Chapter 3 — The Long Drift

Nobody tells you how a marriage dies, because mostly they don’t die in any way you could point to.

Mostly they just drift, so slowly that no single day is the day it happened.

Ours drifted the way most do, I think, under the sheer accumulating weight of a life.

The first baby came, and then the second and third, and a child needs you with a completeness that leaves nothing over, and I poured myself into them the way mothers do, and Hal — Hal did what men of his generation did, which was work, more and more, longer hours at the plant, because providing was the love language he’d been given and because, I understand now, the house had filled up with children who needed me and he wasn’t sure there was still a place in it for him.

We became a very good team and a worse and worse couple.