-butt the table.
“Say hi,” I prompt.
“Hi,” Liam says, pressing his mouth to the glass. There’s now a smear of toddler spit right over Reid’s face.
“Wow,” I say. “So affectionate.”
“I’ll take what I can get,” Reid says, smile soft.
We talk about nothing and everything. How Liam tried to eat chalk at the park.
How my team pushed a bug fix at the last second and somehow didn’t burn down the internet.
How Reid pulled a B+ on an exam he swore he’d bombed and how his coach reacted like he’d just secured a championship ring.
It’s easy for a while. Familiar. Then Liam starts rubbing his ear.
“He doing that a lot?” Reid asks.
“Rubbing his ear?” I adjust him on my lap. “Yeah. Teething. Again. I swear he’s going to end up with two full sets of teeth at this rate.”
Reid studies him through the screen. “Has he been pulling at it? Or like… crying more than normal?”
“His normal is chaos,” I say. “Do you know how low the bar is for ‘more than normal’?”
“I’m serious,” he says. “Ear infections run in my family. My mom said my brother used to?—”
“I know,” I cut in gently. “I’m watching it. If he gets a fever or keeps messing with it, I’ll call the pediatrician.”
Reid nods, but his mouth pulls in. “I just don’t want you to miss something because you’re used to pushing through.”
The words aren’t mean. He’s not accusing. But irritation still prickles under my skin.
“I’m not going to ignore him being sick,” I say. “I’m with him all day. I’d notice if something was off.”
“I didn’t mean you wouldn’t,” he says quickly. “I just?—”
“Worry,” I finish. “I know.”
There’s a beat of quiet. Liam, oblivious, starts trying to feed his dinosaur a Cheerio.
We move on, but the edge stays. Tiny. Sharp.
Another small difference in a growing list. Wednesday’s call is just us—Liam knocked out early for once, his stuffed dinosaur abandoned on the floor like a crime scene.
I curl up on the couch with my laptop closed for once and my hair thrown into the kind of messy bun that would give my mother a headache.
“Okay,” Reid says through the screen, “report in. How’s the schedule working?”
“You’re treating our relationship like a training program,” I say.
“It kind of is,” he says. “We’ve got drills. We’ve got film review. We’re adjusting plays.”
“You’re such a nerd,” I say.
He grins. “You love it.”
He’s not wrong.
“It’s… working,” I say after a second. “Mostly. I like knowing we have nights that are just ours. It makes the random texts feel like extra instead of the only thing.”
“Same,” he says. “I actually told my roommate I couldn’t play tonight because I had ‘a meeting.’”
“Oh wow,” I say. “A meeting?”
“A very important, extremely serious meeting,” he says. “No jerseys allowed.”
I laugh, but the sound is tired around the edges. I can feel it. He probably can too.
“You okay?” he asks.
“I’m fine,” I say automatically. Then I sigh. “Liam’s in a clingy phase. He cries every time I so much as look at my work laptop. Daycare said it’s normal separation stuff, but it still… sucks.”
“Do you want to pull him out?” Reid asks.
I blink. “Out of daycare?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, we could figure something else out, right? Your mom, Destiny, rotating help. Kids pick up on stress. Maybe he’d be calmer if he was home more.”
“He’s not stressed,” I say. “He likes daycare most days. He comes home covered in paint and Goldfish crumbs.”
“I just don’t want him thinking we’re constantly handing him off,” Reid says. “Or that you’re too busy for him.”
Heat flares in my chest before I can check it.
“I’m not handing him off,” I say. “I’m making sure he’s taken care of while I work so we can afford to eat and he can have a bed and clothes that fit for more than five seconds.”
“I know,” he says quickly. “That came out wrong. I just… when I was that age, my dad?—”
“I’m not your dad,” I interrupt, sharper than I mean to. “And Liam’s not you.”
Silence drops between us, heavy.
Reid exhales slowly. “You’re right. I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair.”
My shoulders sag. “I’m sorry too. I’m just… tired of feeling like every choice I make for him is the wrong one in someone’s hypothetical scenario.”
“I don’t think you’re doing it wrong,” he says. “I think you’re doing it mostly alone, and I hate that I’m not there to share the load. So I try to have opinions from far away and it just… makes things harder.”
There it is. The actual thing.
My throat tightens. “I don’t want you to feel shut out. But I also can’t freeze every decision and wait until we’ve had a forty-minute strategy call about it.”
“I know,” he says. “I don’t expect that. I just… want to know what’s happening. Be part of the conversations. Even if I can’t physically be there.”
“That’s fair,” I say quietly.
He leans closer to the screen. “So how about this—you keep doing what you’re doing. If you want my opinion, ask. If I’m worried, I’ll say something once, and we’ll talk about it, but I won’t keep pushing after that. Deal?”
I think about all the times lately I’ve felt like I’m being graded. By daycare. By my mom. By strangers at the grocery store. By myself.
“Deal,” I say. “But the same goes for you. If you start drowning in classes and practice and work and don’t say anything, I’m going to call you on it. I’m not going to guess anymore.”
He smiles faintly. “I’d expect nothing less.”
We move on to lighter topics after that. His roommate’s weird new hobby. Hazel’s latest chaotic text thread. Iris’s plan to teach Liam a TikTok dance the next time she babysits. We laugh. We tease. We make fun of each other’s snack choices.
But when the call ends and the apartment goes quiet again, the weight of everything still sits there. The schedule is better. The intentions are better. The communication is better. The exhaustion hasn’t gone anywhere. Parenthood doesn’t care about color-coded calendars.
Some nights Liam sleeps, and I get actual REM cycles. Other nights he wakes up screaming at two a.m., flailing and inconsolable, teeth cutting through gums like tiny knives. I pace the apartment in worn socks, bouncing him on my shoulder, whispering nonsense while my own eyes burn.
On those nights, I don’t even bother trying to text Reid. Either he’s dead asleep because he had practice at dawn, or he’s up studying and already drowning in his own responsibilities. I don’t want to add another “I’m barely holding it together” notification to his screen.
We talk about it later, when he calls and sees the shadows under my eyes.
“You should have called me,” he says.
“You couldn’t have done anything from a hundred miles away,” I say. “You can’t bounce him through FaceTime.”
“I could’ve been there with you,” he says. “On the phone. Talking. Something.”
My chest pulls tight.
“I didn’t want to make you feel worse,” I say. “You already hate missing this stuff.”
“‘This stuff’ being our son existing at two in the morning?” he asks, a rueful edge to his voice. “Yeah. I do.”
“I’m serious,” I say. “You spiral when you feel helpless. I was already dealing with one meltdown. I couldn’t handle two.”
There’s a beat, and then he snorts softly.
“Wow,” he says. “Calling me out from long distance. Impressive.”
“I’m not wrong,” I say.
“No,” he admits. “You’re not.”
We keep trying anyway. We swap pictures and dumb videos. He sends clips of campus life, of the court, of late-night study sessions where half his face is hidden behind a hoodie. I send Liam’s new words, his wobbly dance moves, his latest obsession with putting things inside other things.
We send each other memes at inappropriate hours. We say I miss you more than we used to, but it still never feels like enough. On paper, we look like we’re coping. We have systems. We have routines. We have a plan.
But underneath all of that, something is still frayed. Still stretched. Still waiting for a break neither of us wants to admit we see coming. The next morning is already teetering before I’m fully awake.
Liam is grumpy, clinging to my shirt like he’s auditioning for a baby sloth documentary. His nose is runny, his curls are sticking to his forehead, and every attempt to put him down ends with him screaming like I’ve personally betrayed him.