I had imagined turning sixty in a hundred different ways over the past year, the way you turn a thought over and over when you have too much quiet in your life and your mind fills the silence with projections. I had imagined a small dinner, just me and Mark, my oldest, at the Italian restaurant on Burnside where they make their pasta by hand and the lighting is low and forgiving and you feel, sitting there, like someone who is being taken care of. I had imagined my daughter Sarah calling from wherever she was living now, Colorado or New Mexico, she had mentioned both at different times and I had lost track, calling to sing happy birthday through the speaker in that flat, cheerfully tuneless way she had always sung, immune to embarrassment in the specific way of people who genuinely do not care. I had imagined my husband, if he had been here, which he was not and had not been for five years, standing behind me in the kitchen and putting his hand on the small of my back and squeezing once, the way he used to do when we were young and the house was new and we could not quite believe we had made this life together out of nothing but intention and stubbornness.Mostly, though, I had imagined a house full of noise.

When David and I got married, in a small ceremony in his parents’ backyard in June of 1988, he told me he wanted a big family. Not in the abstract way that young people sometimes say things like that, meaning vaguely more than one, meaning the idea of children rather than the specific reality of them. He meant it specifically and enthusiastically, the way he meant most things when he was young and certain. “A loud house,” he used to say, pulling me toward him in the one-bedroom apartment we lived in before the children came, the apartment where the kitchen table also served as the desk and the dining room and the place where we did our taxes. “A table that’s never empty. A place where people are always coming and going and there’s always someone talking over someone else.” He would laugh when he said it, and I would laugh with him, and we would lie in bed at night in that small apartment and talk about the family we were going to build as though it were a country we had already been granted and were simply waiting to move to.

We had six children in ten years. Mark, then Jason, then Caleb, then Grant, then Sarah, then Eliza. Four boys and two girls and enough noise between them to shake the walls of our house on Clover Street in Portland, where we moved when the apartment became impossible to justify with a second child on the way. For years that house was exactly the loud house David had dreamed of, a symphony of sibling arguments and basketball in the driveway and the constant percussive sound of running feet and slamming doors and at least two people at all times asking about dinner. Homework complaints layered over excited chatter about school dances. Soccer cleats left in the middle of the hallway. Someone always looking for their other shoe.

I used to complain about the noise. I want to be honest about that. I used to stand in my kitchen on the worst evenings and fantasize about silence the way some people fantasize about vacation, about an hour, just an hour, of nobody needing anything from me. I said it out loud sometimes, dramatically, to David or to my sister on the phone, and I meant it when I said it and I also did not mean it, the way you can hold two contradictory truths simultaneously about the life you have chosen. The noise was exhausting and the noise was everything. Both were true.

He had met someone online, a woman in Southeast Asia, and the meeting had apparently been thorough enough that he came home one Tuesday evening in October and told me he was leaving. He said it in the kitchen, standing near the refrigerator, still in his work clothes, with the particular expression of a man who has rehearsed a conversation until it no longer looks like something he is afraid of. He said he needed to find himself, as though himself were a thing that had become lost somewhere in the middle of raising six children and building a life with the woman who had given him everything she had for twenty-two years, as though himself were something that could only be recovered in Southeast Asia rather than in the house on Clover Street where the person he had chosen to become had spent the better part of three decades being built.
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