These days, it’s kind of like squeezing an apple with my bare hands for juice. Aka, a sticky mess that seems to produce little other than pulp. Also: I don’t even try because it seems like it’ll lead to naught.

I’ve been working at Home Depot, and it’s the first job I’ve had in a long time where I haven’t tried to make it my lifeblood. I go in early – 6am. I front the product with a strange cane, pulling candles and dishsoap and cleaner forward. I front the product with my bare hands, lugging bags of dirt into place, putting a small scraggle of lavender back with its fellows. And for the first hour or so, I do it in silence, alone, as the sun is just beginning to lick its pink warmth into the cold bones of morning.

I love it.

I love it, but it doesn’t have to mean more to me than that.

Jacob and I have been fighting, loving, fighting again.  Buying a house will do that to your marriage. Or, apparently, your eternal engagement.

My aunt tells me family is the people who can’t stop seeing you as who you were as a child. There is no doubt in my mind that Jacob is my family. Even before this I knew, but now I know because I don’t think he’ll ever forget how I was in active addiction. I don’t think he’ll ever forget. He might, someday, forgive me. I believe he’s truly started to. But forget? Never.

It’s infuriating. It’s heartbreaking. It’s safe.

I’m about to turn 31 and our daughter is four. All her little friends either have older siblings or younger ones or are just now getting babies in their houses and lives, and she comes home talking about sisters. I too go out into the world and hold babies, see babies, imagine a baby at the breast again. I can feel this future child like they’re a part of me, fading, fading, fading. I want so badly to make them real.

Jacob is scared though, and that’s understandable. That has to be understandable.

He wants them too, future-baby. I want to say not as badly as me, but there’s a chance just as much. It’s too raw, though, too close; how I teetered through her first year in a drunk grief. How I almost destroyed us all.

How can it matter that I’m coming up on three years sober when one year drunk almost killed us?

I spent her first birthday in rehab.

How selfish of me, to risk that again.

I can’t explain why I know, know in my heart that this will not be like that beyond saying that birthing my child was nothing more than the trigger on an already loaded gun. I got sad and drunk? No, I was sad and drunk. The door for post-partum chaos was not locked; it wasn’t even on its hinges.

Now I’m turning 31, I want at least one more child, one more. Preferably three, but at this point I’ll take just one more. Time, for the first time in almost three years, feels like an enemy. I feel like that same apple, unsqueezed, browning on a windowsill. It’s not unrealistic to say fertility might fade before his fear does.

And then what?

We will still have a good life. Sookie will grow up with the strange loneliness of the only child, or perhaps we’ll adopt, or perhaps we’ll have a slip up and I’ll get my wish the selfish way. 

It’s terrible to hope for the lack of his choice in the matter. So I won’t. That’s addict behavior, right there. There was a girl in rehab who used to say that whenever anyone got selfed up, hand on hip: That’s addict behavior, right there.

Besides, I want that. I want to pee on a stick with him waiting hopefully in the same room. I want us to gasp together as pink overtakes the stick, I want him to hug me, to laugh, to maybe do the weird anxious clapping thing he did when I went into labor.

“We’re having a baby!” Single clap. “Ok! Wow!” single clap. “We’re having a baby!”

I want that for us.

I want to have another child because I want them in our lives. I want to complete our family in a way I can sense in every pore of myself it’s not, not quite yet. I want our daughter to have someone to hold hands with in the dazzling field of daffodils right outside this beautiful three bedroom house we bought. I want to change diapers again, for fuck’s sake. I want to watch them grow and love together, to fight together, to have one another when parents inevitably die. 

Oh god, I don’t want Sookie alone for that. 

How is that not worth the risk?

The risk of what? That I descend again into the great maw of my addiction. 

That I make life terrible tenfold, that I go harder and hurt rawer than ever before.

If it was a girl her name would be Estelle, nickname Stella. Boy? I’m pushing for Jet. It goes with the last name. It’s short and sweet, it’s an abbreviation of my dad’s nickname,

I want it I want it I want it I want it more than I can breathe. 

We talk about it sometimes when he’s in a good place. Laugh and joke and dream about futurebaby, and take no action towards making them. Then, when he’s in any other place, the topic is toxic. I am a danger for speaking it.

I want to smack fists and feet into the ground and sob, it’s not fair! Why can’t I have a life?! What has tainted me so thoroughly that I can never prove my worthiness to do shit like have another baby and survive it?

There’s nothing I can say. I do the next right thing. I slip and fall and if i cry, there I am again, my true self, a mess. I might’ve put lipstick on that pig but I’ll wash it off with crazy, soon enough.

In recovery I have almost three years. In recovery I sponsor other people, I share my story at meetings. I am spiritual and safe and maybe not humble, but somewhere less than prideful sometimes.

At home?

I’m just that pig who might wash off the lipstick at any moment.

Fuck that shit.

Family.

Family is the people who can’t stop seeing you as you were as a child, or whatever.

Just see me?