A different kind of separation anxiety during my husband’s business trip


When I tell them we have mice in the house, people say, “Bring a cat.”

“I don’t need a cat,” I say. “I have a wife.”

I had no wife except to be gone for three weeks. of Ruth I was on a long work trip and left me to find mouse traps (were they not under the sink?), wait for them (why doesn’t the cheese seem to work?) and put them away (in the drawer under the oven or on the kitchen counter?).

And if she’s so unlucky as to take the mouse-bait and set the trap, it’s up to me to dispose of her little corpse, Ruth is something. Very good at. In fact, I tell myself that she is a job He loves it. to do Sitting in her Paris hotel room with the Eiffel Tower visible from her window, Ruth must have been jealous. All fun I’m back home, doing all the dog walking, taking out the trash, picking farm related vegetables, putting out kitchen scraps for composting folks and hunting mice/rats.

But this is not an unhappy column, as it crumbles when the husband leaves him on his own accord. Well, not entirely about that. It’s about the strange ways we act when we miss someone we love.

One of those weird ways is to piss them off before they leave. I have some experience with this: experience with the breakup and reunion cycle. My parents divorced when I was 12 years old. That’s how we started with my brother and the latter for weekends, longer stays with one or the other parent. I remember how reflective we all were, not from any emotion – but from the mental preparation we had to go through before this change of guard.

That’s how mom’s house is. This, I think. My father’s house is like this. That’s what he said.. I’m still available. mother Home, but my mind is looking forward. My father at home. I don’t think my mother likes the penumbra I throw at these times.

So Ruth is getting ready to leave for three weeks. She’s getting ready in her way—putting away her clothes in the changing room, lugging a suitcase—and I’m getting ready in mine: steeling myself in solitude, hardening myself a little, teasing a little. She’s not out of sight yet, but I’m slowly putting her out of mind.

And then the Uber comes and she’s going to the airport.

Sleeping is the hardest part. I go to bed very late and wake up very early. I will pay myself. I feel like an 18th century fur trapper wandering around in some frozen corner of the Great White North. I just have to do it until spring.

And then, one day, at the edge of my vision, something small and gray scuttled across the kitchen floor.

You see, I’m not afraid of mice. I was able to comfortably hold them as they entered the house. And like I said, she looks like Ruth. so good In cooperation with them. But Ruth is not here.

I found two classic wooden traps, covered them with cheese and put them in the oven drawer. I’m skunked the first night. What I read online is that if you touch a trap with your bare skin you can smell a mouse, and that cheese is bad bait.

I found a third trap and – wearing gloves – smeared the trigger with Nutella. It comes out on the stove. I was frustrated again.

And one afternoon I went in to collect my drum kit for the gig Brook was doing that night. I opened the wheelie bag that contained my cymbal stands and was hit with the thick funk of a dead mouse.

On the one hand, mice A A mouseAnyway – caught. On the other hand, I can’t bring this bag – ripe with the smell of rot – to a nightclub. I removed the cymbal stands, put on rubber gloves, covered one in a plastic newspaper bag, removed the mouse carcass, and took it outside to the trash.

Then I jump in the car and run to the music store. I call down the road and ask for some bags of drum hardware to be prepared, just as the pilot of a stricken plane orders to foam the runway.

Adjusted as I am, I’m not thinking of Ruth at all, being angry, losing her. But later that night, after the gig, trying to get comfortable in bed, I happily realized we were halfway through her journey. She will be home in a week and we will have a lot to do.



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