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Megan's fussing. I can hear her on the baby monitor. I wake up confused. I'm in bed. I haven't slept in the bed in months. How did I end up here? I roll off the bed, look at the clock. It’s five oh six. Oh god, I hope she will go back to sleep. As I walk down to her room, I figure I must have fallen asleep on the bed watching TV. It's ridiculous how we do this every night. Bill watches TV in the living room and I watch in our bedroom. Then when we're ready to go to sleep we switch. He takes the bed and I take the couch. Not that he hasn't offered to sleep on the couch, a lot.
Most of the time when Megan wakes up in the middle of the night, after I feed her I just lie down on the carpet in her room. After Bill realized I was doing that, he blew up the air mattress and set it in there. Sheets, blankets, everything. And I did try to sleep on it, but I just hate the air mattress.
I pick Megan up out of her crib and she stops fussing, but now she is frantic, clawing at my pajama top. As soon as I sit on the glider, and get her latched on, she calms down. It calms me down too, somehow.
I didn't want to tell Bill I didn't like the air mattress, on a certain level, I appreciated the effort. The fact that he noticed and tried to do something. But on another level, I'm like, yeah, nice try, not nearly enough. I know he would do anything to make things right again. He's asked me over and over. But I have no idea what to tell him.
It's very calm in the house, most of the time. He doesn't want to do anything to upset me. Anything I ask him to do gets done fast. His procrastinating used to make me nuts. Now I just want us to be normal again. Except when I don't want to ever forgive him and, even if I did, it wouldn't erase what he did, so how can it be normal again?
Megan can nurse really fast now, it is way easier. I pop her off and switch her to the other side. Hopefully she'll just go back to sleep.
How can I even consider forgiving him? He doesn't deserve it. I can't really forgive him, not really, I don't think I can. I would just be doing it for the girls. So we could be a family. Happy perfect family. Perfectly fake. I know all the stuff they say about forgiveness. About how you do it for yourself not the other person. And I think I could do that, if it was just us. I would walk away and forgive him and start over. The girls make it impossible to walk away. I want what we always planned. I want to stop hurting and carrying this around with me all the time.
I realize Megan is done and asleep. She has fallen off me with her mouth open. I kiss her little hand, and her little forehead, and put her back in the crib.
I go back to the bedroom and get into the bed. When Bill slides his arm around me, I am stunned. I didn't even realize he was there when I got up. I guess I just assumed, when he found me asleep on the bed, he tucked me in and went to sleep on the couch. He snuggles up against me, I can feel him breathing on the back of my neck. I am frozen, we haven't touched each other in months. He feels really good, in a familiar sort of way. But the other part of me is horrified I'm even considering it.
"Lauri," he whispers, and I start crying.
I haven't let him see me cry since that first night, when I told him I knew. He turns me towards him and kisses my face, kisses the tears off my face. It seems like a long time, I cry and he kisses me. When I finally stop crying, he reaches over me and grabs a tissue and hands it to me. I blow my nose, in an awful honking sort of way. Real attractive, I'm sure. There's enough light coming in now, we can see each other, a little bit anyway. I don't know what to do next, I don't know what I want to do next. But when he kisses me again, on the mouth this time, I kiss him back.
