Ad copy

It's our tenth anniversary tonight. My husband looked up at me at the bottom of the stairs the way he looked at me in 2014 and I have not been able to stop crying about it for an hour. I'm writing this at the kitchen counter at twenty past midnight in the dress I wore to dinner, with the bag still on the counter next to me, with my husband asleep upstairs, and I need to write this down because if I do not write it down by morning I am going to convince myself it didn't happen. My name is Lauren. I'm 35. I have two children — a son who is seven and a daughter who is four. I live in a suburb of Atlanta. I work part-time as a marketing coordinator for a nonprofit I do not particularly love. My husband Mark is 37 and he is a good husband. I want to be clear about that before I say anything else. Mark is a good husband. He is not the villain in this story. There is no villain in this story. Tonight is our tenth wedding anniversary. We were married on a Saturday in October 2016 at his parents' farm in north Georgia. Forty-six guests. I wore my mother's wedding dress, taken in at the waist. Mark cried during the vows. We were 25 and 27 years old. We have not been on a real date in fourteen months. Our four-year-old has been a difficult sleeper since birth. Our seven-year-old started a new school in August and the transition has been hard. We had a babysitter cancel three times last spring. We had a stomach bug rip through the house in July. There is always a reason. There is always a reason every couple I know has not been on a real date in fourteen months. The reason is not the reason. Mark booked the dinner six weeks ago. An Italian restaurant in Buckhead called Vespa we had been to once, in 2018, when I was newly pregnant with our son and could not eat any of the food. He texted me the reservation confirmation while I was at the pediatrician for my daughter's ear infection. 7:30 Saturday, our spot. Don't make plans. I read the text in the pediatrician's waiting room and I felt two things at the same time. The first thing I felt was happy. The second thing I felt — and this is the thing I want to write about — was a low panic about what I was going to wear. I stood in front of my closet on Friday night for forty-five minutes after the kids went to bed. I have one closet. It is full of clothes. None of the clothes had been bought for a woman going on a date with her husband. They had been bought for a woman going to a Tuesday morning playdate, a Wednesday afternoon office Zoom, a Thursday evening soccer practice, a Saturday morning birthday party at a bouncy-house place, and a Sunday brunch with our friends and their three kids. Every piece of clothing I own has been chosen so that I do not have to think about it. Every piece of clothing I own has been chosen so that I disappear inside it. I have not bought a piece of clothing for myself, as a woman, since 2021. The dress I had worn to my college roommate's wedding in 2018 was hanging at the back of the closet inside a dry-cleaner bag, untouched. A black wrap dress with a v-neckline. I had not worn it in seven years. I tried it on on Friday night. It fit. I stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom and I looked at the woman in the dress and I did not know her. She was a woman I had been seven years ago. I was not sure I was allowed to be her again. I want to write the next part carefully because the next part is the part that has been sitting in my chest for nine months without a name on it. In March of this year, on a Saturday afternoon, both of my kids were at a birthday party. Mark was at his brother's. I had three hours alone for the first time in roughly six months. I went to a small boutique near our house — the kind of place I used to go in my late twenties — and I tried on a woven leather crossbody bag in a deep cognac brown. I stood in front of the dressing-room mirror with the bag across my body and the woman in the mirror was a woman I recognized. Not the mom-version of me. The pre-mom version of me. Slightly older, a little softer, but the same woman. I bought the bag. I drove home. I hung it in my closet, in its dust bag, on the high shelf where I put the things I am not sure I am allowed to want. I did not take it down for ninety-three days. I want to be honest about why. I had not bought the bag for any specific occasion. I had bought it because for one afternoon in a boutique near my house I had remembered who I had been and the bag had been the proof. And when I had come home from the boutique that afternoon and set it on the kitchen counter, and Mark had come in from his brother's and looked at the bag and said, brightly, "Oh, that's pretty, what's the occasion?" — I had not known what to say. I had said: "Just felt like buying something." He had said: "Looks expensive, babe — but you've earned it. Where are you going to wear it?" And I had not had an answer to that question. I had stood in the kitchen with my bag on the counter and I had not had an answer to where I was going to wear it. I had worn shoulder bags and totes and the diaper backpack that I was still carrying despite the fact that my youngest was three and a half and we had not had a diaper in the house in over a year. The places I went did not require a woven leather crossbody bag. The places I went required a free hand, a charged phone, and the ability to clean up a juice spill without ruining anything. The bag was for the woman I had been before I had become a logistics manager for two small humans. I had not been able to figure out where to wear it because there was nowhere I went anymore that the woman in that bag belonged. I had hung it in the closet. I had stopped seeing it when I opened the door. Until tonight. Tonight at 6:48 PM. The babysitter arrived. I went upstairs. I put on the black wrap dress. I did my makeup with the small set of brushes I had not used in two years. I put on a red lipstick I had bought in 2019 and stopped wearing in 2020 because I had decided red lipstick was for women who were going somewhere, and I was no longer a woman who went somewhere. I put on small gold hoops. I dabbed perfume on my wrists. I took the woven leather bag down from the shelf. I packed it with my wallet, my phone, the lipstick, a hair tie, a small handkerchief, my reading glasses I had not worn at a restaurant in three years. I came down the stairs at 7:08 PM. Mark was standing at the bottom of the stairs holding my coat over his arm. He looked up at me. He did not say anything for a long time. I want to be specific about that. The silence was not the silence of a man searching for the right compliment. It was the silence of a man who had not seen his wife and had just seen her. He said, quietly: "Oh." I did not say anything. He said: "Oh, Lauren." That was it. That was the entire sentence. He did not say "you look nice" or "you look beautiful" or "you clean up well" or any of the things he had said to me on the small handful of date nights we had managed in the last five years. He said my name like a man who had been seeing his wife as one thing — a woman who managed his life and the kids' lives and was tired all the time — and had just remembered that she was a different thing entirely. He said my name the way he had said my name in 2014 across a kitchen table in a tiny apartment we had rented in Decatur, the year we had gotten engaged. I almost cried at the bottom of the stairs. I did not. I walked down the last three steps and I took my coat from his arm and I said: "Hi." He said: "Hi." The babysitter — Madeleine, who is sixteen and was watching this happen from across the foyer — said "have so much fun, you guys" in a small voice and went into the kitchen with my children. Vespa. 7:32 PM. The waiter — a young man, maybe 28, in a black apron — came to our table after we sat down. He looked at me first. Not at us, not at Mark, not at the table. At me. He said: "Welcome back. Can I start you with a glass of wine?" I said: "Yes please. The Montepulciano, please." He said: "Excellent." He turned to Mark. He took Mark's order. That had not happened in eight years. I want to be specific about this because I do not want anyone to think I am making more of it than it is. For eight years, every waiter, every sales clerk, every concierge, every ticket-taker at every place I have walked into with my husband has, ninety-five percent of the time, addressed him first. Not because Mark is loud or because he asks for the bill first. Because something about the way I had been carrying myself for eight years had told them, before I had said a word, that I was not the person whose answer mattered. They had clocked me as the wife. The mom. The plus-one. The woman who would, at some point in the dinner, take her phone out to check on the kids. The waiter at Vespa had clocked me as a woman dining at a restaurant. I had a glass of red wine in my right hand. I had a woven leather bag hanging on the back of my chair. I had on a dress and red lipstick and gold hoops. I had been visible to the waiter the moment I had sat down, in a way that I had not been visible to a stranger in eight years, and the difference between visible and invisible was — entirely — the dozen small choices I had made in my bathroom an hour before. Mark was watching me across the table. He had been watching me since I had come down the stairs. He had not picked up his menu. He said: "Lauren." I said: "Yes." He said: "I am not going to say the wrong thing right now. So I am just going to say I am very glad we came to dinner tonight." I started crying at the table. Quietly. Into my napkin. He did not say anything. He reached across the table and held my hand. We sat like that for a while. Vespa bathroom. 9:15 PM. I went to the restroom after the entrees. I washed my hands at the sink. I looked up into the mirror. The mirror was small and dim and warm-lit and I was alone in the bathroom and I stopped and I looked at myself for longer than I needed to. The woman in the mirror was 35. The lipstick was still mostly there. The hair was a little mussed. The dress fit. The earrings were small and right. She was a woman. Not a mom-who-is-also-a-woman. Not a tired-version-of-the-woman-she-used-to-be. A woman. I had spent eight years dressing in a way that made me invisible to the world and to my husband and to myself, and I had not noticed I was doing it because the way the world had treated me in response had been so consistent for so long that I had thought it was normal. It is not normal. It is a thing I had been doing to myself, carefully, every morning, for eight years. The bag had not done this. I want to be very clear. The bag had not done this. I had done this. The bag had been the small permission slip that I had needed to give myself in order to do this. I had needed to take the woven leather off the high shelf in my closet and put it on my body for the first time in three months in order to remember that I was allowed to wear it. The world had been waiting on me. The world had been waiting for eight years. Now. 12:20 AM. The kitchen counter. Mark went up to bed at 11:50 PM. He kissed me at the kitchen island and said "come up soon." I told him I would. I am not going to. I am going to sit at this counter and finish writing this in the notes app I have on my phone that I never publish anywhere, because I have been telling myself for eight years that I have nothing to say anymore, and tonight has been the first night in eight years that I have felt like I have something to say. The bag is on the counter beside me. The wine glass is half-full. The kids are asleep. The dress is slightly wrinkled. The lipstick is on the rim of the glass. The lipstick I had thought was for women who were going somewhere, and I was no longer a woman who went somewhere. I am a woman who went somewhere tonight. If you have been a mother long enough that you have started dressing for invisibility without noticing — If you have a closet full of clothes that have been chosen so that you disappear inside them — If your husband has not looked up at you the way he looked up at you in 2014 in approximately five years and you have stopped expecting him to — They're running a buy one get one right now. Add two to the cart, the second one is free. I bought a second one tonight after Mark went up to bed. I haven't decided who it is for yet but I have a few candidates — my older sister who has been a mom of three for ten years and who I love and who is going through some version of what I have been going through. My friend Kate, whose youngest just started kindergarten and who has not bought herself anything that wasn't from Target in four years. My mother, who is 64 and who has been a wife for forty-one years and who deserves, after forty-one years, to come down the stairs and see her husband look up at her the way Mark looked up at me tonight. You already know who you'd give yours to. Get two. Carry one. Give one to the woman in your life who has been waiting eight years for someone to look up at her. Your move. https://emmafy.com/pages/sale1