I woke up hungover, irritable, with a headache and a blotchy right eye in my new apartment after a night out.
Checked my phone.
9:43 a.m.
Shit.
I was supposed to pick up my daughter at 10.
I threw on a T-shirt and shorts, splashed water on my face, skipped brushing my teeth, and started tearing through the apartment looking for my keys.
Nothing.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
I texted my wife.
Running late. Can’t find my keys.
The reply came immediately.
Were you drinking?
Damn it.
I ignored the question.
A minute later I spotted the keys sitting on the kitchen counter.
I grabbed them and headed out.
When I pulled into the driveway, my mother-in-law’s Prius was already there, complete with the rainbow bumper sticker on the back.
The shadow matriarch appears again.
Another reminder that I hadn’t just married my wife.
I’d married a mother-daughter coalition.
Sometimes it felt like the umbilical cord had never actually been cut.
My mother-in-law wasn’t simply family.
She was a permanent stakeholder in the marriage.
I walked to the front door and rang the bell. My wife cracked the door open. I forced a smile.
She opened it the rest of the way.
“Are you drunk?!”
“No.”
She told me to walk a straight line.
I refused.
I didn’t drive over there to perform sobriety tests on my own front porch.
“You’re drunk.”
Something in me snapped.
“I’m her dad!”
My voice came out louder than I intended.
She slammed the door in my face.
The same door on the house I was still paying for. The same house I’d already been removed from.
The anger arrived instantly.
Hot. Primitive. Disproportionate.
Being blocked from seeing my daughter hit a part of my brain that wasn’t interested in nuance or strategy. For the first time during the divorce, I wasn’t thinking.
I was reacting.
