20. Sloane
Sloane
Iused to think the phrase “it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt” was just a warning for kids with skateboards or Catholics with rosaries.
Turns out, it’s a pretty accurate summation of what happens when two highly anxious lesbians attempt to baby-proof a house months before there’s even a baby to menace it.
It starts on a random Sunday, because it’s as good a time as any.
Eden wakes up before me. This is not the miracle it sounds like; she has the sleep patterns of a raccoon with a Fitbit.
She’s standing in the doorway with a cup of tea and a “we need to talk” look on her face.
Only instead of talking, she launches a Ziploc baggie full of outlet covers at my head.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Sloane, but I’ve seen the state of your cable management. I don’t trust you not to electrocute our spawn within a week.”
I catch the bag. “You say that as if the baby will be crawling on day one,” I mutter.
“You crawled at five months,” she counters, pulling up the covers to wrap herself like a burrito next to me. “Jenna started walking at seven. The odds are not in our favor.”
She’s not wrong, and worse, she knows she’s not wrong.
I pop the bag open and peer inside. Each tiny plug cover looks like the sort of thing that would choke a toddler, which I realize is why you need to baby-proof to begin with.
I add that to my ever-expanding encyclopedia of Preemptive Parenting Nightmares.
We start with the outlets. This goes well until Eden drops a handful of them in the couch cushions, where they vanish forever.
For the next decade, they’ll be fossilized between cat hair and loose Skittles, and I will only find them when I am barefoot and angry.
But Eden, proud of her progress, plops on the floor in front of the TV and announces, “Kitchen next!”
Kitchen is code for the place where you will never again have a sharp object or access to anything resembling actual adult food, because all the cabinets are now locked and the fridge is essentially a safe.
She dumps a box of childproof latches on the table and looks at me like she expects me to sprout a tool belt.
“Did you read the instructions?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
She holds up her phone, screen aglow with a YouTube tutorial and thirty unread group texts from our friends.
“I’ve watched six different methods.”
The first latch installation takes twenty minutes and three YouTube pauses, but the feeling of accomplishment is unmatched.
The second latch goes faster. By the third Eden is a machine, sticking screws into the wood with a force of will that should honestly frighten me.
The trouble comes on latch number five, when I realize we’ve installed the locks backwards, so the only way to get into the snack cabinet is to crawl inside, close the door, and then open it from within.
We both discover this at the same moment, locked outside our own kitchen and staring at the cookies trapped behind a plastic childproof bouncer. Eden leans against the counter, while I attempt to jimmy the latch with a butter knife and a string of profanity that would make a sailor blush.
“Do you think we can just eat through the cabinet?” Eden asks, nose to the door, voice muffled.
I groan. “You had one job, and it was to not screw us out of snacks.”
“Correction,” she says, “my job is to keep the goblin safe. You are the designated snack provider.”
She’s right. She’s always right. I resort to calling Becca, who FaceTimes in while at the dog park and offers to break in with a hammer.
Eden solves the problem by removing the hinges entirely, which works but leaves us with a cabinet door that now swings like the entrance to a Wild West saloon.
I watch her, still barefoot in a t-shirt, hair in her signature haphazard knot, and I wonder for the hundredth time how I got lucky enough to be stuck in a childproofed kitchen with her.
We take a break to eat the cookies we liberated. “You realize that if we can’t outsmart these, there’s no hope for the child.”
Eden shrugs, crumbs all over her chin. “Survival of the fittest. If the baby’s not clever enough to defeat the locks, it’s not my fault.”
I love her so much I could scream.
Next comes the baby gate. This is theoretically the easiest step: you click it into the doorway, adjust the tension rods, and bask in the glory of not having to chase a hypothetical infant up the stairs.
Eden reads the box for exactly two seconds before tossing the instructions onto the pile of outlet covers on the couch.
“Teamwork?” she asks, raising an eyebrow.
“Teamwork,” I agree, immediately regretting it.
We assemble the gate, which seems straightforward until I realize that it’s approximately three inches wider than the actual hallway.
I try to explain the concepts of “standard” and “universal fit,” but Eden is determined to make the thing work.
She yanks, I push, and the gate makes a noise like a medieval torture device.
It’s at this point I discover that, with enough force, the gate can actually wedge itself into the wall, which is apparently what the manufacturer intended.
Eden tests it by shaking the gate. “That’s solid,” she declares, then proceeds to climb over it. In the process, her foot slips, and she ends up straddling the gate, frozen mid-mount with a look of terror and delight.
“Don’t move,” I say, which only makes her move more. The entire gate shifts an inch and, before either of us can react, collapses into a heap on the floor with Eden on top.
She howls with laughter. “It’s like an agility course! Maybe the baby will be a gymnast!”
I can’t even be mad. I just sit next to her on the carpet, head in my hands, and wonder how I will ever keep up with these two.
When we finally get the gate in place, we test it again. This time, I lean on it to see if it holds.
It does not.
Instead, I find myself wedged between two vertical bars, ass in the air, unable to move in either direction. Eden, to her credit, tries to help, but she is laughing so hard she has to clutch the wall for support.
“Help me!” I yell, which only makes her lose it even more.
“You’re…you’re stuck!” she wheezes. “Like, legit stuck. This is…oh my God, I have to get my phone.”
I try to threaten her, but my dignity is long gone. She takes a photo, and I know, with grim certainty, it will be immortalized in every group chat until the end of time.
She eventually pries me loose, and I collapse on the floor in a heap of shame and giggles. “Do you think it’ll ever get easier?” I ask, voice muffled by the carpet.
“Not in a million years,” Eden replies, flopping down next to me. “But at least it won’t be boring.”
By now, it’s afternoon, and the house is a graveyard of bubble wrap, packaging, half-installed gadgets, and the empty baby gate box. Eden surveys the destruction, then rolls over and starts taping bubble wrap to every sharp corner she can find.
“Do you really think that’s necessary?” I ask, picking a piece off the side of the coffee table.
She grins. “I think if you’re going to have a baby, you should just wrap everything, including yourself, in at least two layers of protection. Maybe three.”
“You’re going to wrap me?” I say, deadpan.
She’s already plotting. “If I start at the feet and work my way up, you’ll never get away.”
“You’d have to catch me first,” I counter, but I’d let her do it, and we both know it.
We end up in a bubble wrap arms race, each of us trying to tag the other with the most layers before they can retaliate. At some point the cat gets involved, which distracts Eden long enough for me to win, and I tape a full six feet of wrap around her torso, pinning her arms to her sides.
She thrashes, mock-offended. “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”
I collapse on the couch, victorious, only for Eden to flop next to me, rolling like a log until she can wedge herself under my arm. I peel the bubble wrap away, inch by inch, and she lets me, face inches from mine, eyes all soft and full of promise.
“You know what I love about us?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“Every day is a disaster, but it’s our disaster.”
I want to say something sweet, but she beats me to it, pulling a throw pillow from behind my head and whacking me in the face with it.
“Assault!” I yelp, grabbing another pillow for defense.
“Survival of the fittest!” she declares, and before I know it, we’re in a full-on, no-holds-barred pillow fight, feathers and bubble wrap flying, the house echoing with our laughter.
Eventually we collapse, exhausted and out of ammo. The couch is a fortress of baby-safe cushions, and we are two idiots tangled together in the rubble.
I look at her, hair a mess, cheeks flushed, and I feel this weird, wild certainty that we’re going to be okay. That the kid, when it comes, will have two moms who are equally capable of disaster and wonder, and that’s probably the best anyone could ever hope for.
“Fun mom or responsible mom?” I ask, catching my breath.
“Why choose?” Eden says, tucking her face into the crook of my shoulder. “I say we rotate.”
“Agreed,” I whisper.
We fall asleep right there, arms and legs entwined, wrapped in the sound of our own happiness.
After yesterday’s tornado of failed babyproofing, I finally have a decision about what I want to do after the baby is born regarding work. I don’t want to be a full-time working mom. I want to be at home, raising our goblin.
I don’t even wait for the morning to marinate before I tell Eden. She’s brushing her teeth, still in her “Caffeine is My Love Language” t-shirt, half of her hair up and half of it trailing down her back, and it feels so utterly domestic that the words just pop out of me.
“I want to stay home,” I blurt. “At least until the kid’s in kindergarten. I think I want to do that. I think I need to.”
Eden pauses, mid-spit, and gives me a look in the mirror. There’s a beat where she’s probably trying to decode if this is a bid for emotional reassurance or if I’m about to have a breakdown, but then her eyes go soft. She wipes her mouth and leans against the sink.
“Yeah?” she asks, like she’s testing out the taste of the idea.
I nod, heart thumping so hard I can basically see the pulse in my neck. “It’s not that I don’t love my job. I do. But I want to be here, with you, with the baby, in this chaos.” I gesture broadly at the bathroom, the house, the entire looming future. “I want to do the mom thing.”
She considers me, then crosses the tile in two steps and hugs me from behind, arms warm and firm. “If you want to be home, we’ll make it work. Hell, you can do whatever you want. You survived getting stuck in a baby gate, you can do anything.”
I laugh, and it feels giddy and terrifying and perfect.
“Lila can take over the practice,” I say, the plan tumbling out of me faster than I can keep up, “at least for a few years. I’ll still be the boss, just…
not the front-line boss. I can do admin, telehealth, the boring stuff, but the real work, the actual fixing people part? Lila’s better at it anyway.”
Eden lets go and turns me around to face her. “You’re sure?” she asks, searching my face for any sign of regret.
“I’m sure.” And I am. I am so sure it’s almost scary.
We spend the rest of Sunday in a weirdly productive fugue state, Eden painting in the garage studio while I draft an email to my employees after having a conversation with Lila, who was more than happy at the idea of taking over for a while.
I keep waiting for the panic to hit, but it doesn’t.
Instead there’s a wild, floaty feeling, like I’ve just jumped off the high dive and haven’t hit the water yet.
At some point, I wander out to the garage and find Eden with her hands covered in cerulean blue, streaks of it on her cheeks and forehead like war paint. She’s working on a canvas that’s all bright color and motion—nothing like her usual stuff, which is moody and architectural and sharp.
“Hey, baby.”
She turns to me, smiling brightly. “Hey, sexy. Everything go okay with Lila?”
“Yep, she’s onboard.”
“Nice. I’m so happy I get to have you at home with me.” She sighs, dropping her paintbrush and walking over to me. I don’t even care that she’s about to ruin another top with paint, I let her scoop me up and hold me close.
“You know we’re going to be neck deep in baby poop, right?”
She shrugs. “Eh, we’ve dealt with worse. Plus no kid can shit like Arin did, and we got through that!”
I laugh because she isn’t wrong. We’ve survived Pia’s kids, and we’ll survive our little bean, too. Hell, we might surpass survival and reach for a loftier goal like properly raising a kid. Weirder things have happened.