He said: she’ll cry tonight.
I said: probably.
He said: and that’s — that’s okay.
I said: yes. It’s okay for her to have feelings about it. The feelings don’t change the date.
He nodded.
We sat for a little while longer. Then he got up and made tea and brought me a cup without asking if I wanted one, because after eight years he knows I want tea after difficult conversations, and I drank it and we did not talk very much and it was the most comfortable silence we had had in three months.
The Household Plan, Working Through It
The household plan took two evenings to settle, not because there was enormous conflict about it but because we were being specific, and being specific about how a shared space operates takes time when you have previously operated on assumptions rather than agreements.
The office was the first item. I said I needed my work hours to be work hours in the full sense: door closed means do not knock unless there is an emergency. I defined emergency as fire, medical, or a situation requiring immediate decision that cannot wait thirty minutes. Patricia said she understood. She said she had not always realized how much her coming in had cost me.
I said: I know. I should have said it more clearly sooner.
This is true. The office boundary had been something I’d addressed by putting up a sign rather than having a conversation, and a sign is not a conversation. I had preferred the sign because the sign felt like a request rather than a requirement, and somewhere in me I had been more comfortable requesting than requiring in my own house. This is worth saying plainly.