Free The Pursuit of Happiness (2001) by Douglas Kennedy Page B

because I was secretly scared of ending up alone and childless in middle age.

‘A lovely young man,’ my mother said after first meeting Matt. ‘I think he’d make you very happy’ … which was her way of saying that she approved of his WASP credentials, his preppy sheen. Meg was a little less effusive.

‘He’s a very nice guy,’ she said.

‘You don’t exactly seem overwhelmed,’ I said.

‘That’s because you don’t seem exactly overwhelmed.’

I paused, then said, ‘I am very happy.’

‘Yeah - and love is a wonderful thing. You are in love, aren’t you?’

‘Sure,’ I said tonelessly.

‘You sound very convincing.’

Meg’s sour comment returned to rattle around my head four months later. I was in a hotel room on the Caribbean island of Nevis. It was three in the morning. My husband of thirty-six hours was asleep beside me in bed. It was the night after our wedding. I found myself staring at the ceiling, thinking, what am I doing here?

Then my mind was flooded with thoughts of Peter. Tears started streaming down my face. And I castigated myself for being the most absurd idiot imaginable.

We usually mastermind our own predicament, don’t we?

I tried to make it work. Matt seriously tried to make it work. We cohabited badly. Endless petty arguments about endless petty things. We instantly made up, then started squabbling again. Marriage, I discovered, doesn’t coalesce unless the two parties involved figure out how to establish a domestic detente between themselves. The will needed is huge. We both lacked it.

Instead, we dodged the growing realization: we are a bad match. On the morning after fights, we bought each other expensive presents. Or flowers would arrive at my office, accompanied by a witty, conciliatory message:

They say the first ten years are the hardest.

I love you.

Matt

There were a couple of let’s-rekindle-the-spark weekends away in the Berkshires, or Western Connecticut, or Montauk. During one of these, Matt drunkenly convinced me to dispense with my diaphragm for the night. I was seriously loaded too - so I agreed. And that is how Ethan came into our lives.

He was, without question, the best drunken accident imaginable. Love at first gasp. But after the initial post-natal euphoria, the usual domestic discontentment reappeared. Ethan didn’t believe in the restorative virtues of sleep. For the first six months of his life, he refused to conk out for more than two hours at a time - which quickly rendered us both quasi-catatonic. Unless you have the disposition of Mary Poppins, exhaustion leads to excessive crankiness. Which - in the case of Matt and myself - turned into open warfare. As soon as Ethan was weaned, I wanted us to establish a rota for night feeds. Matt refused, saying that his high-pressure job demanded eight full hours of sleep. This was battle music to my ears - as I accused him of putting his own career above mine. Which, in turn, sparked further confrontations about parental responsibility, and acting like a grown-up, and why we always seemed to fight about everything.

Inevitably, when it comes to kids, it’s the woman who ends up carrying the can - so when Matt arrived home one night and said that he’d just accepted a three-month transfer to PBS’s Washington bureau, all I could say was:

‘How convenient for you.’

He did promise to hire (and pay for) a full-time nanny - as I was now back at work. He did promise to come home every weekend. And he hoped that the time apart might do us some good - lessening the bellicose atmosphere between us.

So I was left holding the baby. Which actually pleased me hugely - not simply because I couldn’t get enough of Ethan (especially as my time with him was limited to after-work late evenings), but also because I too was debilitated by all the constant bush-fighting with Matt.

Intriguingly enough, as soon as he moved to Washington, two things happened: (a) Ethan began to sleep through the night, and (b)