No Happy Endings

by Nora McInerny

  I am happy. And I’m really, really fucking sad.

  I don’t need to worry about anyone else shoulding on me. I’m shoulding all over myself.

  Chapter Four

  I Can’t Even

  You don’t realize how fast and loose people play with meaningful words like “single parent” until the words mean something to you. “I’m a single parent this week,” women in my barre class would sigh, “my husband is traveling for work.” I would wrap my thighs tighter around the blue ball between my legs and try to crush it with my contempt. People will say this on Facebook, on their Instagram stories, or in hurried conversations at the grocery store, asserting their aloneness in a pursuit in which some people are actually, truly alone. I felt, after Aaron died, a burning defensiveness not only for myself, but for truly single parents. Not middle-class wives whose husbands would undoubtedly return home Friday evening for a family night of Chinese takeout and a movie, men who were just a FaceTime away from any unruly children. Not wealthy people with nannies to help with errands and childcare. Not average divorced people who alternated weeks or days with their children. All of these people had an out—a potential break from the tyranny of childrearing, somewhere on the horizon. Truly, truly single parents do not. There is no partner returning on a set day or time, nobody to text when your child is driving you bonkers or reaches a milestone.

  It is just you.

  Pointing out this reality is not something you are allowed to do, or even think about. As mothers, we’re required by an unspoken code to unconditionally support one another. We accept the choices that other mothers make without judgment, we acknowledge that all our experiences and feelings are valid and wish each other well on our individual journeys.

  LOL, yeah right.

  I am fully aware that these thoughts are uncharitable. I don’t know what it’s like to be divorced, or to have a terrible husband, or to feel abandoned in my marriage. Or to even have a husband away on business. The only thing I know is my own experience, and part of every lived experience is a natural amount of judgment and envy, two feelings that are amplified by the difficulties of motherhood. We all want to know that we are doing a good enough job for the small human beings that have been placed in our care, and we are all sure that someone else has it better or is doing a better job.

  One day, in that same barre class, as we did our check-ins and tucked our tails and carved our thighs, I got the full-on dose of perspective I didn’t know I needed. I was squeezing my inflatable ball between my legs, channeling the anger I was feeling that day into a rounder butt, halfheartedly listening to the women around me describe their perfect lives. And then, she spoke. A woman I’d quietly envied—hated, but just a little—for her perfection. She wasn’t talking, she was sobbing. Everything was falling apart and had been for a long time. This class was the only thing she had to look forward to today, or any day. “I’m sorry,” she laughed to herself, wiping her nose on her sweat towel and folding herself back into the version of herself that acted like everything was fine. She offered no further details, and nobody seemed to need them. It was clear by the silence in the room, that we were all starring in the same exact play, just with our own artistic interpretation. We were all doing a great job of pretending that we were fine.

  “I’m sorry,” I said out loud, to her, and to everyone else.

  The stomach flu hit me hard the winter after Aaron died. I put Ralph to bed early, and spent the night in the bathroom, sweating and shivering on the floor between puke sessions. I woke up on the tile floor to the sound of Ralph crying. Even at his sickest, Aaron would have been awake to take his turn on parental duty given my sorry state. But Aaron was dead, and I had nobody to cry out for. “I’m coming, buddy!” I called to Ralphie, and tried to stand. I was too weak and too nauseous to balance on two feet, so I crawled to his bedroom. When he stopped crying, I laid on the floor next to his bed like a dog.

  I was alone, but I hadn’t always been alone. For that reason, single parenthood felt like a badge I wasn’t qualified to wear. Solo Parent, which seemed snappier, seemed to have been claimed by those temporarily abandoned by business travel. What was I, besides a sweaty mother with bad puke breath, laying on her son’s bedroom floor, weeping for the man we’d both lost?

  “We’re widowed moms,” Moe told me over and over, “we’re not normal people anymore.” Moe looks exactly like eighties Jon Bon Jovi: big, curly hair; cut-up T-shirts; tight jeans; big smile. We met in the winter, just after we’d each been widowed. I was just two months out from Aaron’s death. Moe’s husband, Andy, had died by suicide just a few months before Aaron. Loss is what brought us together, and love is what has kept us together. We became each other’s Person: the one to text about our fatherless boys, the one to call in the middle of the night when it felt like the whole world’s sadness was piled on my chest. All of the things I didn’t know how to say, Moe already understood. She knew in the first two seconds of a phone call whether I was calling to laugh, to scream, or to sob uncontrollably. Moe knew what it was like to remember without trying: three chords from an old song brought Andy back to her, lanky and young, dancing in their living room. Moe is a naturally independent person. She can catch and clean her own fish, even though she’s so allergic she has to do so while wearing rubber surgical gloves. She changes her own oil. When something is broken, Moe can fix it herself. If she or Andy got a flat tire, Moe stepped right up. But Moe preferred doing things with Andy. She liked that he made balanced dinners—a carb, a protein, a vegetable—every night, even though her gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian diet made that simple task infinitely more complicated. She liked raising Bronson with Andy, and how they’d established their own little family traditions: morning dances in the kitchen, nightly parades through the house with their dog and cat trailing behind them as they each played an instrument. Moe could do it all on her own, she just didn’t want to.

  I’d removed Aaron’s brain surgery staples and I’d pushed a human being out of my body, but I don’t have Moe’s natural strength and independence. The first time I watched TV after Aaron died, I sat in the basement screaming and crying because there were three remote controls, and I didn’t know what any of them actually controlled. That winter, I sat in the parking lot of a gas station, consulting my car’s manual to learn how to pop the hood and pour in some windshield washer fluid. I’d signed up to do things alone; I didn’t think I could do them.

  I bristled at the admiration people poured my way. “You’re so strong!” “I don’t know how you do it!” Didn’t they know how hard it was realizing that you were the only one who could remember to pick up milk on the way home? The only one who could pick up your son when he cried? Even if you were sick. The only person who could shovel the sidewalk when the sky dropped six inches of snow and the wind chill was minus eleven degrees Fahrenheit? Of course, they didn’t know. I didn’t know any of that, back when Aaron and I had decided to start this family. Not really.

  “You’ll have to do this alone someday,” he whispered to me one night.

  “I can do it,” I said, kissing his tears away, not realizing I was lying to his face.

  I was worried about everything as a widowed mom, because I had no one to discuss anything with. I had no one to tell me I was overreacting, overthinking, no one to do the parts I couldn’t handle. Ralph’s lymph nodes were swollen . . . did he have cancer? Did you see the way his eye sort of drifts in photos? Is he on the spectrum? He doesn’t know how to throw or catch a ball . . . how am I supposed to teach him things I don’t give a crap about? Is he going to be the weird kid in school who lives with his weird mom who never taught him how to throw a ball? I once had a friend tell me that just the act of buying a parenting book proves that you are a good parent. She was probably just trying to make me feel better, but I hold on to that thought during the first months of widowed parenthood, when everything is harder than it should be, and all my parenting books sit unopened on my bedside table.

 
When everything feels hard, small victories feel like huge ones. As a surprise, I bought Ralph a tricycle with an additional steering handle sprouting up from the back. The handle lets a parent steer their kid along, without having to hunch over and push them like a stalled car. It was genius, except that it arrived at my door unassembled. The toolbox was in the garage, and I was aware, suddenly, that Aaron had been the last person to touch this box, and everything inside it. Aaron would know how to assemble this tricycle without the instructions, but I need to read them several times before I can even begin the assembly process. It’s easier than I think it will be, and when it’s finished, I call Ralph into the room to see his new ride. “Look, buddy!” I shout and pick the trike up by the handlebars . . . which completely come free from the rest of the bike, as it goes crashing to the living room floor. “Is it broken?” Ralph asks, while I momentarily consider throwing the entire thing through the picture window. Later that day, Ralph and I take his trike for its maiden voyage. He is not great at steering, and the grown-up steering handle helps me keep him from jumping the curb and hitting a parked car. He doesn’t understand this, and he resents it. He’s two and a half, after all. “Let go!” He demands of me, periodically turning his head—and the entire bike with it. I refuse, and we are immediately that family, having a loud altercation on an otherwise quiet street. Ralph narrows his eyes at me and screams. “I. CAN. DO IT!”

  Well, then. That makes one of us.

  Solo parent, single parent, widowed parent.

  However it is you’re doing this parenting thing . . . you’re doing it.

  Chapter Five

  Arranged

  I was on the hunt for a love affair. Okay, not a love affair, but an affair. And maybe not an affair, but some sort of sexual experience that sounded more respectable that just banging some random guy. Please pardon my self slut-shaming, I was raised Catholic.

  I had been widowed six months earlier, at thirty-one. And while my heart had withered and died alongside my husband Aaron, my body remained alive and that rolling boil of grief inside of me was matched with an equal amount of lust. This was an indiscriminate lust. Not just of the sexual variety (though, yeah, that for sure) but just the appreciation of the living human body in almost all of its adult forms. I would find myself, in public, thoroughly undone at the site of a strange man’s forearm while he read the paper, at the shoulders of the male person in front of me at yoga. All around me were beautiful, walking miracles and I wanted—no, I needed—to be naked with one. I felt so guilty about this. My husband had just died. How could I be feeling this? But aside from anger, the only thing I could feel was palpable desire. That real deep and gut-wrenching grief that I felt deep inside of me was too hot to touch just yet, but the desire was right at the surface. I had three modes: Blistering Anger, Complete Detachment, and Fantasizing About the Man in Front of Me at the Grocery Store. Detachment was not a form of Zen, but a form of emotional stagnation I’d been dropped into. One where I could recite my life script as if I were talking about a complete stranger:

  “Hi, I’m Nora. I was widowed six months ago right after I lost a pregnancy and my dad died. So, do you live around here?”

  I knew that some very sad things had happened—I was sad about them, I swear!—but I couldn’t access that sadness. I didn’t have the security clearance for it yet. I was removed from the world, and from myself. Feeling desire was at least feeling something, and I wanted to feel. Specifically, I wanted to feel some hands on me that didn’t belong to my toddler son.

  But, like, how? Earlier in my life, this had not been hard to accomplish. I wanted the freedom of my early twenties back, but it’s hard to capture when you’re a mother and you are concerned about how you’ll provide for your child, and everyone around you has grown up and is no longer interested in just rolling around together for a little while. What I wanted and couldn’t find in my twenties—to be paired off—was now what everyone wanted, or already had. I’d somehow passed beyond the age or lifestyle for a casual sexual encounter, which left dating as the only option. This was . . . not ideal. I didn’t want to date. I didn’t want to have dinner or pretend to care about someone’s life story. I didn’t want to explain myself to anyone, because that would have meant revising my script to say, “I am a recent widow who wants nothing from you except your naked body on top of mine.” I had tried to do the swipey-app stuff, with no success. I live in Minneapolis, which is a big enough city until you are trying to troll for a no-strings-attached hookup on the internet and find yourself matched with the big brother of one of your childhood friends. What the heck did a widow have to do to have some no-strings-attached—yet respectful and safe—intercourse with a stranger?

  I met him at my sister’s dance show. My sister is nine years older than me. She is also a white woman. She is also a Bollywood enthusiast who became an active member of Minnesota’s largest (only?) Bollywood dance troupe. They had sold out several nights of their show in a sizable theater, and I watched in awe of her, onstage in a swirl of color and movement. Backstage after the show, there he was dressed in a white undershirt, the only man there taller than my six feet. “Nice job,” I said, “we should make out sometime.” He looked at me with shock and then said, “Yes, we should!” My sister took it from there, like any wingwoman would. “She’s serious,” she told him after I left, “she’s coming to the after-party and you should totally make out with her.”

  He was perfect in every way: tall, handsome, and unavailable. He was engaged, which may make you hate me. But he hadn’t even met his fiancée, so it felt like a little bit of a gray area that maybe we could work around? Okay, look, none of this was good. Except it was. It was so good. It was so good to have warm hands on me that didn’t belong to a child. It felt so good to have a secret. To have a person tell me that I was beautiful, desirable. The situation had all the makings of a great rom-com: both of us were unavailable, we had established at the outset that neither of us were allowed to develop feelings for the other, both of us understood that this was an unviable romantic relationship with limitless physical possibilities . . . both of us were certain that with this understanding, nothing could possibly go wrong.

  What could go wrong and did go wrong is that people have feelings, even (especially) when they agree not to have them. That is the obvious plotline of every rom-com!

  One night I woke at three a.m., having accidentally fallen asleep. He was sleeping beside me, and for a few gorgeous moments, I thought he was Aaron. The realization was too much, and I gathered my things in the dark, rushed to my car, and wept my apologies to my dead husband.

  Still, I went back to his small apartment a few nights later. His sweet smile and his kind eyes sometimes made me forget that this was just pretend, that he was just a person whose bed I snuck into after my son had gone to sleep and my mother had agreed to “babysit” while I went somewhere that was none of her business and would you please stop asking.

  We had both agreed this was nothing, but I was not the only person who was forgetting that. He would wonder aloud how Ralph would react to him, and I would remind him that he would never meet Ralph. He would wonder if his parents would disown him should he cancel his arranged marriage, and I would remind him that I was not a suitable replacement for any fiancée, for many reasons. He spoke to his family every day, sometimes while I was there, and his language was like a song. Sometimes he would speak it to me as he played with my hair. He could have very easily just been reciting his Target list, but it lulled me into a peaceful place where my imagination could run wild.

  This was the affair I needed—that we both needed—a sweet, kind distraction from the realities of our lives: that I was an unlovable pariah and that he would be the good son and make his parents proud with the suitable woman they’d selected for him. A suitable woman who was certainly not a widowed mother.

  In a few months, I knew, his fiancée would arrive and this would end. He would get married, buy a house, and have his own babies
. I would use these moments with him, and then the memories of him, to fight off the loneliness as long as I could, before moving on to another emotionally unavailable man. It was the perfect solution! One emotionally unavailable magnet attracting another, one empty affair after another to chase away and protect my loneliness for years to come.

  He was fascinated by what he saw as my freedom—I could choose who I wanted to be with and do what I wanted with my life. I thought he was insane. Didn’t he know that I was a widow, and a mother? That it was unlikely that men would be lining up to take on all of my emotional excess? The idea of a completely blank page of a future didn’t seem like freedom, it seemed like a trap. Where was I supposed to go from here? I was fascinated by the rigidity of his life, and a tiny bit jealous of it, too. Everything for him was so certain. He’d picked his career at age sixteen and followed the path diligently, even when it led him to the frozen tundra of Minnesota, far from his family. Now, his parents had selected his life partner. All he had to do was stop having sex with me and show up at the airport when his future arrived.

  This affair made me even more deeply protective over my relationship with Aaron. Nobody could know that I was sleeping with someone else, because nobody would understand it. Well, nobody but Moe. “Good for you!” she said. “You need this. And you’re allowed it.” But was I? Was I actually allowed, six months after Aaron’s death, to be sneaking around the city with a man who was engaged to someone else, and if so, could I get that in writing?