“Why didn’t you try?”
He looked at the table. “Because explaining it would have meant having a conversation about how our household works and whether that was going to be a problem, and I didn’t want to have that conversation.”
“Was it going to be a problem?”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t want to find out.”
I sat with that for a moment. “So instead of finding out whether your family would have a problem with how our household works, you told them a story about how it works that they wouldn’t have a problem with.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s accurate.”
“And in that story, I don’t work.”
“In that story, you don’t work.”
I am writing this out at length because I want the logic of it to be visible. It is not a complicated logic. It is an old and common logic, the logic of someone who decides the easier path is to tell the story that won’t require explanation rather than the story that is true. Daniel was not being malicious. He was being a person who has a specific anxiety about being seen a certain way, and he made decisions in service of that anxiety without thinking through what it cost.
What it cost was me. My professional identity, in his family’s picture of our life, for eighteen months.
The cost was real even if the method was not malicious. I needed him to understand both of those things.
## The Part Where I Was Not Perfect Either