butter pecan cupcakes

THE recipe

Serves: surly wedding guests who don’t like you and confused ones who love you but don’t understand why you’re vomiting

Pair with: being late

INGREDIENTS

vanilla cupcake mix and required ingredients

chopped pecans

butter pecan flavoring

(Forget icing)

THE QUICK AND THE DIRTY

Ask someone else to make them for you because you VERY LATE for something else.

Have an anxiety attack, peppered with guilt.

Serve.

(Where’s the icing? Shit.)

THE ESSAY

It is the day before the ceremonial wedding that Able and I have been killing ourselves to pay for and plan, respectively. Of course, there is not enough time in the day. I have baked two dozen butter pecan cupcakes that I have asked Able and one of my bridesmaids to top with cake pulls and icing while I am an hour north, going through the trial run for hair and makeup alone. 

In the HBO series Six Feet Under, when protagonists Nate and Brenda finally marry, Brenda has recently suffered a miscarriage. Because the miscarriage happens only days before the wedding, she cannot schedule her D&C prior to the ceremony. She goes through the wedding with her dead baby inside her and is miserable the entire time. When I watched this, a couple of months after Able’s and my wedding but years before I became a birth-giving parent, I understood in small way how she felt.

It wasn’t just pretending to be happy while ushering in the public status of my new family and ignoring the death of what used to be my family.  It was a real and genuine bit of happiness, dinged up and dented by the rest of my life refusing to pause just for this one moment.  It was a little bit of trying to take an infinite number of treasured private and public moments—both those that had already happened and those yet to happen—and trying to stretch them out and parade them in front of the limited number of people I knew at that time and who were available on that specific date, at that specific time, in that specific place.  It felt almost sacrilegious and a little bit like reading my own poetry aloud in a crowded high school cafeteria.  

***

 “Can I write ‘I promise to always treat you like my mistress—and not my spouse.’?” I text my dear friend, Miriam.

She laughs, or rather informs me that she does, but avoids the question.  We move on to other topics. Mentally, I push the issue. I think, just this month, my partner and I have gotten into several not-quite-small (and pretty out-of-character) arguments. In my brain, I know that eighty percent of our arguments are due to the stress of my studying for the bar, his demanding work schedule, the lack of air conditioning in our sweltering house, and the implosion of my parents’ toxic marriage. But, in my heart... I worry.

Are we destined for the same path? Am I inherently unlovable and likely to repel this relationship as well? Was I conceived in a bad marriage and, therefore, doomed to fail in my own?

Most of our fighting has fluttered about the frustrating minutia of domestic life.  Having spent the last six years of our relationship long distance, my brain knows it is a blessing to fight with him over the price of organic frozen vegetables and whether a bi-monthly, forty-five minute drive to Trader Joe’s is reasonable. (It is; and, yet, upon my revisiting this essay six years later, we never adopted this bi-monthly chore.)

Lurking beneath every unresolved argument lies the compromise of compromises, the one ever more razor sharp as my parents’ marriage crumbles: my abandonment of my family to live in my partner’s state—the guilt, resentment, and alienation that consumes me for not being there (and not wanting to be there) through their divorce. I’m embarrassed to admit how many times I’ve thrown this in his face to win an argument.

“I don’t really want to drive forty-five minutes to go grocery shopping, babe,” my partner moans.

“Well, I didn’t really want to move over a thousand miles from my parents, sister, and nieces and nephews for you but,” I shrug accusatorily and then refuse to feel any emotion whatsoever on the forty-five minute drive to the grocery store. 

I am a true delight.

***

I try to think of how couples first treat each other when they initially pair off, the respectful breathing room we give to new love because we understand that we do not really know this new but wonderful person. We allow the new lover to act, rather than predict how they will. We ask them questions rather than assume answers. I try also to bookend that idea with the way disenchanted partners take each other for granted and save up their good moments and good energy for others—perhaps, one day for their mistresses.

In 2015, I’m acutely aware of this behavior when I return to my hometown periodically throughout the year. My homecoming is obvious to anyone with the misfortune to speak to me. I snap at people’s heels like a rabid Pomeranian. Everyone at Publix is an idiot, and no one knows how to drive. In fact, people who tailgate or do not utilize their turn signals should be put in solitary confinement while all the death row inmates I’ve helped to represent are set free. The world is unjust and disgusting; and, I am filled with venom. I’m embarrassed of my short temper when I’m home. It is uncharacteristic of my normally calm temperament; it is because I’m exercising all of my patience—and then some—on my divorcing parents.

My parents had been unhappily married for almost thirty years, separating every few years, with one moving into the guest room but never out of the house. Even in their so-called happy times, my mother slept on the living room sofa. The earliest time I remember their having separated was just five years into their marriage. For a long time, I harbored a belief that this was my fault. In a way, it was.

The argument leading to my father’s departure was the result of my tattling on my half-brother, Eric, for lightly kicking my butt as I retrieved a soda from the kitchen. My father’s response to my crocodile tears, which perhaps seemed rational after a few rum and cokes, was to pin my fair-skinned and bony fourteen-year-old brother to the wall with his enormous hand gripping my brother’s adolescent and reddening neck. My mom walked into the kitchen at that moment, just as I had sicced my merciless golem on my brother.

This is just one of the many reasons why my parents’ marriage didn’t work. Some I’ve taken into consideration for my own partnership. One that does not apply to Able and me, however, is that both of my parents each brought two of their own children to their marriage. And, these four children more or less remained the children of either spouse. 

“It’s hard for a man to love kids that aren’t his,” my father said offhandedly to me once, while discussing a boyfriend of my sister Barbie, a mother of four. 

My father’s children and my mother’s children had different rules. They were disciplined differently. They were given gifts disparately. They were loved separately. I was a real conundrum, then, when I arrived by accident to my supposedly infertile mother.

After I’ve had a glass too many of wine (and I’m in a particularly self-pitying mood), I sometimes wonder if I wasn’t the worst thing that happened to my parents’ marriage. Both half-hearted Catholics, they had each been forced to marry at young ages due to accidental pregnancies. My oldest brother and sister were each born to teenaged couples forced to play house with real lives. At 17, my industrious and clever father dropped out of high school to work fulltime to support his new sixteen-year-old wife and infant daughter. My brilliant but sad musician mom, at almost 19, was unable to attend college, despite having taken college classes in high school. Several years later, my parents met each other at a bar on St. Patrick’s Day. My tan, dark-haired father was there to pick up the bartender for a date. My pretty, red-haired mom spilled green-dyed beer on him, made him dance to Bob Seger with her, and he left with her instead. 

By then, they were entering their late twenties. My mother was officially divorced; my father was in the middle of finalizing his. I like to think they each bonded over the fact that they had two children, one boy and one girl. I imagine my mom enchanting him in the same way that my half-sister Cory captivates everyone she meets, all motion and fast speech—the human equivalent of cocaine. I imagine my father singing her Eric Clapton, a musician not allowed in my adult home, as he would do in good years in the future. 

My dear, you look wonderful tonight.

My mother, having had to notify her ex-husband of their divorce through the newspaper, took her first divorce personally. She never speaks of him, except to say that he was probably mentally ill. For a decade afterward, when she went to church, she refused to get communion. 

“I’m not allowed,” she told me meekly. 

“But didn’t your husband, like, beat you or something?” I asked, incredulous and obviously sympathetic at twelve. 

She paused, “He was not a nice man.” 

Much later, as a young woman in the future, I listened as my grandmother talked through my parents’ divorce. She emphatically declared my mom finally deserves happiness while shaking her head about how, during that first marriage, my mom would come back to her family home with bruises and black eyes. She stayed with her first husband until she feared he would hurt her children. That was all that made her leave. 

My parents wed very quickly, to my grandmother’s dismay. My four half-siblings stood up as bridesmaids and groomsmen. There used to be a photo of it in a picture frame I bought for my mother one Mother’s Day; it went ominously missing from the frame in my childhood house, another casualty to my father’s rum-fueled cleansings. It is now another missing photo from a childhood I have to piece together with dim memories.

Once, my half-sister Cory, while brushing my hip-length black, pin-straight hair, used to say, “You’re the one that binds us together. You’re the only one who’s related to everyone.” 

In a burst of anger while fighting with my father the summer before my wedding, trying to explain why it’s so difficult to maintain relationships with my estranged half-siblings, I slipped and said, “I’m half someone everyone hates.” 

My life has represented both the incarnate union that bonded my parents and their children together as a family and also the powerful alienation that comes with the fundamental truth that my existence represents the end of two respective families. Both the roles of peacemaking savior and extinguisher of last hope for reunification were put on me. In the end, I was the cement that encased two drowning persons together, probably too fearful of a second failed marriage to leave each other before any more significant damage could be done. If the mental health of your grown children is a litmus test for the toxicity of your marriage, then my parents’ union was undeniably carcinogenic. We all struggle with depression, various addictions, and, most profoundly, a nearly insurmountable handicap in how to love and be loved, how to fight respectfully, and how to forgive. On the other hand, we are all fiercely independent, highly skilled at verbal assault, and excellent couponers.

It’s no wonder I brought a lot of baggage to our wedding.

***

Because it was important to me (and my partner lovingly obliged), we wrote our own wedding vows. Doing this while my parents divorced made the post mortem of their marriage my favorite masochistic pastime. Reflecting on the shards of their marriage consumed me, draining my self-worth and any enjoyment of my own impending marriage.

I had been writing my vows in my head for the better part of the last decade I dated Able—sometimes to explicitly spite the couples I hated around us who couldn’t possibly feel as much as we did and sometimes because our relationship left me bursting with something my small, calloused heart still cannot contain. There were snippets of thought floating around in my head. But writing those down, while packing my mother’s clothes from the guest room and watching my father drink himself to death, was impossible. 

Weeks went by, and what I had always thought would be my favorite part of our wedding—finally putting words to the wordless bond we had built—became an insurmountable task. Ultimately, I turned to the Internet. I felt like a failure. My favorite activity had once been to proclaim our partnership’s perfection, the real life version of perfection, anyway, with curled-up edges, ink smudges, and a stray fingerprint or two of expired Clinique foundation. I used to revel in the gossamer threads of the incomplete thoughts I might one day deem worthy enough to say in front of our loved ones. But now, as the day gets closer and I am the solitary witness, and future casualty, to the bloody war between my parents, I am silent. Even in my mind, where I speak smoothly but wildly at a thousand words per second, I am silent. There are no words in me anymore.

I knew: I had to plagiarize my vows.

To say that I—the written word pharaoh of emotional yet exacting text—had writer’s block is incorrect. I knew, in nebulous form, what I wanted to say. But the emotional and exacting words that went with those nebulous ideas weren’t accessible. How could I attach the right words to the concept that my partner is more than my boyfriend, fiancé, and secret husband but also my Xanax, my mood stabilizer, my heart mender, and my emotional mentor? How could I ascribe language, succinct and un-alienating language at that, that shows that his love and friendship and care has done more for my heart and my mental health than the equivalent of a hundred million worker-bee robots descending upon ancient ruins only to mend them so that they become whole and gleaming once more? 

Accessing these words, and the feelings that come with them, meant tearing down the wall I built when my dad disowned me and the slow cascade of losing the rest of his family started. I couldn’t do it.

With the impending wedding, it was so easy to feel nothing. My extensive to-do lists kept me robotic and unfeeling between spells of weakness, when I would cry over my weight, a few friends’ delayed RSVPs that ultimately read no, and my own lack of sleep. Whenever I began to feel something real—if, perhaps, the photographer wanted me to pick a time for family photos—then I could simply immerse myself in, say, what we should put in the customized welcome bags. If I did feel something beyond stress, I could only access anger and hatred.

I hated both of my parents for deliberately choosing the only event I ever asked them to attend for me as the backdrop of their insanity. Our wedding was the culmination of a decade of fantasy and dreaming, the one life event to which I unabashedly looked forward. I sifted through wedding magazines in the early years of our relationship while meeting my closest friends at Barnes & Noble on holiday breaks. In inevitable moments of naive weakness, I told my mom our evolving wedding colors every year so that she jokingly bought me a book entitled, My Vintage Wedding, for my twenty-second birthday—five years before I would marry Able. I loved fantasizing about our wedding. It was a refuge during times of boredom and stress. I reveled in thinking about it so much that I, on more than one occasion, feared our actually getting married because what will I fantasize about afterward? 

My parents’ divorce—divorce is such a small word for what actually happened—was finalized the day before our public wedding ceremony. The word ‘divorce’ brings to mind ABC Family movies with ultimately happy endings, arguments over how many trees will have to be decorated at Divorced Christmas, mildly tense interactions at soccer matches, and G-Rated spats in the kitchen. 

My parents’ divorce was like a nuclear bomb, with hundreds of escalating but forcibly forgotten battles that led up to it. It was the only logical conclusion for two people who could not stand to be in the same room as one another for the past few years, but one my father decided to take as a surprise. 

My father, who both refused to inform my mother of his latest open-heart surgery and would not allow her to visit him in the ICU, was enraged by mother’s moving out. As long as she had remained in the house, he would reprimand me for my visible irritation with her unstable mood swings. But once she left, he would interrogate me every time I spoke to her. He accused me of hiding her boyfriend from him, despite knowing that I rarely speak to her. He accused her of multiple affairs and me of knowing about them all. 

When I spoke to her, she told me of the danger she felt around him, how she was terrified to return to get even her clothes from the house. She would tell me she was sorry she hadn’t left him sooner. 

He would demand to know whether I thought she was right in leaving him. He made my brother choose between my mother and him. 

She told me she was excited to bring her boyfriend to the wedding. 

He demanded to know whether her “fuck boy” would be coming to the wedding. 

The officiant, my paternal aunt, Cleo, demanded that my mother’s boyfriend not attend unless I wanted to break up a physical assault and, perhaps, battery. 

When I am home and I go anywhere with my father, he drives slowly by my mom’s work, looking for her car. He told me, the last time I was home, to take anything I wanted from the house because he wanted to burn it down rather than let her have it.

“Some days, I really think I’m going to get a call from the police or my sister and it’s going to be that my dad has murdered my mom and grandma and then killed himself,” I tell Able in the quiet dark of our bedroom.

“Your dad wouldn’t do that,” he lies comfortingly.

“That’s what everyone says after something like that happens,” I mumble, trying to remember how many guns my father still owns, the damaged door after my mother moved out, the way my sister said he told her that he was afraid she would have to bail him out of jail because he was so angry with my mother. “Did you think he was going to try to hit me when I went home in May?”

My partner is quieter still. “No.”

My point settles uncomfortably like a shadow in the corner, watching us.

My parents’ divorce destroyed any joy I had for the wedding. Their recklessness and merciless cruelty toward each other infected everyone around them. Their divorce attracted the worst in everyone around us, like the stench of decay attracts flies. I dreaded having to bear them in the same room, so that when my father—in a fit of completely irrational rage—disowned me over voicemail, the next emotion I felt after heartache was pure relief. But it was only temporary. 

A couple of weeks before the wedding, I received a superficially apologetic text (“I’m sorry I said your not my daughter”) and an invitation to have me disinvite him from the wedding in writing under the guise of understanding. At the time, I thought maybe we would recover from his actions. I thought the best course of action was to encourage him to come and give him the space to try to heal things with me. Of course, that didn’t happen. He didn’t think he had done anything wrong, and Aunt Cleo encouraged that mentality. But, before I knew how things would turn out, I was wrestling with my own guilt over how much I was starting to hate my parents for destroying the one day I had put so much effort into, so much money into, so much of myself into. Instead, I just built up the wall some more.

“Of course, you can come to the wedding,” I texted. “What do you want to eat?”

“Anything but vegetarian,” his text responded, immediately letting me know that he had thrown away the twenty-dollar invitation, which hadn’t listed a vegetarian option.

***

In retrospect, I had been trying to say my vows all week before our wedding but I just couldn’t quite get to them. They were just beyond the wall, just barely out of reach so that my fingertips brushed against them again and again when my bridesmaids and friends, bursting with happiness for me, tried unsuccessfully to coax my heart out of safety. I think I’m ready to talk about them now.

There was one specific story that I really wanted to capture but ultimately could not . . . because the Definitely Not Writer’s Block I had was the refusal to let myself feel too deeply, to thaw. My heart was tucked safely away in an unreachable place, until the storm passed. By getting into this story, I would be plucking my heart from that soft, comfortable space where it slept, free from the emotional blackmail and the casual knife-throwing of my family, and exposing its raw and recent tears to cold air and salt water. I was not strong enough for that.

But, now, time has passed. Somewhat. In my first draft of this essay, we are nearly two months out from the day I so desperately wanted to enjoy but ultimately did not. The pressures have mostly subsided. I’m eating carbs. I never have to engage with the relatives who hurled vicious words and threats at each other for blood sport. It’s over. I have the quietness, once more, that I had for ten years: our home, now a physical place in addition to a state of being.  As I edit this, it’s now six years past even that, and the ice has given way to green moss.

Growing up, I couldn’t have imagined this kind of warm and comfortable home. I never lived under the delusion that my parents were in love with one another, even though I remember them touching each other all the time. They had a sexual relationship but not an intimate one. They constantly misjudged each other. My parents don’t bring out the best in each other; they never have. They may have loved each other sometimes, but they don’t speak the same language and never bothered to learn each other’s in order to forge something new. They were two very broken people whose shards ended up grating into each other and festering instead of mending together. In my darker moments, I believe they got together out of convenience—two wounded and too young single parents—and stayed together out of obligation—a new baby (me). 

I remember clearly one of the many moments I fell in love with my partner; there are so many, but I think this was the first time. I cannot even write it even now without, at this very moment, blinking back the tears in my eyes. When I met my partner, we were teenagers. I had fled my hometown, moving across the country to start over anywhere else. It wasn’t an easy choice. I left everyone I knew, everything I knew. I also left my terminally ill father and my mentally unstable mother, although I was too ashamed to ever speak of the latter back then.

When my parents left me in New England, I was positive that my father would die while I was gone, which meant something to me then because, as I’d once said to my mother to justify my father’s violent temper and escalating cruelty, “Better any dad than dead dad.” 

At this time, I was so sure that I could recreate my life with only thought. I was sure that I could fix the handicapped love I was getting from my parents and half-siblings by simply needing less from them. I had discovered the real problem at the root of my broken family: me. If, instead of needing anything from them, I could leave and only return for a few weeks at a time where I could exert my months of saved-up helpfulness and lovingness then things could be, well, not perfect, but certainly nothing too painful to discuss in public. I presented myself as a preppy, well-adjusted, smart teen. I presented my family as normal, wacky but normal. We were less Running with Scissors the book and more Running with Scissors the movie.

When I met my partner, he was quiet and wonderful. He was smart and observant and not freaked out or dampened by my morbid humor. He was “clean,” in that way that a well-loved child sometimes just conjures up images of luxury brand laundry detergent and fresh-cut vegetables. But he didn’t make me feel dirty and broken in contrast, like almost every other clean-cut boy did. My partner has a flawless undercurrent of sarcasm and cynicism and candor that almost immediately helped me come to terms with my own fragmented sense of self. My partner is a live oak. He is clean and wonderful and weathered and still fits perfectly in his surroundings. And he is quiet without being judgmental (to me). He is calm and soothing in the wind and rain but also a comfort for when there is too much sun, which can be hard for this pale-skinned girl. 

None of this, yet, is the moment I first fell in love with my partner. These are the things you have to know and understand before that moment. Although he had alluded in the intense 9-day friendship that preceded our relationship to the fact that he’d lost his father a year and a half before, it had never been a discussion, like it would become regularly. When he finally confirmed it, he said so without looking at me, while showing me a video that his older brother had compiled of their family videos and old family photos. 

I almost never cry. I do not cry at funerals. I do not cry when I am yelled at. I do not cry when I hurt myself. I do not cry when I am frustrated. Before the months that preceded our wedding, I only cried when Aisha Tyler’s character died in Ghost Whisperer or when being told to throw my coffee out in the courthouse. But when the love of my life—whom I will never, ever deserve and am so happy to have tricked the universe into letting me have even for this short amount of time (but it better goddamn be longer than this)—showed me that video and pointed to the photo of his dad holding his little sister as a toddler and casually said, as if everyone would without hesitation be this way, “And that’s my sister, we have to look out for her even more now,” I lost my mind. 

Tears spilled over my lashes in the most embarrassing fury of hot heartbreak that I was immediately mortified. But I couldn’t stop them. I have never, to this day, wished more acutely to take someone else’s pain and hold it for them for a little while. And, because love is never truly selfless: I saw in that moment how big and deep his heart is, how loyal and profound, how almost mythical in his commitment to his family. I wanted to love like that and be loved like that and create a family where love like that is the norm. I felt like I was being presented with a lush and ripe orange after having grown up on canned beans and unseasoned rice and thoroughly imagined anticipation of citrus based upon old botany illustrations for the last seventeen years.

***

The first time he spent the night, we slept on top of my annoying roommate’s bed, my hand inside the kangaroo pocket of his Etnies hoodie.  I don’t remember what we talked about, except that I felt at home in my cold, linoleum-tiled dorm with him there.  At some point in the early morning, he crept outside to go to the bathroom.  He didn’t know how to leave the door open with its dead bolt, so he just disappeared, swallowed back up in the world from which I had stolen him.  I immediately felt robbed.

The following year, I finagled a single room out of the university.  For weeks, every night, I asked him to sleep over on my Twin XL bed until it became the unspoken norm: crawling into my JC Penny bed-in-a-bag set, falling asleep to Jack Williams telling us the local news, Able falling into the crevice between the mattress and the wall, my learning to cope with his ungodly snoring.

Two years after that, we would regularly drive to a nearby coastal suburb and look at the houses every Sunday and any other day that I was sad, which ended up being a lot of days.  We imagined our future house.  We imagined our future kids, maybe. 

During our first summer apart, I often felt like I couldn’t breathe.  I felt like Able was a dream I had.  I worked two jobs to keep busy, and I called him every night after leaving my waitressing job.  We talked until I fell asleep.

When he visited, I tried so hard to make time stop, an impossible feat that I nonetheless tried every time.  Every night, I pushed my eyes to stay open, to steal twenty more minutes, maybe an hour, that I would miss when he left.

The first time I brought him back to the airport, I dragged my feet at the gate with him until he, really, though, had to go.  And, then, in public, I lost it.  I sobbed hysterically, ugly hiccupping sobs that got worse the more I tried to muffle them.  Someone’s grandfather rushed up to me and made to touch my shoulder, but stopped, and said, “It will be okay.  You’ll see him again.”

I also resented how much I loved Able.  I liked the branding of the Independent Woman (read: Second Wave Feminist) who said things like, “I am too young to seriously date,” and, “I will be Dr. before Mrs.”  I also loved the casual cruelty and aloofness in single-mindedly saying, “I don’t do long-distance relationships,” to the kindest person I ever met with whom I would do a long-distance relationship for the next decade.  Back then, and until I probably turned thirty, I equated casual emotional cruelty with character strength and objectivity.  And, so, I dumped Able several times that first summer apart, usually after 10 p.m., still in my sweet tea-stained work clothes, and the next day we pretended nothing happened.

If I were open about how much I loved Able (and I was wild for him), I would be showing how I wasn’t going to amount to anything in this world.  Young women who love that heedlessly get pregnant fast and burn out at minimum-wage jobs.  I was supposed to “go somewhere.”  As if Able and our relationship were not a boon to my heart, my mental health, and my general life experience, I often felt the need to play down our relationship to the real adults around us, many of whom were not truly invested in my future but were quick to categorize me as not worth a true investment because I would soon be too-quickly-wed.  

I was desperate to prove that I would not embark on the same teen pregnancy path that both my parents and Barbie had gone down.  I was desperate for the approval of every teacher, every boss, every person I met.  I also wanted friends, most of whom at that age—our early twenties now—were not interested in quiet relationships that regularly involved the movie theatre, gelatinous Chinese food, and obsessively fantasizing about our in the way-way-way-future wedding.  But, inevitably, what I wanted with Able would win out.  Or, rather, the life we were already building was always there every time those Things I was Supposed to Do™ proved to be unfulfilling or worse.

I didn’t see it then but our relationship was a quiet rebellion that few would understand.  The first time I was educated on this situation came around 2010 when a mildly famous sex and relationship therapist interviewed me as part of a book she was then writing.  She had been a donor at my then-job and was fascinated by stray comments I had made here and there about Able and our approach to gender equity in our relationship.  Back then, pre marriage, pre disparate incomes, pre child, I almost laugh to imagine what could have possibly tripped us up on gender equity.  But, I guess because we split the cost of my birth control, we were an oddity to her. 

I didn’t do Able’s laundry when we first lived together, partially because his mother did it for free.  There is crass joke I’m too ineloquent to make somewhere here beneath the surface on how “gender equality,” as defined by Second Wave Feminism, seems to always involve white women benefiting from the work of unpaid, immigrant female labor.  I also wasn’t “good” at laundry in that I let it pile up for at least a month and sometimes just bought new underwear rather than drag all my clothes to the laundromat.  And, even when I did the laundry, I sometimes encountered shocking life lessons, like that bleach should be used with a detergent and not in place of detergent unless you want red eyes for a week.

I didn’t do much, if any, cooking when we first lived together, largely because we both never learned to cook.  Able did not cook much because he insisted on asking me how to do things, like cook chicken, and was tired of me asking him if I looked like Google, which is exactly what I would have to do if I had to “cook” the chicken.  My extra x chromosome didn’t imbue with cooking knowledge, and I wasn’t afraid to point that out.  We ate a lot of pizza and Chinese and Chili’s and dips repurposed as meals.

Able suffered no preconception that I should be some sort of sex pot and servant when we were dating.  That was revolutionary to my geriatric coworkers.  What I find revolutionary about Able and me in those early days is that we were relatively unflinchingly honest with each other, even when we weren’t with the outside world.  We established a haven between each other where, bit by bit, we could be just us and—most of the time—feel enough.

Loving Able is easy.  Living with him is easy.  We fit together and work together seamlessly on our own, and we pretty quickly adapt when the outside world changes the terrain.  I am so glad I didn’t internalize (more) the messaging that an intense and serious romantic relationship is inherently bad when you are very young.  Able drove me to the LSAT the first time I took it, and where would I have put my phone if not with him?  Surely, I wouldn’t have become a lawyer without him.

***

Able used to sometimes sing the Beach Boys, when I had complained too much about the dorms or our shitty first apartment or how too short our trips together were when I left New England:

Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older?

Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long

And wouldn’t it be nice to live together

in the kind of world where we belong?

You know it’s gonna make it that much better

When we can say goodnight and stay together

 I’ve been thinking for a while now that it’s wild that we finally have the things we used to dream about.  I am so endlessly grateful that I go to bed every night next to you in a home that belongs to us, even though more often than not, a murderous chihuahua sleeps between us and an ornery greyhound wakes us up too early, and a persnickety baby often requires our attention in-between.  

And so, it struck me, piercingly, that we’re living the good years now, and I should start trying to steal those twenty minutes and an hour here and there to keep in my pocket in the future, even though, as we have explicitly discussed, we plan to die on the same day when we’re one-hundred-and-nine.

I don’t cry hysterically now when Able and I have to be apart (just when I write essays like this), but I have found that I rather despise my trips away from him such that I don’t plan anything beyond a day trip here and there now.  We waited so long to build our warm little home together, I rather resent anyone who asks me to break away from it for too long. 

When I look back on how I used to believe that divulging how deeply and consumingly I loved Able made me seem weak, unambitious, or a bit daft, I think it is just the funniest joke.  Loving someone like this is the scariest thing I’ve ever done.  Yes, loving Able feels easy and comfortable, but it also requires that I show up, as a whole person capable of feeling and allowing myself to be loved, which is not easily said and done when you have a high trauma background.  And, it also requires that, in order to accept all the beautiful highs of the relationship and life-building, I also know that I am living without those walls that protect (and isolate) all your soft tissues.

In Gaelic, my name means brave.  That also seemed like such a funny joke for someone who grew up terrified of thunderstorms and elevators and spiders and undiagnosed heart conditions and planes and driving uphill and so many more things.

One of the times that I dumped Able, and one of the times that he chose to ignore our breakup, he met me in D.C. at a job fair.  After I got one attractive offer, I blew off the rest of my interviews, put on his thermal undershirt from the day before, and spent the afternoon with him.  We got hot drinks (a coffee for me, hot chocolate for him), and we walked through an old cemetery.  The stairs on which we walked were also a monument, and they said, “For my Beloved, You were the best thing that ever happened to me.”  Upon seeing it, I erupted into tears.  We did not formally get back together, but we did get engaged shortly thereafter.

There are so many moments in which I realized that Able had my heart that it sometimes feels like I gave him one heart, grew another one, and gave that one to him again, repeating the process over and over and over throughout the years.  I am old enough to know that is brave but young enough to keep doing it without batting an eye.

I guess it is fitting that we had to throw our performative wedding on Halloween.  Able, you terrify and complete me.