232. What Else? - Molly Prentiss
Frederick Edwin Church, Winter on the Hudson River near Catskill (c. 1868)
It was the first really cold day of the year. We’d had a warm November, and I had relished it, dreading the arrival of this day, which meant many days like it: too cold for long walks and outside playdates for my energetic four-year-old; too cold for all the things that make the Hudson Valley wonderful: farms, trails, hillsides, orchards, lakes, and rivers. I’m not sure if it was the cold or the morning sickness—I’d recently found out I was pregnant again—but I felt a sadness creeping in.
I managed school drop-off and responded to all pressing emails, but by 11 am, the melancholy had overtaken me to the point of exhaustion. I had planned a walk but feared the chill, so decided against it. Instead, I drove home, lay on the couch, looked up at the sorrowful clouds passing over the skylight, and promptly fell asleep.
The nap should have revived me but instead it made things worse. I woke up drooling and sour-mouthed, angry for no reason I could articulate. I stood up and stomped around the room, taking my mood out on the old floorboards. I’d slept so long and hard that it was already time to pick up my daughter.
On the gray drive, I called my mom, masquerading it as a check-in. But my mom knows me too well. “You’re upset,” she said. And I was. And I cried. It was the cold, I blubbered. The impending winter, the gloominess, the isolation and time cooped up. I couldn’t do it all over again.
“What else?” she asked.
The new baby, I said. How were we going to have another when we could barely manage one? When neither my partner nor I could work full time anymore and never seem to make enough money?
“What else?”
Me, I said—my impractical decisions. How had I ended up here, driving this lonely East Coast highway, when everyone I loved was across the country? Why couldn’t I be more like my sister, have my shit figured out?
“You can’t be her because you’re you,” my mom said. I cried a bit more and she let me. Before hanging up, she told me I’d feel better in the morning.
Only moments later, my daughter climbed into the car and burst into tears. The teachers hadn’t let her pick an activity, Fiona didn’t want to play with her, her pants had a hole. I wanted to sob along with her, but I knew that in that moment, I was the mother on the other end of the line. I tugged my own feelings toward me, as if I were wearing some kind of emotional corset; suddenly I was held tight by my own ability to feel. I could give her this, I thought. I could offer her my strength, but only because I could also offer her my vulnerability.
I nodded and told my daughter that yes, it was a bummer of a day—I’d had one too. Things will be better in the morning, I said. But until then she could feel free to complain to me, to cry, to melt. My daughter took a few ragged breaths, and her crying fizzled. I reached back, and she grabbed my hand, held it all the way home.
That night, the cold sky broke open and it snowed. The next morning, the world was white and quiet, sparkling from certain angles. I felt rested and good. When my daughter woke up, she bounded out of her room and leapt up to hug me. “It’s a nice day!” she cried.
I smiled. It was.
It is. We step out into the snow together and spin around.
- Molly Prentiss
