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“We have to pick a color Tobin,” Christen complains, the back of her body laying flat against the only piece of decoration they’ve been able to decide on, a gray and white rug that covers most of the dark hard wood flooring in the room.
“You mean I have to pick a color,” Tobin grumbles back. When Christen glances over, Tobin is focused on the ceiling with her eyes squinting to see the two little paint samples taped to the ceiling.
“I chose the color,” Christen reminds her, “You have to chose the shade.”
“They’re too similar, I can’t tell a difference. Just hold one in each hand and I’ll pick an arm.”
“That’s cheating, it took us a month to narrow down colors. At the most we have a month to get this room together, we have to do this now.”
Tobin mumbles something incoherent in response and crosses her arms over her chest, tilting her head to the side as if that’s going to make some sort of difference.
“What are we doing Tobin?” Christen nudges her in the side, smirking a little as the squirms from the sensation.
“Adopting a baby.”
Tobin’s response just frustrates Christen a little more and she pushes herself up so she’s sitting on the rug and not laying down on it anymore, “I meant why are we laying on the floor staring at paint samples on the ceiling, we’re only painting the walls.”
“For perspective,” Tobin uncrosses her arms and points to the ceiling, “The left one. Definitely.”
“Okay then, get it down and let’s go back to the store,” Christen pushes herself up and walks out of the room, ignoring the boxes and rocker that are pushed up against the wall in the corner of their living room.
-
“Careful!” Christen shouts from the blanket she’s sitting on, failing at stopping the ice cream from dripping down the side of her cone in the late July New York heat.
It happens almost in slow motion, but with Tobin squatting down to pick up dog poop with her back turned to the incident and Christen more than three feet away there’s really nothing either of them have time to do.
The little girl had been using her little legs to run to catch up to Tobin and their dog Poppy after a dragonfly had landed on Tobin’s hand, but she’d shuffled her feet too much upon crossing the walking path to get there, leading her to trip and land on her elbows.
Christen can’t even see her face but she knows that her chin is starting to tremble and tears are pushing past her tear ducts.
“Oh Len,” Tobin quickly squats down and picks up the girl from the ground, dog leash still in her other hand. She holds her elbow up for Tobin to inspect, a few drops of blood pushing through the elbow scrape, Tobin presses a kiss a couple inches above the cut, “It’s okay, mommy has bandaids.”
Christen shakes her head a little, grabbing for Tobin’s orange backpack and unzipping the front pocket that has a few bandaids and neosporin. Tobin sits down on the blanket, plopping Elena on her lap. Her tears have stopped but Christen reaches out to rub away the tear clinging to the bottom of her chin. She pours some water over her elbow first, before she lets it dry to put on a bandaid. By the time it does, Elena has already moved on and is barely managing to throw the tennis ball they brought with them more than three feet at their ‘under 25 pound dog policy’ complacent puppy.
She moves to sit in front of Christen’s lap as she puts the bandaid on, whispering not very quietly, “Careful Mommy, i’ hurs.”
“I know baby,” Christen makes a show of being extra gentle, barely tapping the sticky edges onto her elbow and she can see Tobin send her a wink out of the corner of her eye. When she finishes, she fixes the hat they’d put on the little girls head to protect her from the sun and kisses her forehead.
-
Christen just about drives Tobin crazy on the first day of school.
She wakes up at six in the morning like she always does, but instead of doing her yoga and getting ready for work she paces around their apartment. She checks Elena’s backpack for at least the fourteenth time to make sure she has all of the forms they’d needed to fill out for the kindergartener, makes a coffee run for herself and Tobin, and starts making pancakes and omelets for breakfast before Tobin even starts to wake the five year old up from her slumber at seven.
Tobin cringes when Elena questions her while she’s supervising brushing her hair, “Can we have bagels with strawberry cream cheese?”
“Mom made pancakes and eggs, is that okay?” She asks, hoping that she’ll play along.
“I guess,” She shrugs, standing on her tiptoes to try and get a better look at the outfit Christen had laid out on her dresser the night before, “How come mom isn’t working today? It’s a school day.”
“She’s going to work from home so she can walk with us to school and pick you up,” Tobin runs her hand through a kink in her hair, hoping that it will help it lay flat.
For what it’s worth, Elena is relatively excited to have pancakes on a weekday when she sees her plate and the bowl of berries that Christen has put out for toppings. Christen kind of rushes them through breakfast though, wanting them to leave an extra ten minutes earlier than they need to.
On the walk back to their apartment, Tobin reaches out for Christen’s hand as they walk in silence surrounded by much more fast paced men and women in business attire trying to make it to work on time in their Monday morning hazes.
When they stop to wait for a crosswalk, Tobin turns her head to where Christen is staring straight forward, focused on the light in front of them, “And to think I thought I was going to be the nervous wreck this morning.”
“Hmm?” Christen asks as she turns to face her.
Tobin drops her hand and instead reaches out to wrap an arm around Christen’s shoulder, “Nothing, I just didn’t think you’d be so anxious.”
Christen’s shoulders shrug under her arm, “When did we get so old?”
Tobin laughs and Christen stares her down incredulously, “I’m serious Tobin.”
“Honey, you’re still nineteen inside and out to me,” Tobin lets her hand drift down Christen’s side until it sits low on her waist.
Christen crosses her arms across her chest but Tobin can tell she’s trying to stay serious over the twitch in the corner of her lip, “Maybe you should pick twenty, I was still steamrolling my feelings for you when I was nineteen.”
“Nineteen or twenty, I was still trying to find any excuse to kiss you,” Tobin squeezes her waist gently, “C’mon at least pretend like you love me.”
Christen laughs and uncrosses her arms, reaching over to hug Tobin from the side, “I do love you.”
“Good,” Tobin takes a step forward when the other people waiting to cross do, “We’ve still got a lot to do. I believe I was promised a lifetime of love, being married to a CEO, my own office space, another kid, a trip to Australia for our tenth wedding anniversary in a year and a half, a gas stove, a pool, a big back yar-”
“Did you fall asleep with HGTV on again?” Christen interrupts to get her to stop, knowing that she’s mostly messing around with her suggestions now.
Tobin pauses to key into the first door of their apartment building, holding the door open for Christen as they feel the cold air conditioning wash over them, “It’s not my fault every single show is the same and every single couple wants the same house.”
Christen stands silently in the elevator with Tobin, another woman joining them for the ride up gets off a few levels before them. She glances at her phone, it’s just approaching 8:30 and she has a conference call she needs to be on at nine.
“I have a call until eleven, but do you want to sneak out for lunch sometime this afternoon?”
“You’ll have to ask my PA,” Tobin winks in Christen’s direction, mocking the day a couple weeks after Christen had gotten a promotion at work that included a new personal assistant. Tobin had called Christen at work on a particularly busy day, on a morning where she’d left in a bit of a mood after disagreement about their homestudy, to see what time she’d get off work in hopes of being able to make the treck to drop Elena for the night at her sister’s in New Jersey so she could take Christen out to dinner to talk about their discussion in a more relaxed setting. In the midst of a busy meeting to prepare for her boss’ board meeting that night, Christen had texted Tobin to ‘check with her PA’ to see when she was finished for the day.
“Stop, I already felt bad for yelling at you and Elena overhearing it,” Christen avoids eye contact with Tobin and fiddles with her phone in her hands.
Tobin gives her a half smile as an apology as they step out of the elevator.
Christen is very animated when she works, which is how Tobin understands that she likes her work even though she doesn’t understand close to an ounce of what Christen does all day. Today though, when she’s at home and on the phone she can’t sit still. She walks circles around their living room and it makes Tobin dizzy watching her. When she has a differing opinion on something, her tone raises and she starts motioning with the hand that’s not holding her phone to her ear. She wonders if this is how Christen works in her office, maybe she should get her one of those exercise ball chairs for Christmas or something.
Tobin thinks it’s strange seeing her work at home. Since Tobin doesn’t really have an office of her own, she works anywhere she wants. Sometimes it’s the kitchen counter, sometimes it’s a coffee shop down the street, maybe a bookstore or a library. It all sort of depends.
Christen though, unless she’s sick and needs to get some work done from home, doesn’t ever bring her work home.
Like the flip of a switch, she hangs up the phone, types a few things on her laptop, and before Tobin realizes that the tone of her wife’s voice has stopped talking, she’s resting her chin on Tobin’s shoulders with her arms wrapped around her waist, leaning over to press a kiss below her ear.
Whatever has her relaxed in the middle of the day, certainly does not remain with her through the afternoon.
She paces while sending emails from her phone and a half hour before school is supposed to release for the day Christen declares that it’s time to go.
“There’s still thirty minutes before the bell rings babe,” Tobin looks up from her laptop, pushing her glasses on top of her head and rubbing at her eyes from staring at her computer for so long, “It’s ten minutes away, we’ll be twenty minutes early.”
“But what if there’s traffic or something?”
Tobin laughs into her hands but slides off her bar stool, patting her pockets and looking around in an attempt to find her phone, “We’re walking but if we leave now we can grab some ice cream on the way.”
“Len would kill us if she knew we had ice cream while she was at school.”
“What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her, will it?” Tobin finds her wallet, grabs a twenty dollar bill and pockets it.
Christen walks with Tobin, holding her hand while they eat ice cream together, making sure to finish their cones before they walk up to the entrance of the elementary school. They’re still five minutes early but so are a lot of parents. Christen wonders how many of them are anxious parents of kindergarteners like she is.
The bell rings right when it should and about two minutes later kids start flooding out of the entrance of the building. Christen and Tobin are standing by the tree where they dropped her off, just like they said they would. Strings of children are filing out, older ones walking in clumps and heading home by themselves. Christen is rocking back and forth between her tiptoes and her heels, trying to find their daughter.
Christen must spot her though because she starts to wave with one hand in the direction of a clump of particularly small children, around the height of their own.
Elena bounds towards them with a smile, her lunch bag swinging in her hands. She just about knocks Christen over when she plows into her, “Mom!”
Tobin ruffles her hair while Christen begins to throw her ‘how was your first day of school’ questions at her while she’s still squatting down to be face level with her.
“We got to play with this big parachute in gym class today! We played all these games with it and my whole class sat under it and it was like a tent! And then at lunch, my new friend Margaux and I switched sandwiches, so she had half of my peanut butter and jelly and I had half of her ham sandwich. Can we make ham sandwiches for lunch sometime? And Margaux, she sits at my table in Ms. Johnson’s room, can she come over and play with Poppy? She has two dogs and a cat-”
“Slow down hun,” Tobin pats her head again before she holds her arms out, “We’re going to need to meet Margaux’s parents first and I need a hug.”
"Hi Mama," Elena also tightens her arms around Tobin’s neck, squeezing her a lot tighter than Tobin expected. When she pulls away, Tobin grabs the lunch bag from her hands and motions with her head towards the sidewalk, “How about you tell us all about your day on the walk home?”
“Okay,” She agrees, turning her head back in Christen’s direction and reaching a hand out to make sure she follows, “After we get a little brother or sister, can we get a big brother or sister? A lot of my new friends have big brothers and sisters but I don’t have any brothers or sisters-”
Christen laughs a bit, looking up to see the smile Tobin has on her face while trying to contain her own laughter, “It’s not that easy sweetheart, and adoption takes a long time. Remember how we said it could be a while before we get another child? And how it took us almost two years to get matched with you?”
“Is that a no then?” She looks up at Tobin with a little bit of a frown on her face.
“How about we think about it after we do our next adoption, okay?”
That seems to appease her enough, Tobin looks up at Christen and lets out a little bit of a breath she didn’t know she was holding in. When Christen glances up to make eye contact with her after, she whispers what Tobin knows to be an
I love you.