And I made myself smaller to accommodate his largeness. I picked up the slack at home. I stopped mentioning the things that bothered me, because mentioning them made him irritable, and his irritation was unpleasant, and it was easier to just absorb the disappointment than to provoke the irritation. I became, without deciding to, a woman who managed her husband’s moods, who tiptoed, who made herself agreeable and undemanding and low-maintenance, who confused her own diminishment with being a good wife.
Then Sophie was born, and I went on maternity leave, and the imbalance became a chasm.
Elon never helped. I want to be precise about that, because it was the daily texture of my life in those months. He never got up in the night. He never changed a diaper if he could avoid it. He never took Sophie so I could sleep or shower or simply sit for ten minutes as a person rather than a milk supply. He spent nearly all his time at work, and the work had lately acquired a new feature, the late meetings, which had become almost nightly, and which I, exhausted and isolated and running on three hours of sleep, accepted the way I’d accepted everything else, with a swallowed hurt and a determination not to be difficult.
I was so tired. I want you to understand how tired I was, because tiredness like that erodes your judgment, your boundaries, your very sense of self. I was a new mother, alone all day and most of every night with a newborn, and the one adult who was supposed to be my partner had essentially withdrawn from my life, and I was too depleted to even fully register how wrong it was. I just kept going. I kept loving Sophie, who was the light of my whole world, and I kept making excuses for Elon, and I kept getting smaller.
The afternoon it happened, I called Elon to ask a simple, wifely question. Would he be home for dinner. That was all. I had Sophie on my hip and a chicken I was thinking of roasting and I wanted to know whether to cook for one adult or two.
“Probably not,” he snapped, the moment he answered. “Can you stop checking up on me? God. I’m working, Grace. I don’t need you calling me every five minutes.”
I swallowed the hurt, the way I’d swallowed a thousand hurts.
