Page 7 of Woman on the Verge

I did the only thing I knew how to do—I got her another yogurt.

When the girls finished their yogurt and crackers (yes, more crackers), they got out of their chairs and climbed onto the bench seat on the other side of the kitchen table. Grace turned onto her stomach, both hands stuffed underneath her, touching herself. Yes, like that. Then Liv did the same.

According to Google, it’s normal. Do toddlers have orgasms? I’ve wanted to google this but am too afraid of what kind of list such a search would put me on. I envision the FBI showing up at my house, confiscating our computers. In any case, orgasms or not, the girls are undoubtedly pleasured, and I resent this. They are both more sexually satisfied than I am.

“Girls, are you tired?” I asked them.

They usually touch themselves when they are tired. They must get this from their father.

Grace did not look up but said, “Five more minutes” as she writhed around.

I busied myself with the dishes, not knowing if I should discourage them. I don’t want to beCatholicabout this type of thing. I don’t think they’re going to go blind, for god’s sake. But I don’t want to be too lenient either, so lenient that they start doing it in public, flopping down in the middle of Target, rubbing against playground equipment.

I’ve never told Kyle about the girls doing this. He would be appalled. It’s been weeks since we’ve had sex, Kyle and me. Eight weeks, maybe. Meaning it’s accurate to say we haven’t had sex inmonths. There are times he touches me—a casual squeeze of my forearm, a tap on the butt—and I shudder. What a terrible thing, to recoil from touch. But it’s not just touch, pure and simple. I can’t help but feel it as a demand, a preface, a precursor to requests to come when the girls go to bed.

“Girls, come on,” I said after a few more minutes. They were both all sweaty. When they looked up, their cheeks were red.

“Five more minutes.”

“You already said that, Grace.”

She rolled around a little more, then sat up. Liv kept going for a few seconds, but upon realizing that Grace had stopped, she did too.

“Fine,” Grace said.

“You ready to go for a car nap?”

Neither of my girls is a great sleeper. They have never gone gentle into that good night. They share a room, so they do the whole bedtime routine together, a routine that I have always managed, even when I was working full time. It started innocently enough—I was breastfeeding, so I would do a top-off and then put the girls down. Now that they’re older, Kyle could step in, but he doesn’t, and I haven’t pressed it. He works a lot; he’s tired. Plus, I’m better at it than he would be.

The girls take approximately two hours to brush their teeth, then want to read seven hundred books. Kyle would never survive this. When they finally get into bed, I close the door knowing one of them (usually Grace) will summon me back at least twice:Mommy, I don’t like that shadow on the wall. Or,Mommy, my pajamas feel weird. Some nights, I feel a wave of nausea come over me upon hearing the whines. It’s visceral, motherhood.

By the time I go to bed, after a cup of tea or a glass of wine or both, I am still tense with anticipation of the girls calling for me. This is when Kyle reaches for me, pulling me into his side. I used to just give him what he wanted, even though I’d been touched all day and I was tired of giving. “The male ego is a fragile thing,” my stepmom told me once. Lately, though, I reach into my bag of cliché excuses, a bag every mother must carry around (along with the snacks), and use one of them.I’m so tired. I have a headache. I have a particularly bad period.When I do this, he sighs, likely bothered by both the rejection and my lack of creativity in delivering it, and I know I’ll be to blame if he ever cheats on me.

It’s not that I’m turned off from sex completely. It’s just sex in this context. The context of Wife, Mother, Servant. I have found myself daydreaming of sex with men besides Kyle on many occasions. There’s a cashier at Trader Joe’s, for example, a young man who can’t be more than twenty-five years old, who I think about fucking in a back room of the store. There’s that dad I used to see at day care drop-off, the one who knew the name of his daughter’s baby doll, the one who asked the teacher if his daughter was doing better at nap time. He wasn’t particularly hot in a conventional way. He was balding. He wore orange Crocs sometimes. But he was soattentive. I was convinced he’d make me come with just his tongue.

The fantasies remind me that I’m still in there—Nicole, the person I was before I became Wife, Mother, Servant. They, the fantasies, are what sustain me.

The girls sleep through the night, mostly—thereis, apparently, rest for the wicked. Sometimes I wake up between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m., the insomniac’s witching hour, and then one of them calls for me, as if they know I’m stirring, as if we are still physically connected, tethered in the way we were when they were inside me. It’s as magical as it is terrifying, much like motherhood itself.

No matter what time they go to bed, no matter if they wake up in the middle of the night, they are up for the day at five thirty in the morning. Most parents cope with this type of insanity by keeping their eyes on the prize of nap time. Grace, however, will not nap. Or not in a bed, at least. As an infant, she would only sleep in a swing turned on at top speed. We had to change the batteries in the thing every week—those fat D batteries that you never have just lying around. When she grew out of the swing, we tried to get her to sleep in her crib, but she wasn’t having it. She required motion. We resorted to putting her in the car and driving around aimlessly. The Car Nap was born.

Liv would probably nap on her own, in her bed, but I can’t successfully separate them, so she comes on the drive too. When the girls were in day care, I only had to do the Car Nap on weekends, which was fine. Now I have to do it every day. I haven’t told many people about the Car Nap because they say things like “You still do that?” As if I am a terrible parent. The truth is it’s the only reliably quiet time of my day. So yes, I still fucking do it.

“I don’t want a car nap,” Grace said, her whine extra high pitched because she was in desperate need of the very thing she did not want.

Liv did not attempt to put her distress into words; she just started crying.

“How about we go to another park after?” I said.

Grace jutted out her bottom lip and said, “Fine.”

Liv stopped crying.

“Hold me,” Liv said, reaching up, her little hands clenching and releasing.

She gave me all her weight when I lifted her. My back ached, but in that moment, the ache was offset by the oxytocin that came with holding her. She was tired. She trusted me completely. I’ve come to consider this trust my performance review—I am doing okay because my daughters hold on to me as if I am everything in the world.

In the middle of the day, the freeway is mostly quiet, and it’s possible to drive seventy miles per hour without hitting the brakes once during the Car Nap. On this day, I looked over my shoulder to see both girls asleep, lulled by the white noise of the freeway. I exhaled, then resumed the audiobook I’d been listening to, this one a memoir by a woman who left her husband of ten years to be in a relationship—athrouple, they call it—with two women. I tend to gravitate toward memoirs of people whose lives have completely imploded in some way.

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