We have talked six or seven times since the wedding. The conversations are still careful, but the careful quality is evolving: less like two people watching what they say because they’re afraid of another rupture, more like two people who have decided to be thoughtful with each other because they’ve seen what happens when they aren’t. It is an improvement. It is not a return to whatever we were before, which I now understand was a relationship built on assumptions we had never examined.
My mother has changed in small ways that I am trying not to make too much of, because making too much of small changes tends to create pressure that collapses the change. She calls me on weeks when nothing is happening, not just when there is family weather to manage. She asks about my life, my work, the project I have been leading at my company, the friend she knows I’ve been spending time with since all of this happened. She is trying. I am letting her try.
Owen texted me separately, about two months after the wedding, to say they were looking at apartments in a building that had slightly more space, and to ask if I had any experience with a neighborhood he was considering. We went back and forth about it for a while. I said I thought the neighborhood was solid but that the one a few blocks east had better transit options. He said he’d look into it.
That was it. A normal exchange between two adults with no subtext. It felt like something.