Life made a path around the wanting.
I was the birthday rememberer, the gift giver, the card sender, the one who knows every gesture to the “Little Bunny Foo Foo” song. I was the weekend entertainer: Movies! Arcades! Putt-putt golf! Bubbles! I was the one cheering on the sidelines. The one to dance, to giggle, to put on her bathing suit and slip and slide on the banana slide, try the roller blades, the skateboard, be silly in a way a mother can’t always be.
I was the listener for mothers who worried. The listener to their children too.
Annilee, at eight on an overnight at our house, tells me her struggles with making mistakes in her schoolwork and getting mad. I say, “It’s okay to get mad.” And I say more about perfection and that anger is normal, but it’s what we do with it that’s important. She says, “Oh,” and then she tells me the whole plot of a movie she loved. Later, Leanne says, “Thank you. She told me you said it was okay. Even though I told her that too. It meant something coming from you.”
Raphael, the fifteen-year-old son of our Swiss friends, shares his first broken heart while we hike in the Alps. I tell him about the care we must take with broken hearts, and later his mother says she’s relieved he talked to me because he’s been so quiet. Many years later he will invite us to his wedding and seat Bill and me at the head table and call us his American parents.
His sister Jessica, at five, stares up at my long dark hair and said, “Elle est belle,” and I feel beautiful. At sixteen she asks to live with us for a summer so she can practice her English and begins to speak with me of more than the simple things.
Our niece Christy is sixteen when her mom calls and says, “Please come and talk to her. Something has happened and she won’t tell me.” I go to her house and her mother lets me in. I knock on her bedroom door, and Christy lets me in. We sit on the edge of her bed. She tells me about what has happened, what has hurt her, and then we go to her mother.
Our nephew Jared is eight when asked to rate his day on a scale of one to ten, and he says, “You mean I get to pick?” I nod, as surprised by this idea as he is. I say, “Yes, of course, you decide.” He says, “It’s a ten. Why wouldn’t every day be a ten?”
Why wouldn’t it? I get to pick.
“I want a new job,” I said.
“Yes,” Bill said. “Do it.”
“I want to cut back on work and go to school for a master’s degree.”
“Yes! Go for it.”
“Let’s take that class together.”
“Let’s teach this class together.”
“Let’s build a house.”
“Yes! Let’s do it.”
When I was absolutely sure about what I wanted, Bill was all in too. He met my enthusiasm, celebrated my clarity.
In 1995, we moved into the house of my design with two bedrooms, and a great room with windows that took full advantage of the view to the old cedars out back.
Two of Bill’s aunts whispered and nodded when they saw the small alcove off the master bedroom. “This would be a good room for a baby.” We had already filled that room: treadmill, stationary bike, free weights.
I picked a cupboard in the great room for toys and books and crayons and paper, stickers and glitter and glue. This is where the fun starts! The front of our refrigerator filled with drawings and school pictures until the magnets could not hold.
Now it was Cris’s girls, Alyson and Devin, who came from Condon for weekend visits. The sound of these two laughing together filled the rooms of our new home.
We’d designed the house with a private space for guests. Over the years, nieces and nephews grew to young adulthood and would need a place to stay while they worked a city summer job before college, or saved for their own place. They would use this space for temporary living, and we would become a temporary family.
At night we stood in the bathroom before the big mirror. Me at my sink, Bill at his. We brushed our teeth. I ran water on my face, took a towel to pat it dry. Looked at us in the mirror. His hair grayer. Small lines around my eyes.
“It’s probably good we didn’t have kids,” I said. “That poor baby’s nose.”
He stopped brushing, “What?” He looked worried. This again.
I was showing him, it’s okay. “Each of us on our own, our noses are just prominent.” You see, I can even joke about it now. “But if you put us together, that kid could have had a honker.”
The desire aged and shifted in me. I was thirty-nine, forty, forty-one. My arms had once wanted an infant to hold; now my legs wanted a toddler to chase; then it was a longing for a five-year-old learning to make jokes, a ten-year-old speaking logic, a twelve-year-old awkward and still wanting to play. Each age became the age I loved best.
The child I didn’t have grew in this place of possibility, the place where ungiven love is held. Here also, I kept a part of myself back from Bill, the part that could have witnessed him as a father, been witnessed as a mother. My ungiven love wrapped tightly around a stone of resentment that rested on one side of a scale, hidden even from myself: a scale that measured who had done more, who had given up more for the other.