One morning, after 21 years of marriage, I received an email informing me that our order of a traditional mate had shipped. A mate? A traditional mate. Had I been slacking off? Not quick enough with his slippers and martini?
Jim always said you could find anything on Amazon, but this seemed a little extreme. Would the mate be joining us or replacing me? Was she going to help with the kids or gather our paperwork for taxes? Would she be like me, only better? Presumably the mate was for him, but maybe the mate was for me and the email had ruined my surprise.
(Don’t want to read? You can listen instead.)
Jim and I had always tried to be fair in our relationship. This often came down to playing rock, paper, scissors to decide things. It was even how we picked our china pattern.
Soon after we married, we moved to London for his job and I became a trailing spouse. I had a little booklet from the immigration office to take to the police station to report any changes to my address or employment status.
“Occupation?” asked the WPC when I presented myself. The W, if you were wondering, stands for Woman. Woman Police Constable. Literally part of her job title.
“Writer,” I said.
“Housewife,” she corrected me.
I protested, “I have an agent.”
The WPC gave me a conciliatory smile. “Writer sounds unemployed. Let’s put Housewife,” she suggested briskly, jollying me out of my delusions, adding, “It’s more respectable.”
She wrote Housewife neatly and definitively in the booklet. And for the first couple of months Jim and I were in London, that’s what I was.
It became a running joke, whenever there was some task one of us wasn’t keen to do.
We need a wife for this, he’d say.
I’d say, You should ask your wife to do that.
And now, apparently, one was on the way.
When we moved back to the US, Jim, a journalist, worked from home, which meant he also did the work of a househusband—a man wife— while I worked outside of the home as a Woman School Administrator. On the days he did not file his column, he went to the store and did school runs. We tried to maintain gender parity. We cooked together, but it was I who alphabetized the spices, who bought stamps and kept them in a secret drawer with envelopes and the checkbook. Our Amazon account was under my email. When I showed him how to enter contacts in his phone, he said, “It’s easier if you just text me the numbers when I need them.”
His idea of doing laundry was throwing the one thing he needed into the washing machine. He was the one with the Consumer Reports subscription. He found the good deals on hotels. He managed our online brokerage account. In short, I was better at managing the physical things: finding them, folding them, putting them into albums. He was about actions, ideas, plans.
When one of us had to be the representative payee for our daughter’s disability allowance, it was me, not just because of my superior filing capabilities, but because I was in it for the long haul. His heart was failing, imperceptibly at first, and then undeniably, inescapably, terminally.
When I clicked through the email to check the order details for our mate, I learned that we would soon be in receipt of 38 of them and that they were bags of traditional maté tea, which he drank for its health benefits. His illness was the third person in our relationship.
When he died, we had been together for 30 years. It was a shock to be without him. While I accepted the fact that he was gone, I periodically found myself looking for him. I ordered the books he had left in our shopping cart in the cloud, hoping they might contain secret messages. The other day, I scrolled back through our order history to the first purchase in 1999.
Each dropdown year charts our life together, the speed with which our children grew up. Here is an oyster knife he bought when he surprised me with oysters for our 23rd wedding anniversary, the maté teabags, a book about stroke recovery.
In the months after his death, untangling the me from the us meant I was nobody’s wife now. I was all of us. I was no-one.
The dogs got me out of bed each morning, leaping into action at the first sign of my waking, greeting each day with a manic intensity that I didn’t feel. I got through the school year, one foot in front of the other. One daughter would leave for college in August, the other I feared was home forever.
That summer, I met someone. She had previously been a very traditional mate, a classic, conservative husband, but she had recently transitioned, which, like being widowed, tears up the script of your life. Our daughters had suggested we get together, not romantically, but just to not be lonely and sad. I landed on her porch like a package one evening.
We fell into conversation and then into each other’s lives. We saw the two sides of each other, the before and the after, the difficult journeys we had taken to get to where we were, how we are the sum of all our experiences.
To fall in love a second time was unexpected. We are the “yes, and” of improv. I hadn’t thought I wanted another mate, traditional or otherwise, and not, literally … a wife. Had the universe not understood that was a joke?
A friend asked me if it is hard to write about him, but this is the hardest part: When Jim appears in my dreams, he never quite understands that he has died. He thinks we pick up where we left off, not knowing all that has happened in his absence, that there are three of us now.
Every hair on my body is standing on end after reading this, Rebecca. Just wow. And thank you. x
Rebecca I nearly just fell off my chair after reading this, you are so amazing.