Miles City Montana, My Twist

Alone with my daughters, I took the opportunity to check my reflection in the review mirror. It was a rare occasion. Meg and Cynthia had that pale, un-weathered skin, the kind that women in their thirties and forties start searching for on the undersides of their arms, or the places the elements don’t touch. I was already able to pick out the signs of aging on my face, the lines around my eyes and mouth when I smiled. I never wore sunscreen yet slathered it on my children. I figured my skin was far from saving. I was a mother who encouraged my children to get away from the TV, spend as much time outdoors as possible. They played while I gardened or I’d push them on the swing Andrew made for them, two ropes tied to a sanded piece of wood. I had painted it with daisies. I spent nights out there in his undershirts and bare feet, lolling in the dark, the moon peering through the trees, smoking the cigarette I said I had quite smoking. I felt like Wendy in Peter Pan, caught somewhere between adulthood and reveling in my daughters’ childhoods.

Sometime after Meg was born, after the post birth bliss, I found this constant hostility pressing and stretching my skin across my face that I try to rub away. And I think of what my mother told me when Andrew and I first started having problems. “He has to love you more than you love him. He has to commit.” I found definitions for “commitment” at the bottom of my coffee cup and in the sheets I tucked around my children at night. I found it in the lists I made for myself and in the corners of my mind where no one else could reach.

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I grew into the kind of woman I thought I wanted to be with Andrew. At 24 I felt old and told myself over mugs of tea and dinners eaten out of styrofoam boxes, that I was ok with being a single woman, that there were other, more significant places I could deposit myself in the world. Maybe I was never meant to have a family. I was irresponsible anyway and locked myself out of my own apartment more times then a young woman with a Bachelors degree should. But it all happened so quickly and I surprised myself in how easy it was. We met when people are supposed to meet, in our mid twenties. And sometimes I wonder if it was a mistake, that his love was just easy and I didn’t have to go searching anymore.