Free Planting Dandelions by Kyran Pittman Page A

said, crying. “Don’t come home. Ever.”
    It sounds maudlin and terrible. It was maudlin and terrible. I could leave it at that and let you think I was the long-suffering wife, and he was the cold-hearted bastard. (Go ahead, think it for a minute, before I get to the next part. He has that much coming.) But it was Kabuki theater, love suicide. Those were painted-on feelings, and we were lost in our roles.
    Mothering is a tremendous force. It can possess you completely, eclipsing every other passion, point of view, and relationship. Maybe I was especially vulnerable to being possessed because I had never really consciously identified with my maternal side, and it snuck up on me. Maybe it was because Patrick was used to being bossed around by his mother, and her death during my first pregnancy created a vacuum that sucked me in. Maybe it’s just what happens. It’s what happened with me, anyway. I had control issues, especially when it came to parenting. It was my way exactly or it was child endangerment. That’s literally how I saw it. I was the ultimate, infallible authority where the kids were concerned, benevolent and omnipotent unless crossed. Then, off with his head.
    When a parent with control issues is constantly broadcasting the message that the other parent can’t be trusted to make decisions or work through problems without advice and direction, they set up a self-fulfilling prophecy. The expectation of failure is loud and clear. There’s no chance of acquiring or demonstrating competency when someone is constantly standing over your shoulder, saying, “Not like that. Like this.” The parent being critiqued and managed is robbed of the opportunity to figure things out by trial and error, and being a parent is all trial and error. There’s no other way to learn it except by doing it. You wobble along, and it’s in the process of making adjustments that the foundation of your relationship with your child is laid. If anyone besides the baby had told me, “You’re doing it wrong,” the first time I held, fed, or changed him, it would have destroyed whatever shred of confidence I had as a new mother. I would have been devastated. But I said it to Patrick again and again, if not in those words, with a look and a sigh as I stepped in and took over. I’d elbow him aside and complain that he didn’t show more initiative. I’d issue orders and fault him for being passive. I’d critique his interactions with his children, and shame him for not being more engaged. I stripped him of his self-worth and his dignity.
    And then I wondered why he wouldn’t come home.
    He withdrew to his office like a teenager to his room, surrounded by his guitars and comic books. He was drinking too much, sleeping too little, and if I hadn’t been so insane myself, I might have seen sooner that the man I knew and loved had checked out some time ago. If I was capable of being honest with myself, I had, too. Each of us crept outside the marriage to steal what the other would not give. He wanted space. I wanted a devoted husband and father. The one I found was already someone else’s, but it didn’t matter to me. We were just friends, spending time together. Granted, it was lot of time, and if you counted the time I was spending with him in my head, it was most of the time. I wasn’t in love, but I loved to be with this man. He was gallant and swaggering, a take-charge kind of guy. He bristled protectively when I alluded to my lonely nights, and if I didn’t actually lean my head on his shoulder, I let myself picture it there.
    He was a family man, and that quality that made him so attractive to me would have probably kept us both out of real trouble, regardless, but my surprise pregnancy was a timely intervention. Even so, I was slow to shift my emotional focus back to my marriage. It had drifted further than I was prepared to admit. One night, I woke up