2. Sela
Sela
My husband isn’t home, and I miss him.
That’s the part nobody tells you about a twenty-year marriage. The missing doesn’t go away. It just gets quieter, the way a song you’ve heard a thousand times gets softer—still playing, just under everything else.
He’s in Honolulu.
He’s been gone four days.
I don’t sleep well when he’s not in bed. I haven’t ever since we started sleeping together over two decades ago.
I have friends who don’t share a bedroom with their husbands anymore, and I can’t understand it—not as a judgment, just as a fact about my own body. I reach for him at night. He reaches for me.
We still have sex. Maybe not as often as we used to, maybe not as desperately, but it’s still there, and it’s still ours, and it’s still lovely.
That’s the part I want to remember when I think about the rest.
Because there is a rest.
When he’s home, he slots me away as housewife.
Where are my cufflinks? Did you pick up the dry cleaning?
When is that wedding we have to go to?
As if I were still the woman who managed the house when the kids were small. As if that woman is the woman he married.
She isn’t.
In fact, I’ve never been that woman—I was playing that woman, because I had two babies eleven months apart and a husband on the partner track, and somebody had to do it, and I loved them too much not to.
But I don’t have to do it anymore.
The kids are gone.
Magnus is at Bowdoin. Liv is at Wesleyan. And two years ago, for the first time in my adult life, I asked myself what I wanted, and the answer was Bridgeline.
So when August asks me where his cufflinks are, what I want to say is, “I don’t know, August. I don’t run a hotel. I run a non-profit.”
What I actually say is, “Top drawer, left side,” because that’s where they always are, and you’d think he’d know.
The tragedy is that I still know where his things are, even when I’ve decided not to be the woman who knows.
People expected me to fall apart when the kids left.
I had friends who cried for weeks after their kids moved out of their homes.
I was not one of them.
I miss Magnus and Liv every day, and I miss them less every day, and both of those things are true at the same time, and neither of them makes me a bad mother.
I did a good job. I sent them out. They are living their best lives, so I can live mine—now as I turn forty-four, which let’s be honest, is a strange age for a woman.
Perimenopause is its own dirty secret—the brain fog, the hot flashes, the rage that arrives at 3 PM for no reason and leaves by dinner.
There was a meme going around last week: Do I want to divorce my husband, or is it perimenopause?
I felt very seen.
Because there are days when I want to just leave this life, the apartment where we raised our babies—all of it…especially him, because I feel stifled at times by his tacit expectation that I remain his wife and their mother with no identity of my own.
But I’m on Hormone Replacement Therapy now, so he’s become tolerable.
I met August a hundred million years ago.
I was twenty-one.
He was twenty-five.
I was working at the public defender’s office with my brand-new public policy degree. He was a junior associate at a top law firm, so tired that he could barely keep his eyes open at a Noam Chomsky reading where I told him he was in my seat.
He wasn’t. The place was full, and he was handsome, and I wanted a reason to talk to him. He gave me his seat, and then when I asked him if I could buy him a thank-you drink, he said I couldn’t, but he’d like to buy me one.
I was charmed.
He bought me a drink. He has been buying me drinks ever since.
He told me, on our third date, that I was the best thing that had ever happened to him. I told him, on our fourth, that he was the best thing that ever happened to me. I needed a little more time than he did. But I was the one who made the first contact, so we were even.
We still say it to each other.
We say it on anniversaries and birthdays and sometimes for no reason at all, in the kitchen, while one of us is unloading the dishwasher.
Lately, when he says it, I can hear how long it takes him to get the words across to me.
There’s something between us now.
I don’t have a name for it.
Rift is too sharp a word.
Distance, too neutral.
I reach for him, and he reaches for me, and we still find each other, but the reach is longer than it used to be—like there’s more air in the way. I try not to worry about it. I tell myself that every long marriage has weather.
And mostly I believe that rationalization.
I stretch languidly in bed, then I pick up my phone and send a message to August.
It’s the first thing I do after I wake up when he’s not there. It’s a habit.
His response makes me smile.
August: I changed my flight. Coming home to you tomorrow.
He misses me, too. He always does. We’re not the couple who doesn’t connect when we’re apart. We do. Few phone calls, but many text messages.
He’ll send photos and tell me what he’s up to—a story about someone he met, or an interesting anecdote, something, anything—and I do the same.
I tell him what’s going on.
Then there is the domesticity of life, or the life of domesticity, that interferes.
Did you RSVP for so-and-so’s wedding? Are we going to Henrik’s for Thanksgiving? Are we going to the fundraiser for Henrik? Do I have to go to your mother’s charity auction?
I’m not fond of my mother-in-law. But then, she’s hard to like. The constant lamenting—“I lost my husband, and you still have yours; my life is so hard”—as she clasps her Chanel pearls, is all too much.
I adore his brother, Henrik.
He’s a good man. I like his politics, which, given the family he came out of, helps a lot.
His wife Caro and I have become more than sisters-in-law; she’s the extra sister life handed me.
And when my actual sister, Elsa, is around—yes, my mother was creative; same four letters, different order—the three of us vibe.
I was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia, in a house not unlike the one August and Henrik grew up in—old money, old furniture, old portraits in the hall—but transposed south, which gives the same architecture an entirely different environment.
My father, Miles Harrison, is as Southern a man as you can produce on this earth. He runs the family business, which is managing money. He’s warm. He’s kind. He and Henrik get into arguments about politics when they meet. But then they hug at the end of the weekend. It’s all very copacetic.
My mother is Swedish.
Annika Lindqvist—never took my father’s name, never quite belonged in the house he brought her home to. They divorced the year I left for college. One of those classic the children are gone, we can stop pretending sort of marriages. She moved back to Stockholm.
Elsa lives in Sweden, too, in Uppsala. She and her husband Lars both teach at the university. Her field is the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. His is the quantitative analysis of civil wars and negotiation strategies. Very esoteric.
They don’t have children—a choice—and dote on my kids.
We are close—like the sisters in books and movies—and we know what we have is unique, so we treasure and nurture it.
When we’re together, we speak English, even though I speak Swedish reasonably well and she’s a native speaker.
Since she lives in Sweden, it’s second nature to her.
It’s our secret language when we’re not in Scandinavia, a way to say, “Did you see her tits spill out of that dress?” without anyone understanding us.
August’s family has a Danish line—his paternal grandparents are still alive in Copenhagen, in their nineties, in the same apartment they’ve lived in since the war.
I’ve been three times. They were thrilled, on the first visit, to discover I spoke a Scandinavian language.
Less thrilled to discover it was the wrong one.
I get up and make the bed on both sides, even though only my side was slept in.
I shower.
I dress.
I drink coffee and have some muesli for breakfast. It’s all on automatic pilot. And very quiet. When August is home—breakfast becomes more than nutrition.
I miss him!
I put on the coat my mother bought me two years ago from Loro Piana, my favorite brand. It was a gift when I told her I was going back to work. She’s an independent woman who has always worked as a teacher, both in Savannah and in Sweden, and didn’t approve of me taking care of the family.
I believe the coat is my lucky charm because it brought me to Bridgeline. It was a chance meeting at a coffee shop with a woman who admired it—and we got talking. Now, Delphine Okafor is one of my closest friends and colleagues.
I wrap the coat tighter around me.
It’s a cool day—because it’s November and we’re in New York, and while the weather can be unreliable in spring, summer, and fall, winter tends to be dependably cold or freezing.
People complain about New York’s weather because it changes so often within a day or a week. I love exactly that about it. I never know what kind of day I’m going to get, and there’s a certain mystery in that, a small daily thrill of discovery.
I walk the twenty minutes to work—my beautiful, wonderful home away from home. I do this every day unless it’s raining or snowing, when I take a cab.
Bridgeline is three years old, and I’ve been there for two of them.
It was founded by Delphine and is a transitional employment program for women coming out of domestic violence shelters.
The work is unglamorous and exact: résumés, interview clothes, childcare logistics, and the legal-aid phone calls nobody else has time to make.
We don’t house anyone.
We don’t lecture anyone.
We get women into jobs that allow them independence from their abuser.
Delphine promoted me to Executive Director after eight weeks of my working there. She said she wanted to slow down—and wasn’t it wonderful, she said, that I’d come along just as I wanted to speed up.
I have a budget and a staff of nine. I have a board that includes two women I would have killed to have lunch with when I was twenty-five and who now text me about their grandchildren. We placed 140 women in jobs last year. This year we’ll do 200.
My work has become my purpose. The word feels enormous in my head, and I use it anyway, because at forty-four, I have decided I’m done apologizing for words…or anything else. I am, as the memes say, out of fucks.
I was a stay-at-home mother for eighteen years.
I don’t regret it. Or maybe I do, sometimes—in the small hours, when it’s impossible not to wonder about the roads you didn’t take and the versions of yourself you never got to meet.
But I don’t anymore. Not since Bridgeline, when I discovered that the part of me I thought motherhood had consumed wasn’t gone at all. It was simply waiting for its turn.
My phone beeps, and I see August’s assistant has updated the family calendar to include his new flight time.
I smile automatically.
He’ll be home in twenty hours. I wonder if I should make a reservation at Le Bernardin, our favorite French restaurant, or cook, or order in.
It’s been a while since we’ve had some alone time. Maybe I’ll walk down to Saks and pick up some lingerie…like the old days.
A giggle bursts out of me as I badge myself into the Bridgeline building, feeling that my world is finally and truly right.
Order Guilt & Glitter