The Woman He Called No Fun

It does not happen all at once. That is the thing nobody tells you. There is no day you decide to put yourself down. It goes a little at a time. You skip the Grange supper because the baby has an ear infection. You tell Tammy you cannot make practice because Ben has a game. You stop getting asked to sing the anthem because you stopped saying yes, and the band stops calling because you never call back, and your good dress stops fitting and you do not buy another one because the kids need shoes, and one morning you look up and you are thirty-seven years old and you cannot remember the last time you did a single thing that was just for you.

I was not tired because I was used up. I was tired because I was carrying all of it. The six kids and the house and the garden I put up every fall and the laundry and the bills we spread on the table on the first of the month and the school pickups and the sick nights and the planning of every meal every day for eight people. I was the one who remembered the field trips and the dentist and which kid was allergic to what. Greg went to the plant and came home and sat down. I did not sit down from five in the morning until I fell into the bed.

And he looked at all that, at the woman doing all of that, and he decided I was no fun.

After that night it got worse, because he had said it out loud and saying a thing out loud gives it permission. He started saying it like a joke that was not a joke. When his brother came through from Lafayette and we all went to the Dairy Whip, Greg told him, “Dana used to be a live wire, buddy. Marriage’ll fix that for you.” When I begged off the plant Christmas party because Eli was teething, he told the kitchen, “Your mother’s idea of a good time is a load of towels.” When I fell asleep on the couch at nine, which I did most nights, he would say it to whoever was over. No fun. Worn out. Used to be something.

The kids heard it. That is what I could not forgive, later, when I let myself feel it all the way. Lucy was six and she started saying it too, the way little ones parrot, telling her teacher her mommy was “too tired for fun.” Caleb, who was sixteen and angry at everything the way sixteen is, stopped asking me to anything, and I thought he was just being sixteen, and it took me a long time to understand he had quit asking because his daddy had taught him I would say no.