On Grace (2 page)

Seriously?
This is a moment when I would usually cry. I’ve never been one to hold my emotions in check successfully. I am seriously bummed. I had been envisioning that job as a kind of salvation for me. A huge hand lifting me out from underneath all that had been burying me, holding me up in the sky, proclaiming me a productive working woman once again.

My first thought is to find out why the magazine is closing so suddenly. All signs pointed to them doing well financially: Their last issue had closed with the highest number of ad pages in the publication’s history, they had just hired me and an ad sales rep, and the publisher had just taken his senior executives on an expensive boondoggle at a fancy inn in the Hudson Valley.
Why would he sell?
It just doesn’t make sense. I shoot a quick email to Darren with a “Check this out!” subject line and a quick rundown of what just happened along with a link to the
Weekly
’s site.

More pressing, however, is the fact that I am now jobless. True, and most importantly, no one will be going hungry at my house tonight or any other night because I have no job. And does it still count as losing my job if I had never started it in the first place? The concept of my being blessed that I don’t
have
to work is absolutely not lost on me. I thank my lucky stars every day—well, almost every day, kind of like how I floss
every
day—that Darren does well enough that I don’t have to work in order for us to make ends meet. Working is a choice I make to satisfy a need within myself, not to satisfy a mortgage payment.

Sometimes I feel guilty for not working outside the home, for not struggling when so many are. Cameron always says that’s no reason for me not to enjoy my own life. That most of those women would trade places with me in a heartbeat. That, in a sense, I owe it to them to enjoy myself every day instead of feeling badly that I’m not them. And that my worrying about it doesn’t change the lot for anyone else.

I’m crushed, but maybe this job loss is a sign. Maybe I’m supposed to be a stay-at-home mom after all. Maybe the “everything happens for a reason” adage holds true in this scenario. I’m just not so sure.

Later, after our bike ride and ice cream cones, more baseball, and an early dinner and baths for the boys, they watch
SpongeBob
in my bedroom while I finish getting ready for dinner with Cameron.

“Hey,” Darren says as he walks in at 7:15, his voice unusually quiet.

“Hey, I’m off, I’m late. I have to be at Méli-Mélo at 7:30,” I say, giving him a quick kiss before I stuff my phone in my purse, grab my sweater, and give him the hospital-nurses-changing-shifts download. “The boys already ate, and your dinner’s in the fridge. They had ice cream this afternoon, so please don’t give them a treat even if they beg, and please make sure they brush their teeth and that James puts on a Pull-Up before he goes to sleep. He wet his bed last night, so I just want to do the Pull-Ups for a few days.”

“Okay, got it.” He smiles without meeting my eyes.

“Oh, did you get my email that I lost my job?” I ask him, as I start to walk out of the room.

“Yeah, that’s a bummer,” he says, untying his tie. “I’m really sorry about that.” He looks at me, “Sorry I didn’t email you back. It was a crazy day.”

“That’s okay. I understand,” I say. “Alright, love you, see you later.”

“I love you, too. Tell Cam congrats,” he says and finishes taking off his tie.

During the ten-minute drive to Greenwich, I sing along to P!nk and wonder if that was a strange interaction or if I’m just imagining it. I’ve been questioning a lot about our relationship lately. I’ve tried to analyze it from every perspective. It comes down to the simple fact that we’re just not connecting.

I keep picturing a trapeze act. Darren and I are both up there swinging from our bars, acting as if the show is going according to plan. But every time I reach to grab his feet with my hands, I’m a second too late. I don’t fall into the net, I just keep swinging, with a smile on my face and my sparkly leotard just so, waiting for the next opportunity to try and grab his feet again, so we can soar together. This image is totally at odds with how I’ve always known our marriage to be. We’ve got one of those marriages people gush over. Compared with a lot of our married friends, we actually still like each other as people. We hold hands in public because we want to. We drink wine in bed and giggle over
Curb Your Enthusiasm
repeats. We kiss before sex.

Darren and I met at Cameron and Jack’s low-key-yet-elegant New York City wedding. I was a bridesmaid, and Darren was at the table for Jack’s childhood friends that the other bridesmaids and I scoped out because all the ushers were married. Jenny Simms and I both called dibs on the handsome, tall guy with the dark hair and ridiculously blue eyes, but I brought her a lemon drop shot, and she let me have him. Turns out, she had her eyes on Jack’s cousin anyway.

Darren noticed the shot-drinking at the bar and, with the perfect combination of confidence and shyness, approached us, asking if we were up for another. I caught my breath as I saw him up close. I was smitten. When the bartender presented a tray of tequila shots, I let out one of my deep, raspy laughs. Darren told me later, while we danced to a slow song and he stared at me with those gorgeous blue eyes, that he had never heard a woman with quite so sexy a laugh. And he was smitten, too. Neither of us had any interest in dating anyone else from that night forward, we got married a year and a half later, and we’ve had an excellent run of it ever since.

We’ve spent our marriage contentedly bonding over things we both love—Judd Apatow movies, authentic Chinatown dim sum, Coldplay, modernist architecture—and things we both hate—films with subtitles, pretentious restaurants, electronic music, the circus. He respects the things that
I
love—Nora Ephron movies, Jane Austen and Nicholas Sparks, red velvet cupcakes, Indigo Girls—and, in return, I tolerate the things that
he
loves—Coen brothers’ movies, Stephen King and Michael Lewis, pork rinds (
pork rinds!
), Shania Twain. Now ten years, a suburban mortgage, two children, and countless deep, raspy laughs later, here we are. Disconnected. Over all the normal stuff.

I open the door to Méli-Mélo and see Cameron waiting for me at our favorite corner table at this unassuming Greenwich Avenue cafe. The Avenue, as it’s referred to, is the long tree-lined thoroughfare in the heart of this chic town in lower Connecticut, right on the Westchester border, and home to a perfect combination of big stores (Saks and Apple), small boutiques, hip restaurants, and other town necessities such as banks, newsstands, and shoe repair shops. When Cameron sees me, she unfurls her long, athletic legs from under the table and stands to give me a huge hug.

“You are glowing!” I say excitedly, admiring her rosy cheeks and bright golden eyes. Cameron has been glowing since the day I met her freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania. Our rooms were three doors apart in the Butcher-Speakman dorm in Penn’s legendary and architecturally stunning quad. Unfortunately, our hall was known mostly for its abundance of rowdy football players (which turned out to be good) and architecturally challenged unrenovated rooms (which turned out to be not so bad).

Raised on a farm in Maine, Cameron arrived at our first hall meeting looking like a
Seventeen
magazine model. We became fast friends when we were the only two girls who voted for “cheese steaks and a movie” instead of “private tour of the university art museum” as the first hall activity. And as we got to know each other, I realized her looks were just an accessory to her brilliant mind and playful personality. She’s always been a guy’s girl, preferring sports bars over Sephora,
Die Hard
over
Dirty Dancing
, snowboarding over suntanning. But we connected that semester, and she’s been Debbie Boone-ing my life ever since (note obscure reference to 1977 saccharine hit “You Light Up My Life”).

“Why, thank you,” she purrs, twisting her long, chestnut hair into a bun without using a ponytail holder.

“So, do you feel any differently?” I ask.

“My boobs kill. And that has never happened any of the other times I’ve been pregnant. And they’re enormous. Too bad for Jack, though; I’m denying access because they hurt so much,” she says with a smile.

The waitress brings our menus and without even glancing at them, we tell her we’re ready to order: broccoli soup to start, chicken Caesar salad (no raw eggs in the dressing) for Cameron, and a prosciutto and mozzarella crepe for me. It is a Tuesday night, so Méli-Mélo isn’t as crowded as it usually is during weekday lunches and weekend dinners. It’s always been my and Cameron’s favorite local spot as much for its delicious food, good prices, and energetic buzz as for the eye candy of the French chef Cedric presiding over the open kitchen.

“And how about emotionally?” I ask, putting my napkin on my lap and taking a sip of water.

“I really hope I can carry to term this time, Grace. I’m really scared. I want this baby more than absolutely anything in the world,” she says with fierce desperation in her voice.

“I know you do. I feel good about it this time though, Cam. I think this is
the
baby. This time it’s going to be different. And a year from now you’ll be telling me your boobs hurt for an entirely different reason. And chances are, Jack won’t want to go anywhere near those lactating beasts.”

“Well, I’ll toast to that.” And with that, we clink water glasses and toast to placentas, nursing bras, and hemorrhoid pads, laughing hysterically and completely oblivious to the glaring eyes of nearby patrons.

After we finish our broccoli soup, Cameron turns the conversation to my plan.

“It just hit its first official snag,” I say dejectedly.

“What happened?”

I tell her about the phone call from Margaret White and my realization that maybe this is all for the best.

“But,” I say flip-flopping, “to be completely honest, I’m not sure that now my kids are in school I’ll be happy being a stay-at-home mom anymore. I just feel buried. What is my identity? I’m a mom. I’m Darren’s wife. I’m the smiling volunteer at school. And there’s nothing wrong with those things. But I want to be more. I want to have a purpose that society respects and that comes with a paycheck.”

“But you love being a mom. And it
is
respected by society. And why, for heaven’s sake, on the brink of forty, do you still care what other people think of you?” Cameron asks in an exasperated voice as the waitress brings our entrees.

“I don’t know why I do. I just do. I can’t help it. And to answer your first question, of course I love being a mom. But that has nothing to do with it. I can’t
just
be a mom anymore. It’s time for more. I’ve been doing this mom thing for eight years. I miss the me I used to be.”

“I wish you would just be more confident and not compare yourself to everyone else in the world. Just be who you want to be.”

“I don’t even know who that is anymore,” I say. “As soon as I had kids, my entire identity as I’d known it disappeared.”

“What do you mean?” Cameron asks.

“Do you remember the old me? The overachieving, confident, fashionably dressed, fit, extremely organized career woman who could write a brilliant 3,000-word article, run five miles, and throw a dinner party all in one day? Without getting frazzled? All with the caffeine equivalent of one green tea?”

“Yes, I remember her,” Cameron laughs.

“Well, she’s long gone. She’s been replaced by someone who can barely write a shopping list, let alone an article. And I need at least three cups of coffee just to get through produce.”

“You are way too hard on yourself, Grace. You do so much!” Cameron says.

“Did you read the ‘Style’ section of the
Times
last week?” I ask and continue without waiting for an answer. “They profiled women who are ‘doing it all.’ They had these women with three and four kids who have full-time jobs as management consultants or bond traders, and they also run charities and wear Prada. Size two Prada. Why can these women do it all, and I get overwhelmed organizing a cheese board?”

“First of all, the female editors profile these women to make
themselves
feel better, because
they
left their
own
kids home with a nanny. If they featured all the stay-at-home moms and how wonderful their children are turning out it would be cognitive dissonance for them. Plus, Grace, everything’s edited to make it sound better. They clearly have left out the parts where the women miss their kids’ birthdays because they are making ‘very important presentations to very important clients,’ where the women cry because it’s just all too much, where the women get divorced because their husbands never get laid.”

“True, true,” I say, laughing. “I know the grass always seems greener. I have to realize it’s probably not as rosy as the article professes it to be. But it would be nice to see women like myself represented respectfully sometimes. The only models of stay-at-home moms are in magazines about how to make the most ghoulish Halloween door wreath on the block.”

“Fair enough. So let’s assume you do want to find another job, does your plan have a provision for that?”

“Ha ha, no. But I’m just gonna keep my ears open. I’m planning on going on Craigslist, Mediabistro, and a couple other sites to see what kind of freelance writing jobs are out there,” I say as I practically moan over how delicious my cheesy, gooey crepe is. “By the way, if any of your patients’ parents let slip during an exam that they’re looking to hire a writer, be sure to give them my name.”

Cameron is a pediatrician. After we graduated from Penn, she continued on to Harvard Med and then to Boston Children’s Hospital for her residency. Now in private practice on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—I’ve always liked the way that sounded—she is the most sought-out pediatrician of the Park Avenue mommy set. They love her bedside manner, they love that she has separate well- and sick-visit waiting rooms with BPA-free toys, and they love that despite her long hours she still manages to work in either Louboutins or Jimmy Choos. It makes them feel like she understands them better.