The luxuries they covet and occasionally pretend to, on which they have no purchase, are not material things; they are time—leisure time for their marriage, leisure time for exercise and sleep and self-care, for all the nooks and crannies or great stretches on weekends that people without kids or people with help take for granted. Time with their kids, not the kind spent policing fights, or frantically cleaning and cooking and running errands, but the kind where you enjoyed each other, lingered, listened, did things together.
FAMILY HAPPINESS, POST-INDUSTRIAL BY CORA CRUZ 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 40
“They want me dead. I swear to god.” She holds her face up to the shower in front of her husband, rivers of suds between their feet. When they’ve both rinsed off, one parent will hand the two younger children, in assembly line fashion, to the other for the ritual squirming and protesting under the lukewarm water. The kids have been in the garden, and the rivers beneath their bodies turn d…