Broken Marriage? How About SuperGlue? (“Country” 9)

My divorced grandmother; my divorced dad; me, and Big Brother and Little Brother. Not that I thought about it at the time, of course.

Maybe my scientific mind wasn’t the best contribution to married life.

It seemed like I kept having to come up with a new hypothesis on why marriage with R kept becoming tougher, and then testing my guess with an experiment. That’s a terrible way to talk about making love and making a second baby … but I hoped so strongly that the new baby would bond us back together, that I never considered any other solution to the problem.

And for a few weeks, it worked. R adored the new baby, and continued to find Big Brother — who used to be our Baby Boy — fascinating. Often the two of them would lie on the floor together, drawing pictures of little spear-carrying “monks” lining up around and over a mountainous terrain in battle formation. As Big Brother’s vocabulary grew, so too did R’s interest in this potential book child: Reading picturebooks to this boy, now almost four years old, delighted each of us.

Dad didn’t visit us often, but he made a lot of things easier … like carrying the kids.

R had a bit more time for the pleasure, since I was also breastfeeding the New Baby, preparing three meals a day from scratch, feeding the chickens and a growing calf, and teaching myself to can fruits and vegetables. And the laundry, of which…