The Reminders Don't Stop Because You Did

A woman nine years out finds the teapot on the top shelf where she put it so she'd stop seeing it, and she stands in her own kitchen at four in the afternoon feeling something she thought she was done feeling in 2019. That happens to women who are certain about the decision, who wouldn't go back, who have built good lives since. The reminders come further apart as the years go, they don't stop.

The objects are the easiest because we can move them. The mug goes in the donation bag, the photographs come off the wall and into a box in the closet, and the box stays there for six years because throwing it out feels like a bigger statement than anybody wants to make on a Saturday. Places are harder. There's a road we go around, a restaurant we won't walk into, a whole town where the feeling starts before we've decided anything, and there's nothing to be done about a town.

Then there's what can't be planned for at all. A song comes on in the car, one she played constantly, and it's six seconds before we understand why our chests went tight. Somebody laughs two aisles over at the hardware store and we turn around because for a second we were sure. A woman with her exact haircut is in the next car at a red light. None of that means anything is unresolved, it's automatic, it passes, and it happens again next month.

The comparisons are worse, because they come out of other people's ordinary days. At school pickup there are grandmothers waiting in cars with the backpack ready and a snack, every Tuesday and Thursday, without anyone having to ask. A friend's mother takes her two children two afternoons a week, which is about six hundred dollars a month that friend isn't spending on care, and you know the number exactly because it's the one you pay on the first of every month.

Then there are the events where a family is supposed to show up. You have the baby and nobody comes to stay for a week. You move and you hire movers because there's nobody to ask. You watch your husband with his daughters, how he asks about their day and waits for the answer, and you feel something you'd rather not say in front of him. You go to a wedding where the mother of the bride cries during the toast and everyone dabs their eyes, and you sit there being fine, keeping your face arranged for four hours.

Then it's December, and it runs six weeks. Everyone at work is talking about flights and who's hosting and how many they're cooking for, the commercials are all reunions in doorways, the radio has the same forty songs about coming home, and we're working out which parties we can stand and what we'll say when somebody asks about our plans. Early May is shorter and worse. The cards are stacked at the drugstore register and half of them are about how she was always there, and we stand in line holding the toothpaste with all of it at eye level.

The holidays are also when she tries. Estranged mothers break silence on birthdays and at Christmas more than at any other time of year, so there's a card, or a long email, or a text at 8:40 in the morning that says thinking of you today, and a birthday turns into a day spent watching a phone instead of a day spent however we wanted. Some women turn the phone off and turn it back on at ten at night, and that's a reasonable way to keep a Tuesday.

None of this means the decision was a mistake. Nobody's backsliding and nothing's unfinished, we had families and now we deal with what's left of having had them, and that part is permanent. The recovery time is what changes. In the first year a song in the car ruined the afternoon. Now it lasts the length of the song, and then the light turns, and we're on the highway thinking about dinner.

So plan for the ones that are predictable. Early May is going to be bad, so put something you actually want on the calendar for that Sunday, and expect the text on your birthday and decide beforehand whether you're opening it. And when the teapot turns up on an ordinary Tuesday, stand there for a minute, then put it back or get rid of it, and go do whatever you came into the kitchen for.