Tessa came into Emily’s office that afternoon.
“How’s it going?” Emily asked her.
Tessa closed her eyes briefly before opening them again. “How often do you think is too often to leave your kid with a babysitter?”
“Do you think you’re leaving Zoe with a babysitter too often?” Emily asked back.
Tessa shrugged. “Chris and I hadn’t been going out at all, as a couple, you know. And I thought maybe if I went out with him more on the weekends, it might be good for us. But the stuff he’s doing—day drinking at a ball game, going out with his coworkers to a rooftop bar—it’s not stuff we can bring Zoe to, or we could, but it would change the vibe and we’d probably have to leave early and Chris would hate that, or he’d tell me to leave with her and he’d stay, and I didn’t want that, either. So now she’s with a babysitter for at least some part of every day. And I feel like I’m . . . I’m choosing Chris over her. Is that terrible? Am I terrible?”
Emily felt a surge of envy and reminded herself to take a deep breath. “I think Chris is pressuring you to make a choice that puts you in a terrible position.” She tried to keep her own feelings neutral. She wanted to help Tessa, she felt for Tessa. But she was also, she realized, jealous of Tessa, whose body had produced a beautiful baby girl without even trying. “Have you talked to Chris about any of this?”
Tessa nodded. “Sort of. I tried hinting once that maybe he could come home earlier and be with her while I’m studying—I wouldn’t feel quite so bad that way—and his suggestion was that we ask one of our moms to keep Tessa until I finished school.”
“How did that make you feel?” Emily asked, keeping her face unreadable, even though it felt like a vise was squeezing her heart. Having this conversation with Tessa right now seemed almost cruel.
Tessa pulled the tips of her hair in front of her eyes, examining her split ends. “Like he doesn’t really care if she’s around. Or maybe worse, doesn’t actually want her around. He said it’s not true, just that he wants things to be easier for me, but I don’t know. It’s not like she’s a box of sweaters we can leave in my mom’s basement. She’s an actual person, our baby, and it would change her relationship with us if we asked one of our moms to take care of her until May. But I don’t want to dismiss his ideas, either.” She looked up at Emily. “What do you think?”
Emily smiled slightly, sadly, but didn’t say anything. There was a brief silence in the room until: “You want me to figure out what I think,” Tessa said.
“You got me,” Emily answered. She was glad she’d been able to keep her voice steady when saying that, because all she could think about was the unfairness of it all. That she and Ezra had everything they needed to take care of a baby and they didn’t have one, and then here was Tessa whose boyfriend was making it clear that they weren’t ready for a baby, and perhaps didn’t even really want one but had one regardless.
While Tessa kept talking, Emily wondered if this job made her take herself out of the equation too often, tamp down her own thoughts and feelings and opinions too much. She was always waiting for other people to decide how they felt, giving them space and helping them figure out their own minds, and ignoring her own. She’d been trained to be objective, to be patient, which were good traits in general, but she wondered if sometimes it put her in a strange role in her marriage. The way she’d been trained to interact bled into her relationship with her husband. It created a situation in which Ezra expected her to be a wife who comforted him, and usually she could be. But sometimes, when she was the one who was hurting, she didn’t have the emotional strength to comfort him. She couldn’t be anything more than a wounded woman who needed comforting herself.