Free Planting Dandelions by Kyran Pittman

the baby’s memory book. We would have to lie.
    Patrick slumped into the nearest chair, still clasping his limp hank of hair. Looking at it, I was reminded of that famous O. Henry short story “The Gift of the Magi,” where Della sells her hair to buy her husband, Jim, a chain for his heirloom pocket watch. Only it turns out that Jim has sold the watch for a hair ornament, and both gifts are useless. Of course, it all works out in time for Christmas, and in the end they realize that what matters most is that they have each other. Except in our version, the husband plummets into a spectacular midlife tailspin, during which time the wife is out of her mind with rage, hormones, and confusion, and there are children who need help with wiping whether or not right now is a good time.
    There were days I didn’t think we would make it to the next week, let alone Christmas. Here’s what they don’t tell you to expect in What to Expect When You’re Expecting, or any other pregnancy how-to book I’ve ever read: Even the most carefully planned and anticipated pregnancy can rock a marriage on a seismic scale. It can test a relationship like few other things can, and show exactly where the fault lines lie. In the space of two blurry years, we had gone from two of us to five of us, with the birth of our first two children and the temporary custody of a third from my husband’s previous marriage. We loved each other and our kids, but in the course of keeping up with even the minimum demands of parenting, a few things had gotten pushed to the back burner. Big things, like sleep and sex; and little things, like good books and long kisses.
    We weren’t relating to each other as lovers, or even as friends—only as stereotypes. Patrick was cast in the part of wayward son. Me, the overbearing mother. It was awful, a cat-and-mouse game that reinforced us as adversaries with every round. He avoided, I nagged. I persecuted, he went underground. His office became his bunker, and his days there encroached into night. After supper, he’d kiss me with a weary sigh, as if being dragged out of the house against his will. I bought it for a while. Advertising agencies are notorious for excessive expectations of overtime. Don’t bother coming in Monday if you don’t come in Sunday, goes the joke, which everyone in the business knows isn’t, really. He’s working hard to support us, I’d think. Poor guy. I could ride that glass coach till midnight.
    â€œI thought you were coming home two hours ago,” I’d seethe into the phone, when the enchantment wore off.
    â€œWhat do you want me to do? Miss the deadline? Lose the account?” He always had me there.
    â€œI just want you to come home.”
    â€œI’m coming,” he’d promise.
    But he wouldn’t come, and we’d run through the exact same lines a couple of hours later, at a shriller pitch. It was making me crazier and crazier, angrier and angrier. I upped the offensive, demanding to know who else was working late, why it always fell to him to save the day, what, exactly, he was doing there all by himself, night after night. I was determined to get to the bottom of things. I pressed for details, playing both good cop and bad cop, feigning interest and sympathy, then bringing the heat. I accused him of not wanting to come home.
    The trouble with getting to the bottom of things, says my mother, who knows, is that there you are, at the bottom.
    â€œYou’re right,” he finally said to me, when I’d called him in a rage, after waking up to find myself still alone at three o’clock in the morning. I’d pried my way through his excuses, one after the other, like I was tearing up rotten floorboards with a crowbar. And then I fell through. Stripped of pretense, his voice was flat and lifeless. “I don’t want to come home.”
    There it was, the bottom.
    â€œThen don’t,” I