Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [80]
She had always planned on working, and while I joked about giving up my job to be a househusband, it was never something I could really bring myself to do. Of course, I had been slightly mistaken—now I would have given up every hour at that office to spend more time at home with Madeline. But my daughter and I got used to the shift in our routine, obeying an actual schedule instead of moving through our day at a leisurely pace. We kind of had to find ourselves a new rhythm.
I would leave work early, which was easy since there was nothing much for me to do there, and even though I could have left Maddy at day care until six o’clock while I did my own thing for a little while, I would pick her up immediately. With the time we were spending apart, it became even more important to have her with me as much as I could. I wanted to do the things I knew I’d be doing if Liz were still alive, but I didn’t want more time away from my daughter. Bringing Madeline with me on my adventures was exactly what Liz and I had meant when we said we weren’t going to be changed by our child. We’d instead incorporate her into the activities we both loved so much, each of us influencing her in our own way. But now I had a much heftier responsibility than just keeping our baby happy—I had to preserve and cultivate both of our interests so that Madeline would have an equal amount of influence from both parents. I knew that Liz would have fucking loved that.
Even when Maddy was just a blurry picture on an ultrasound screen, Liz started fantasizing about taking our baby girl to the spa and dressing her up. I didn’t give a shit about that stuff—I just wanted to teach her to appreciate music. I could practically see her on my shoulders, a mini-Liz chirping excitedly, helping me pick out records as I walked through the aisles of Amoeba, my favorite record store.
Tuesdays had always been the best day of the week—the day the new releases arrived at the record store. But since Liz died, Tuesdays had become the designated slot for me to torture myself again and again with thoughts of how many weeks she had been gone. And I was still living from Tuesday to Tuesday. I felt that by counting them, by anchoring the scurry of time into weeks, I somehow tethered Liz to me, keeping a line to the last time I saw her alive.
These weekly trips to Amoeba helped me escape the awfulness that came with waking up to another week gone by without Liz. I knew that no matter how shitty the day started, I’d at least be able to escape some of it with a bag full of new records. Like most other weeks, on what happened to be the thirty-third Tuesday since Liz had died, I left work early and picked Madeline up from day care. I parked in the lot behind the shop, where the walls are covered with years’ worth of caked-on graffiti, and walked into the store with my baby hanging off my arm in her car seat. You should have seen the looks the hipsters gave me as I squeezed through the vinyl aisles, digging for records by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti and Swearing at Motorists. They believed what I had believed before Liz was pregnant: that all people become lame when they become parents. But lame is one thing I am not, and I dreamed of a confrontation that would end with my inviting some asshole to my house for a