When Parents Separate

The eight-year-old, on a Sunday evening, is putting her things into the small wheeled suitcase she now keeps half-packed by the door. She has learned, over six months, which jumper is at which house, which toothbrush stays with which parent, which book she will be allowed to finish on Tuesday. She does not complain. She does, on this particular Sunday, ask her mother whether the cat will be alright while she is gone, which is the kind of question her mother has noticed she asks instead of the question she means.

Her mother, who has held it together for most of the day, finds the question has somehow taken the legs out from under her. She sits on the bottom stair and watches the child wheel the suitcase to the door. The cat is fine. The child is asking about something else.

In our work, parents arrive in some version of this Sunday evening often. The configurations vary; the grief, in different costumes, does not. The parent in the room is exhausted in a way she did not know was possible, carrying a grief she is not allowed to call grief, watching her child more closely than she has ever watched another human being, trying to work out whether anything she does this week will be the thing the child mentions in therapy at thirty.