“And what did your father say she did?” Dr. Watts asked.
Daniel thought about it. He told me he was quiet for a long time before he answered. Then he said: “She stayed home.”
“And what did she actually do?”
“She managed everything,” he said. “She ran the household. It was real work. She just didn’t get paid for it or talk about it as work.”
“And how does that connect to how you talked about Rachel?” Dr. Watts asked.
He said he understood the question. He said he had not talked about me the way his father talked about his mother — his mother genuinely had not been employed, and I was — but that there was something in the framing, something in the picture of what it meant to be the spouse who was home while the other spouse was at the office, that had gotten borrowed without examination.
He said: “I think I made Rachel fit into a category. And the category was one I had grown up with. She didn’t fit in it, but I used it anyway, because it was available.”
Dr. Watts said: “Available and familiar.”
“Available and familiar,” he agreed.
He told me this over dinner and I listened to all of it before I said anything. Then I said: “I appreciate you figuring that out.”
“I should have figured it out a year ago.”
“Yes,” I said. “But a year ago you were not doing the work to figure it out. Now you are. That’s different.”