Magic

You are thirty years old and he is an entirely different sort of adventure.

It's dealing with bathtime screaming and negotiating bedtimes and mediating pulled hair and tattletales. You can't dance to his wireless anymore, not without tripping on toys and, if you're unlucky, maybe a kid hitching around the carpet. He's the one climbing the Mt. Everest that is child-raising beside you, dragging the two older kids through the pitfalls of childhood while you haul the youngest around as she screams in your ear.

You love your babies, the nasty little brats. Even when they're kicking and squalling and giving each other lemur tails, you make yourself breathe, look hard in their small faces and find little pieces of yourself, little pieces of him, little pieces that are a perfect blend of the two of you. It instills just enough motherly awe to cut you off of dreams of throttling the little monsters.

You love your life, too, your lovely little existence in your lovely little house, pretending your lovely little family are as normal as you are. They're really, really not. Maybe you love pretending a little bit too much—the reality is much less cozy.

You find it hard to praise the things they do like he does; it just seems destructive to you, some defensive reflex that invariably makes a mess you can't clean up. Kids are bad enough when they're just the ordinary sort like you were. The ones you're raising are anything but. You colored on walls and broke vases and used your mother's Chanel makeup on your dolls. Your tantrums ended rather unremarkably, with nothing more than a few tear tracks and maybe a few bruises on your mum's legs where you kicked at her—you were a rotten, spoilt little kid. Squabbles in your new life usually end in something more colorful than tears and you are usually powerless to do anything about it. Your eight-year-old son has to walk around with no fingers all day after his younger sister objected to him pulling her pigtail, until your husband comes back from work to take him to their hospital to get it put right.

He talks about moving back to that house in the woods, out of your beautiful home in Hale. You simply assure him that you will be remaining behind, whatever his decision—under no circumstances will you be returning to that fairytale in the woods, to be the useless damsel in the tower. There are times for compromise in marriage—this is something you will never ever concede; this house, this normal house in this normal town is your fortress, your anchor, the only thing that keeps you from losing it entirely sometimes. It's the proxy, the stand-in for the normality you'll never have again.

You know perfectly well you don't quite belong in your pretty normal house, you don't quite belong anywhere, really; you're not talented like your husband and children, you're not blissfully ignorant like everyone else. You half pulled yourself out of your world because you love him and he needed you to. You won't pull yourself any further—you like this world where you can be competent and worthwhile. You don't have a place in his world—at least not any one worth having—and you are made to feel it at every turn.

He argues with you—he loves that house in the woods, it's been in his family for generations and the thought of it sitting empty grinds on some edge in his mind. "It would be better for the children," he pushes you one night after you've eased the door closed on your newest sleeping daughter. "They don't belong here, it's getting harder to hide some of their accidents. And they're telling stories, you need to pull them out of that school."

You would be enraged if you weren't exhausted. "They can belong here," you correct him. "And you can fix the accidents…as for the school, the teachers just think they have overdeveloped imaginations."

He doesn't like that you send them to the school a few streets over. Maybe you read a little more into it than you should, but it bothers you. Why shouldn't they learn the normal things you did? It's not beneath them! They might be capable of things their classmates aren't, but your three certainly aren't above learning a little writing and arithmetic and interaction with the world at large. They aren't above learning multiplication tables or scientific laws or English literature.

"I don't want to go to that stupid school," your son agrees over breakfast one morning. "It's boring. The kids are stupid." You have to scold him over his Cheerios while his younger sister colors obliviously next to him. He glares at you, the dirtiest look imaginable. "You would say that, mum, you're stupid just like they are!" He shoves his cereal bowl away so violently that it spills all over his sister's drawing and she starts crying.

He probably doesn't mean it like that, is too young to understand the situation enough to realize the raw nerve he's just poured acid on. But there's such contempt and nine-year-old fury in his voice that it's all you can do not to cry yourself, instead rushing over to comfort your crying little girl and do your best to salvage her drawings from the spilled milk.

"Is daddy home?" she asks through her tears. "He can fix it." You freeze a little colder at the words and force yourself shake your head and say 'sorry, sweetie.'

When you put the baby down for a nap, you hide in the crevice between your bed and the wall and muffle your tears into the pillow so the kids don't hear.

You love them, and they love you, but already that world is pulling them away from you. It's a painful, frightening thing to recognize.

They have a choice, a choice between worlds, and even now you know better than to hope you have any chance of winning. You and your world are bland and colorless next to what they can have. It really isn't any sort of choice at all.

You still cry cry cry when your eldest gets on that train and leaves you behind, clutching to the two children you have left and knowing you won't get to keep them for long. He comes home at Christmas to share eager tales with his father, who has a hundred stories of his own to share, a beautiful web of a life you never knew he had. You smile along encouragement when he relates excitedly all the wonders of his grand new school, but you feel bad at how insincere you feel inside. You somehow wish he would hate it like he hated school before, sometimes you wish that you could get on the train with him with a stick and black pot of your own and sit in class with a hundred eleven-year-olds and belong in the fairy tale that's your life….really belong and not just inhabit. You envy your eleven year old son, and think you must be an awful mother to do that.

He stops creeping into your room during thunderstorms and curling up on your side of the bed. You're very afraid he's never going to need you again.

Your middle daughter still needs you, wants you to braid her hair every morning, cut her sandwiches just right, hold her hand when you're doing the shopping.

But she leaves, too, turns eleven and follows her brother aboard the scarlet train you'll never ride.

But your baby, your youngest, your last little daughter…she doesn't grow away from you like her siblings. She doesn't summon biscuits from the high shelves, doesn't turn invisible when she doesn't want to be found, doesn't color the cat green. You don't notice until the other two are gone, until the accidents stop.

She gouges long marks out your beautiful wooden dining table with a butter knife, cuts chunks of her silky blonde hair with stolen shears and tells you it's the Barbie's hair when you ask, steals your Shiseido makeup and makes herself up like a tart.

No letter arrives for her. You feel guilty for how pleased you are and grow even more certain that you are a terrible mother for not wanting the best for her. But she can have the best, you hold stubbornly, proudly congratulating her on her top marks in all her classes, the glowing praises her teachers lavish on her. She's beautiful and intelligent and there's not a thing wrong with her just because she happens to belong in your world and not his.

You love her more for it. It's not a fair thing at all, this favoritism, even as quiet and understated as you keep yours. But you need to make up for her father's disappointment, because he is not so subtle. He cries the night when the train leaves without her on it, when she comes home with the two of you, a little subdued and a little disappointed.You get angry with him, start a fight over his tears after she's gone to bed. "How dare you!" you hiss at him, sneering at his red-rimmed eyes. "Quit acting like this is such a tragedy, she's disappointed enough!"

"She's missing out," he argues back. "She's…" He can't find the words, because there are no gentle, subtle words he can say to you. You say what he won't.

"She's going to be like me, God help us all! She's going to be like me, she's not going to be good enough for your stupid world!" you shriek. "What a fucking tragedy! Let's just give her some sleeping pills and a liter of vodka because, well, fuck, what kind of life does she have to look forward to!" You go painfully, ragingly silent and your fury pours off you, freezing the room.

"That's not what I said," he says tightly after a long minute.

"Oh, please, it's what you couldn't say," you toss out disparagingly.

You sit down hard on the bed, fury curling your back into a 'C'. You really don't want to look at him, you're so angry. It's not anything you didn't know before. You are unworthy and out of place in his world. You've known that since your wedding night nightmare. You are, to him, fundamentally lacking and now you've passed your insufficiency down to his daughter. If he never resented you before, you are afraid he will now. It infuriates more than it injures (but it really does both).

He sits down beside you, his hand reaching for yours. You restrain yourself from yanking it away, running from the room, grabbing your daughter and packing her up into the car, driving to the Manchester Airport and flying somewhere (you hope) he'll never find you, somewhere his world doesn't have to be reality bright in your face.

You are blind and your eyes are burning from the furious, beautiful light of all the things you can't see. You've felt like that, to some degree, for the past sixteen years of your life. And you don't want that for your daughter. At the same time you rejoice in this child who is like you, you mourn, too; she will spend her life like you will spend yours. Forever on the fringe, forced to witness wonders and worlds that will never be hers.

You start crying. For the mess you've made of your life, of hers, of the sick unfairness of the God and the genetics that have exiled her here in this lamentable freeze between worlds with you. At least you chose…she has no such luxury. And you cry for her. For everything she'll never have, never be, all the nevers a mirror of your once-reconciled shortcomings. Everything you lack seems so much more tragic in her.

This is the moment you knew would come, the moment when you knew you would regret what you did when you were young and stupid and in love, caring not a whit for all the consequences that had to come.

You are afraid you traded love in the short term for pain in the long, and it's not all yours to sacrifice. You've failed her too, cheated her with a glimpse of something that is just as out of reach for her as it has always been for you.

You would take the other path, now. Just to spare her your life to lead. You would sacrifice every minute, every long hour and day and week of happiness in your sixteen years of 'yes', you would give it all up so she would never have to know a life of inadequacy. You imagine some other father for her, some other man who could praise her mind and talent and not wish for something else, wish she was someone else, someone who could look at her and see something other than failure and inadequacy. You imagine some other life, something clean and easy that you could have had.

It doesn't work that way, you know, you would not have her, have them without him.

And why do you still…how can you still love him like you do? It's such a costly love, and still you pay. Your parents were right to think you stupid. You really, really are. Because his arms wrap around you as you sob and he makes you feel better, somehow, a single plaster on slit wrists. He still has that power and you resent him, but not nearly as much as you resent yourself.

The three of you take a two week vacation to Disney World while the other two are away at school, like some big guilt-ridden apology for the more important things you can't give her. She has the time of her life in the bright Floridian sunshine and the older two complain and you feel a fraction better that she can have something they envy.

Somehow, now, it's you and her, him and them. Your family is divided, and you think it's probably your fault. It all seems like your fault, most days.

You have a pregnancy scare and he is thrilled. You want to throw yourself down the stairs when the test comes out positive. It's just a false alarm, though, and after you find that out, you and your doctor make sure that you can't ever get pregnant again. You can't deal with another child, another child to lose to his world or another child to disappoint him. You don't tell, let him think it's just not meant to be. In the end, it really isn't, anyway, he just doesn't need to know the details.

The anti-depressants your doctor puts you on after you burst into tears when he innocently and politely asks after your family and tell him a censored version of your life (your 'musically gifted' husband dotes on your two 'musically gifted' children and can barely hide his disappointment in the youngest girl you've passed your 'tone-deafness' on to) help a little. You don't even identify with 'depressed' until the medication pulls you out of the pit you never even realized you'd sunk into. Depression is something that happened to normal people, and you aren't one of those.

You start sharing a bed with him again after the medication kicks in. It sort of kills you wanting sex, but you have it anyway just to feel close to him.

You're almost forty and he's still an adventure. You're just getting tired.