We had been good at parenting together.
That was the thing we had in common when everything else got complicated, the thing we could always come back to, the shared project of raising these specific people well, the daily coordination of it, the logistics and the conversations and the driving and the showing up for the things that needed showing up for. We were a good team. We had teamwork even in the years when we were not particularly good at being a couple, when the couple had been put aside in favor of the parents, which happens without your permission and without your noticing until one day someone asks how you and your husband are doing and you realize you have not thought about that question in months.
And then the project ended and it was just us again.
Not just us the way we were before the children, because you cannot go back to before, the before is a country that no longer exists, the before is a version of two people who had not yet been through everything that changes you, who had not yet failed each other in the small accumulated ways that couples fail each other and either forgive or don’t. We are not the before-people. We are the after-people, standing in a quiet house trying to remember who we are to each other when we are not primarily the parents.
Some evenings it is easy.
Some evenings we are just two people having dinner who genuinely like each other, who have been through enough together that the liking has a depth to it, a texture, a history. Who can sit in silence without the silence being a problem. Who still make each other laugh in the particular way that only the person who knows all your material can make you laugh, who knows the references and the shorthand and the exact moment to use the look that means: we see this the same way.
Other evenings we are strangers in the house who need to find their way back to each other.
And I have learned, slowly, that both of those evenings are the marriage. Not the easy ones only. Not the good years only. The whole of it, the strangers and the known and the long silence and the laugh and the learning each other again, which is the work of a long marriage, the endless re-meeting of a person who keeps becoming someone new and so do you and the two of you keep having to find each other in the new versions.
We are still finding each other.
I think that is the answer. I think that is enough.
