As a newly single parent, getting dressed for work, I shimmied into a sheath dress I hadn?t worn in months (not since before he left). And realized there was no way, not a chance, that I could do up the zipper myself. It went too deep and too high and my arms, apparently, didn?t work that way. In a previous life, this would have been his job. I may not have even had to ask because he would have noticed. He may even have put his nose in the nook of my neck and kissed it while zipping up the dress. But he was no longer here.
After contorting myself into many unnatural positions, then failing and falling (and tearing my new stockings in the process), I bribed my 3-year-old son with Girl Guide cookies to help me. But with only a few tugs, the zipper broke off in his tiny, chubby hands. He cried and I fought back my own frustration as I covered my exposed back with a blazer and heard the rumble of the garbage truck ambling down my street. Of course, it was garbage day.
I ran around the house, collecting all of the garbage from the 38 places we had for it while trying to coerce my boys to eat their breakfasts faster so that they could get their snowpants and gloves and hats and scarves on. And then I dragged the bins down my snow-laden walkway he wasn?t there to shovel, another task in the unspoken division of household labour that had been his.
On my way back up my front steps, I tripped over the handle my snow shovel and soaked the front of my dress. I picked it up and started ...