Plan B

I took emergency birth control pills for the first time on the day my husband and I decided to separate.

The day before, I'd come home after work, J.Q. babbling and squirming in my arms, only to find a familiar little yellow tablet sitting in front of the toaster. "Ohhhh... fuck," I muttered, the blood draining from my face. While Mr. Thumbscrews and I had spent the last several months dealing with some truly hellacious marital problems, we'd managed to avoid descending into our own personal off-Broadway version of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", and the mood in the household had remained civil. Extremely civil, in fact... sex, like binge-drinking or skydiving, was a fun way to escape the issues at hand (pun fully intended) for brief stretches of time. Unlike those other activities, sex had the added bonus of being mutually comforting and unlikely to result in either liver damage or slamming into the ground face-first at several hundred miles per hour (well, at least not the way WE do it... *snicker-chortle*).

Ahem. So... improbably enough, Mr. Thumbscrews and I had been engaging in a lot of the activity which that telltale tab of Jolivette was intended to render delightfully consequence-free. When not cavorting like avoidance-seeking bunnies, we'd been having long, serious talks, the latest of which had culminated in our mutual, bittersweet decision to separate - if not permanently, then at least for the foreseeable future.

We've been together since we were seventeen and nineteen, respectively. We spent our latter teens and early twenties working full-time, purchasing and remodeling our house, having, falling in love with and being run ragged by our baby. We viewed the typical twenty-something slacker lifestyle as a phase which individuals as clever as ourselves could conveniently side-step, shunning the extra sleep, music festivals and designer pharmaceuticals in lieu of a one-way ticket on Responsibility Railways.

A wise person (well, okay, it was ME, and if I'm so wise, how come I can't operate an electric can opener or an automatic transmission?) once said that it takes a truly smart individual to be a true asshole. Apparently, it also takes a truly smart individual to be a true idiot.

You can't bypass entire developmental phases sans consequence. You can't FORCE your life to conform to your dreams, no matter how hard you grip the wheel, no matter how adept you are at solving 3D shape-rotation puzzles.

It was only a matter of time before one of us cracked.

I'd experienced small but dramatic periods of existential terror throughout the years, subjecting my poor husband to week-long bouts of uncommunicative weepiness because I developed a crush on a coworker or became acutely aware, ambling through the housewares section of Target, that I'd had more silverware patterns than sexual partners. Mr. Thumbscrews, always as cool as a cucumber dipped in liquid nitrogen, never showed any signs of discontent. That is, until he fell in love with the receptionist at work.

"I know, it's so fucking cliched," he said as we sat next to one another in bed, holding hands and sobbing.

Month 1 was an all-you-can-weep buffet of emotional agony. I stopped eating, stopped smiling, spent the majority of my time staring hollow-eyed at my monitor at work or curled up on my living room floor, letting J.Q. gambol over my prone form as I wept and waited for my husband to return from the latest post-work discussion with OtherWoman. He refused to give her up, yet returned home to me every night. "He's trying to have his cake and eat it, too," sneered my friends, enraged at the betrayal. "I'm so damned confused," he said, stroking my face, "I feel like no matter what I do, I'm going to regret the other decision for the rest of my life."

Month 2 marked my fortuitous introduction to therapy and Paxil. I began to get better. Not just from the immediate emotional trauma of infidelity, but from... everything. With the help of a very subtle, very talented therapist (a practitioner of the "chatting and perpetually-full candy bowl" technique), I started to realize that a bevy of events had occurred over the course of my life which shaped who I became, and that not all of them - or even the majority of them - were positive. However, I didn't HAVE to be defined by my history; with work, I could choose who I wanted to be, regardless of the quantity or color of insults flung by elementary school classmates and sadistic ex-boyfriends (Craig C. : I hope failing second grade was the first in a dismal chain of events which led to your employment as a carcass-disposal technician at the local abbatoir. Josh K. : I no longer "hate the entire world"... mainly just YOU. Ha!).

Month 3 was a time of role-reversal. I thrived under stress and pressure, blossoming like a forced tulip. I worked and planned and drank and wrote and ran (and was immediately convinced that I had always been a runner, but was only now forcing my TastyKake-padded ass to embrace its true destiny). Mr. Thumbscrews, on the other hand, grew increasingly moody. While he had repeatedly pleaded for "just a little bit of time to think about things", more time seemed to result only in more irritability and confusion.

Month 4 has been sweet and sad... like living in mole sauce, to use a somewhat-clunky metaphor. Mr. Thumbscrews began taking an antidepressant of his own and, like me, immediately remarked, "If I EVER think about going off of this, please smack the shit out of me." I began sympathizing with the doubt and confusion he'd endured over the past several months, rather than just condemning his bad behavior (although I certainly haven't stopped thinking [and occasionally remarking] that he picked the single worst, most morally-reprehensible method of dealing with his feelings). I also - sans adulterous affair - began having many of the same doubts myself. Could I realistically spend the rest of my life plodding along in Suburbiaville, picking out interior trim colors and wondering what could've been?

I still don't know. My husband doesn't know, either. But it's become apparent that, as an unwise person once said, "It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it." It seems unlikely that we'll drift back into the same shared orbit post-separation. However, returning to our former path of domesticity-by-brute-force would doom our relationship to death as surely as a dozen extramarital liaisons. While we were young and malleable, it was easy to convince ourselves that we fit together perfectly. Now that we've grown up and become (slightly) more wise, it's clear that we need to find out who we are individually before we can gauge whether we work as a couple.

We're still in love. I feel myself falling for my husband every single day... when he kisses my nose, brings me home ice cream, makes our son cackle like a tiny pink hyena. As the occasionally-wise Liz Phair once said, "You've never been no waste of my time, it's never been a drag." We're not miserable, nor are we irreparably broken. We're still talking hugging, doing things which necessitate emergency birth control (to tie up THAT particular plot thread: a Plan B prescription was obtained, its slick packaging admired, the two potent tablets taken at appropriate intervals. Let me add that Plan B apparently punishes you for forgetting your birth control by making you feel as though you're delivering a baby THROUGH YOUR FUCKING SKULL. However, it appears as though crisis/pregnancy has been averted). The thought of living without him breaks my heart. More and more often, though, it also excites me. We'll still be raising our little boy together (no matter where we are individually, we're both dedicated to J.Q. above all else). However, we'll be living and growing independently, finding our wings/stripes/other anthropomorphic-metaphoric personality traits. We'll be growing up in ways that our seven-year forced march through the bowels of suburbia never could have accomplished.

I'm going to live downtown, like I've always wanted (beyond the rudeness and persistent reek of urine, there IS a certain charm). I'm going to paint the walls whatever color I like and buy weird, modernist plush furniture for J.Q. to fling himself off of. We're going to go for walks in Rittenhouse, jog down West River Drive instead of past the cardboard box factory. I'm going to laugh and cry during the nights when J.Q. is ornery, I'm exhausted and I can't just hand him off to his father. I'm going to laugh and cry during the days when J.Q. is with his daddy, missing my son like mad but simultaneously atwitter with the possibilities inherent in being All. By. Myself.

It's going to be good.