Shortly after the breakup, I told Zach, my eight-year-old, the news. We were eating dinner, and I tried to keep it simple: Boyfriend and I had both decided (poetic license) that we weren’t going to be together after all.
His face fell. He looked both surprised and confused. (Welcome to the club! I thought.)
“Why?” he asked. I told him that before two people got married, they needed to figure out if they’d make good partners, not just for the moment, but for the rest of their lives, and even though Boyfriend and I loved each other, both of us realized (again, poetic license) that we wouldn’t and that it was better for us to find other people who would.
This was, basically, the truth—minus some details and plus a few pronoun changes.
“Why?” Zach asked again. “Why wouldn’t you be good partners?” His face was a wrinkle. My heart ached for him.
“Well,” I said. “You know how you used to hang out with Asher and then he got really into soccer and you got really into basketball?”
He nodded.
“You guys still like each other, but now you spend more time with people who have similar interests.”
“So you like different things?”
“Yeah,” I said. I like kids, and he’s a Kid Hater.
“What things?”
I took a breath. “Well, things like I want to be home more and he wants to travel more.” Kids and freedom are mutually exclusive. If the queen had balls . . .
“Why can’t you both compromise? Why can’t sometimes you stay home and sometimes you go traveling?”
I mulled this over. “Maybe we could, but it’s like that time you were assigned to work with Sonja on that poster and she wanted to put pink butterflies all over it, and you wanted it to have Clone troopers, and in the end, you ended up with yellow dragons, which was pretty cool, but not really what either of you wanted. Then on the next project you worked with Theo and even though you had different ideas, they were similar enough, and you still both compromised, but not as much as you had to do with Sonja.”
He was staring at the table.
“Everyone has to compromise to get along,” I said, “but if you have to compromise too much, it might be hard to be married to each other. If one of us wanted to travel a lot and one of us wanted to stay home a lot, we both might get frustrated a lot. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah,” he said. We sat together for a minute, and then suddenly he looked up and blurted out, “Are we killing a banana if we eat it?”
“What?” I said, thrown by the non sequitur.
“You know how you kill a cow to get the meat and that’s why vegetarians don’t eat meat?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well,” he continued, “if we pull the banana off the tree, aren’t we also killing the banana?”
“I guess it’s like hair,” I said. “Hair falls off our heads when it’s ready to die, and then new hair grows in its place. New bananas grow where the old ones used to be.”
Zach leaned forward in his chair. “But we pull the bananas before they fall off, when they’re still alive. What if somebody PULLED YOUR HAIR OUT before it was ready to fall off? So doesn’t it kill the banana? And doesn’t it hurt the tree when we pull the banana off?”
Oh. This was Zach’s way of dealing with the news. He was the tree here. Or the banana. Either way, he was hurting.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we don’t intend to hurt the tree or the banana, but it’s possible that sometimes we hurt it anyway, even though we really, really don’t want to.”
He went quiet for a while. Then: “Am I going to see him again?”
I told him I didn’t think so.
“So we’re not going to play Goblet anymore?” Goblet was a board game that belonged to Boyfriend’s kids when they were young, and Zach and Boyfriend sometimes played it together.
I told him no, not with Boyfriend. But if he felt like it, I’d play it with him.
“Maybe,” he said quietly. “But he was really good at it.”
“He was really good at it,” I agreed. “I know this is a big change,” I added, and then I stopped talking because nothing I said would help him right then. He was going to have to feel sad. I knew that over the next few days and weeks and even months, we’d have many conversations to help him through this (the upside of being a therapist’s child is that nothing gets shoved under the rug; the downside is that you’ll be totally screwed up anyway). Meanwhile, the news would have to marinate.
“Okay,” Zach mumbled. Then he got up from the table, went over to the fruit bowl on the counter, picked up a banana, ripped it open, and with dramatic flair, sunk his teeth into it.
“Yummmm,” he said, a strangely gleeful look on his face. Was he murdering the banana? He devoured the entire thing in three big bites and then went to his room.
Five minutes later, he came out carrying the Goblet game.
“Let’s give this to Goodwill,” he said, placing the box by the door. Then he walked over to me for a hug. “I don’t like it anymore anyway.”