Playing House by Lauren Slater

and dog with me on the fuzzy periphery, waving my arms around and insisting that I be seen.
    Maybe I’m overstating it. My daughter loves me. She blows me
besitos
, the Spanish term for little kisses, and in grocery stores she occasionally puts her plump arms around my neck and rests the scrumptious pad of her cheek against mine, so it’s like we’re dancing then, waltzing one on one. My husband, Benjamin, tells me I’m being oversensitive. “Of course she loves you,” he says, but we both know she loves him best. In any case, I tell myself, I deserve it. I am, after all, a modern mother, and my husband is, after all, a modern father, and this is just what I said I wanted. Two years ago, on September 28, the Clearblue test wand turned clear blue, and I made my husband, a chemist, swear on his hops vine that he’d be as active a parent as he is a gardener. He is a great gardener, spending hours in the spring sun coaxing dahlias and delphiniums from the ground while I hunch inside, staring at my computer screen, worrying over words. “We can’t have this child,” I’d said to him, waving the test wand in front of his face, “unless you swear you’re in it with me fifty-fifty.”
    “Forty-sixty,” he’d answered.
    “No,” I’d said. “It’s fifty-fifty or nothing. I’m not doing sixty percent of the parenting. My career is just as important as yours.”
    “I mean,” he’d said, “I’ll do sixty percent, even seventy. You do forty, or thirty. I’m shortening my hours at work once the baby is born.”
    Very cool, I thought. I bragged to my friends about how cool my husband was, a real feminist who’d put his money where his mouth was; who, literally, would swallow his salary and swaddle the baby; who would, he promised me, walk his talk. All throughout the pregnancy I suspected he’d renege, but he didn’t. Clara was born by C-section after a two-day labor, and I was so wiped out and drugged up that he was the first to hold her. It was he who insisted with a touching and slightly irritating enthusiasm that we take
every
class the postpartum unit offered, from feeding to first aid to bathing. Once at home, it was he who got up with the baby five nights out of the seven, he who took three weeks paternity leave while I scooted back to my office after just seven days, my cesarean scar still oozing. I was determined not to fall prey to motherhood, as though motherhood were a maw. My vision of motherhood comes, of course, from my own mother, who was more or less devoured by her children—she had four of them in close succession. My own mother never had a paying job, she drank cocktails with pitted olives speared with frill-topped toothpicks, and wept in frustration in the vast master bedroom from the hollowness of her life. I could not allow such a thing to happen to me. This wasn’t the fifties; this was the nineties, and feminism, far from reappropriating the dignity of motherhood, had taught me to try to escape it, even though my ovaries were silver sacs stuffed with human eggs, and my heart, well, even while my heart, in a secret corner, could not wait to feel the flesh of my flesh, close against me.

    I gave birth; he got up nights. I went back to work as a psychologist and a writer full-time; he went back to work as a chemist half-time, and something not-so-strange but difficult happened. Clara started to like my husband more. This was the first problem, and it was piercing. When the baby was nine months old, she began waking in the middle of the night from nightmares. Of course, we can’t be sure they were nightmares, and if they were, I can’t imagine what a nine-month-old’s demons would be—maybe vague watery dreams of sharks and falling, of smothering skin. She’d scream out. We’d both bolt upright in bed. It was always dark then, with maybe a crescent moon clamped against the sky, or stars salted generously; the baby screamed. “I’ll go,” I’d say, throwing off the covers. “No,