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Maddy and Ian were both planned for and loved at first sight. Adam was still a great photographer and took beautiful shots of the kids that he framed and gave me for Christmas.
We’d been utterly clueless with Maddy, wishing she had been sent home with an instruction manual when we left the hospital.
At least six times, we were convinced Maddy’s cough was croup. We called our pediatrician’s answering service to leave frantic messages, then sat with her in a steamed-up bathroom, the shower running hot water. It cleared out all our nasal passages and calmed her cough, which of course never was croup.
Once, when she was a toddler, Madd sneezed and a string of spaghetti came out of her nose, something she had for dinner hours earlier. We chided ourselves for not noticing she had snorted some of her pasta, but she showed no signs of suffering from the stray strand of spaghetti.
I saved every one of her baby teeth, documented her first steps and words and waving bye-bye, in a journal for posterity. I taped a lock of blonde hair from her first haircut, during which I cried as they trimmed only the ends of her hair, leaving it long like mine.
Ian came along when Maddy was four. His first smile was for his sister. We used to put Ian in his baby seat and gather around him, all of us, admiring him like a Christmas present, the best gift we’d ever received. Ian thrived from all the attention.
Adam had been a hands-on father in the beginning—changing diapers, cleaning up baby food flung to the floor, coaching Ian to say his sister’s name. He’d come up with the great idea of floating a handful of Cheerios in the toilet and telling Ian to aim for them with his pee, a game that had him potty trained within a week.
We got a Big Wheel with an extra seat on the back and Madd rode it around the kitchen, Ian belted safely in the back, blowing kisses at us every time they circled. I carried Ian to walk Maddy to the bus stop for kindergarten and he looked for her everywhere while she was gone.
When he was barely two, he was waving and yelling goodbye to his sister, and when her bus came at the end of the school day, he would run from the front porch where we were waiting and throw himself into her outstretched arms.
I had a busy freelance writing business, writing ad copy and editing textbooks and college catalogs until my eyesight blurred. As time went on, Adam began to focus more on his job selling medical equipment across a wide area of the Northeast, a job that required quite a bit of travel. I relished the role of primary caregiver for the kids. Adam took care of all the household finances; I was never interested in anything beyond balancing a checkbook.
Adam spent most Saturday afternoons out in his Ford truck taking landscape photos: trees with branches extended like arms, the sun slanting through leaves just before sunset, a peach pit he found on a sidewalk. His work was as beautiful as when we’d met.
We lived in a modest middle-class neighborhood where all the children were growing up together. We had birthday and Easter parties for the kids, making so many cupcakes I still feel sick at the thought of buttercream frosting. The kids did their own Halloween parade around the cul-de-sac, ending up at our house for pizza for the kids and hot toddies for the adults.
How had the years flown by so quickly? I volunteered at the elementary school, putting on a witch costume for Halloween and helping kids bob for apples in third grade, filling balloons with water for kids to toss at each other outside on field day in middle school. I chaperoned trips to Mystic Seaport, the Bronx Zoo, and the Boston Aquarium, my kids never seeming to be embarrassed being seen with their mother. We still had a magnet shaped like a shark’s tooth, from the aquarium gift shop, on the fridge.
Adam had given Maddy extra money to buy a plush polar bear at the zoo, something she still slept with. While he listened to their stories at the dinner table, he disappeared afterwards to go onto his computer. Working at the computer had become his favorite pastime.
Every year as they grew older, I wished like hell I could freeze them in time and keep them young. They were my favorite people in all the world.
But as hard as I tried to hold on to them, the years slid away.
Time was going too fast for me to keep up.
7
We were, the four of us, a cohesive family, happy children, adults who were partners and had fallen into a groove of parenting. It worked. For a long time, it worked. I never imagined it breaking.
Unless he was at the gym, Adam was always home after work. Sometimes he missed dinner when he went out Saturdays to take photos, but I knew he was doing something he loved.
As time went, the years so fleeting, Adam’s interaction with us changed. He started to seem robotic, as if he were there in person but not giving any thought or taking any interest in anything around him, with the kids or in our life.
It took me a while to even
