And Make It Last

Residual 50’s housewife tendencies force me to have dinner ready and waiting on the days the ex comes over to be with the children. That afternoon, however, we’d gotten stuck at an event so late that I wouldn’t have had time even to bake a frozen pizza. “Want to eat out,” I asked over the phone when it became clear we wouldn’t make it home by dinner, and with a degree of relaxation I hadn’t seen throughout the final years of our marriage he agreed to the change of plans.

We sat father next to son, mother surrounded by daughters. Only the lack of wedding rings and a small negotiation over the check might have raised suspicions that we were something other than a typical happy family. Dinners that relaxed never happened out and seldom happened in when we lived together.

He invited me to eat dinner with them later that week when I dropped the children at his house. I declined, but the atmosphere in his living room was so soothing that I hung out with his new kitten while everyone else ate the food he’d made. Had a scene like that ever occurred when we were together: mommy relaxing on the couch whilst daddy managed the table? Rarely, very rarely indeed. So charming was it that I almost hated to go, even though a weekend free from food preparation, toileting accidents and pre-teen angst awaited me back at home. Finally I bid them goodnight and walked out to his car, more sorry to leave than I had been in months.

I might have been tearing up a little then, but when I started the car and heard the music coming through his speakers it turned into more than a few tears:

I don’t believe in destiny
Or the guiding hand of fate
I don’t believe in forever
Or love as a mystical state
I don’t believe in the stars or the planets
Or angels watching from above
But I believe there’s a ghost of a chance we can find someone to love
And make it last.

“This is church. We’re not going to use any music about not believing,” my mother had said when we voiced our wish to incorporate that song into our wedding, and such a passive little ninny was I then that I didn’t argue. Even without a nuptial commemoration the song represented our courtship and early marriage so strongly that I wondered for just a moment if he’d queued up the cd specifically for me to hear.

How amazing and yet how frustrating it is that the only way we can make it last — is apart.

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