And I didn’t know that within the hour, I’d unzip that costume and find the reason for nine months of closed doors.
***Part 2: Nine Months of Long Sleeves
My son Josh married Megan four years ago. She was quiet, organized, and polite in a careful way, the kind of woman who brings a store-bought pie to Thanksgiving and apologizes that it isn’t homemade. I liked her. I thought she liked me well enough.
Then Finn was born, and something shifted.
From the time he was a few weeks old, Megan kept him covered. Always. Footed sleepers in July. Long sleeves with little mitten cuffs folded over his hands. Once, on a ninety-degree afternoon at a Fourth of July cookout, I saw sweat in his hairline and offered to change him into something lighter.
“He’s always cold, Linda,” Megan said, already reaching for him. “Please don’t undress him.”
She said that sentence so often I could have recited it with her.
At first I told myself she was a nervous first-time mother. I remembered being one. When Josh was a baby, I used to check his breathing three times a night.
But it wasn’t only the clothes.
Megan never let me change Finn’s diaper. She never let me give him a bath. If I offered to hold him while she warmed a bottle, she would suddenly remember he needed burping, or a nap, or a fresh bib. The diaper changes happened behind a closed bedroom door. Every time.
I kept a little mental list. It didn’t take long to fill. In nine months, I had held Finn for a total of maybe forty minutes.
