Latest / My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story / My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 61: The Long Yes

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My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 61: The Long Yes · My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story

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and she had listened and then she said you know
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who's good at this part me i'm extremely good
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at this part i once waited years for a man to
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wake up with no timeline no guarantee he ever
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would no lover to pull nothing my playful wife
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episode 61 the long yes written by mia The Wish
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put on its working clothes faster than I had
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expected, and the working clothes were not romantic.
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They were forms. A great many forms and a telephone
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call to an office. and then another office, and
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a list of documents to assemble that ran to a
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second page, and the slow dawning understanding
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that the beautiful thing we had decided in an
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empty room was going to have to be born, like
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most beautiful things, through a long corridor
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of the unbeautiful, through certificates and
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clearances and references, and the patient machinery
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a society builds, rightly, around the question
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of who may be given a child. I want to be fair
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to the forms because my first instinct was not
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to be. It would be easy to paint the paperwork
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as the dull enemy of a beautiful impulse, the
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state's gray hand laid flat across the warm thing
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we wanted. But the forms exist for a reason I,
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of all people, ought to honor. Because a child
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is precisely the kind of creature who cannot
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protect itself, who arrives unable to vet the
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adults it is handed to, and so somebody must
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do the vetting on its behalf, coldly, with documents,
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refusing to be charmed. The whole apparatus is
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built around the helplessness of the one being
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placed. Presenting it was, I came to see, a small
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selfishness, my impatience set above a child's
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right to careful adults. So I stopped resenting
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it, mostly, and filled in the forms. I had imagined,
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I think, in the empty room, that having said
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the hard yes to ourselves, we had essentially
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done the difficult part. I could not have been
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more wrong. The yes to ourselves had been one
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yes, a single evening's worth. What lay ahead
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was a different kind of thing entirely, a thing
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I came over those weeks to call the long yes.
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The hundred smaller yes, unglamorous and unwitnessed,
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that the one big yes turns out to be made of.
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Yes to the form, yes to the next form, yes to
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the appointment, yes to assembling the documents
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again because one had expired, yes to the waiting,
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yes above all and without end, to the waiting.
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Nobody writes poems about the long yes, but it
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is the only kind there actually is. The single
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dramatic yes is a thing that exists mostly in
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films. In life, every large commitment is secretly
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a corridor of small ones, and whether you arrive
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at the far end depends entirely on whether you
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can keep saying the small, unspectacular yes
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long after the thrill of the big one has worn
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off. That is the plain fact of it, and it was
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one of the stranger experiences of my adult life.
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She was perfectly kind and perfectly professional,
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a social worker with a soft voice and a folder,
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and she sat in our front room on a weekday morning
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and looked at us and our home and our marriage
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with the calm evaluating eye of someone whose
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job is to decide whether a child would be safe
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and well in our care. And I sat there under that
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gaze and felt a thing I had not felt in many
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years, which was the sensation of being judged
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from the outside on the very thing I believed
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I now knew most about from the inside. Here was
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my marriage, the marriage of six notebooks, the
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marriage I had nearly lost and clawed back and
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studied more closely than I have ever studied
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anything, and here was a kind stranger with a
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clipboard who would form. in 90 minutes, an opinion
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about whether it was a fit place to put a child,
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and whose 90 -minute opinion would count, officially,
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for vastly more than my six years of nightly
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evidence. There is a humility in that which I
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would not have been able to bear at all in my
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sleeping years, and which I found, awake, I could
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just about manage. The humility of submitting
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the thing you know best in the world to the judgment
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of someone seeing it for the first time and granting
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that they have the right. And there was something
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useful in it, beneath the discomfort, that I
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had not anticipated. Being looked at hard from
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the outside makes you see your own life freshly,
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the way a guest in your home makes you notice
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a room you had long stopped noticing. As the
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woman's calm eyes moved over our flat and our
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marriage, I found myself seeing them too, through
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her, as if for the first time. The small kindnesses
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worn into our routines, the way Saloni and I
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move around each other in a kitchen without colliding,
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the evidence of a tended life written into objects
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I had stopped registering years ago. The assessment
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was an intrusion, yes, but it was also a mirror.
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And I am a man who has learned to be grateful
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for anything that makes me look again at what
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I have stopped seeing, even a stranger with a
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clipboard doing her job. She asked us, of course,
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why. It is the question at the center of the
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whole process, and they are right to put it there.
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And I, who had six notebooks on the subject,
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who had traced the want all the way back to an
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unwatched child at a family table 50 years ago,
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who could have spoken about it more deeply and
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at greater length than possibly anyone she had
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ever interviewed, I found that I could not say
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the true thing. It was too large and too raw
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and too strange to lay in front of a kind professional
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with a folder. I could not say. I want to do
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this because I was a child no one looked at,
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and I went to sleep for 40 years because of it,
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and I only just woke, and I know exactly what
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an unwatched child becomes, and I cannot bear
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to let another one become it if I have a room
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and the late -learn capacity to prevent it. You
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cannot say that across a coffee table to a stranger
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assessing your fitness. So I said something smaller
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and more acceptable and largely true about having
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love to give and a stable home and wanting to
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share what we had, and I watched her write it
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down, the small, sayable version, and felt the
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curious loneliness of having given an honest
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answer that was nonetheless not the real one,
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because the real one would not fit through the
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narrow official door. I have thought a good deal
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since about that gap between the true reason
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and the sayable one because it is not unique
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to social workers and forms. It runs through
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nearly everything. We are always translating
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our real reasons into acceptable ones, for officials,
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for relatives, for ourselves, smoothing the strange,
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deep, private why into a tidy public because
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that will pass inspection. Mostly this is harmless,
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a kind of social lubricant. But I felt the cost
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of it that morning, the particular grief of watching
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a stranger write down a true enough thing while
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the actual, load -bearing truth sat in my chest
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untranslated and untranslatable. The deepest
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reasons we do anything are often exactly the
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ones we cannot say aloud to the people who most
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need to weigh them. We are assessed on the translations.
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The originals stay home. Saloni did better because
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Saloni always does better at the true things
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said simply. When the woman turned to her and
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asked the same why, Saloni did not reach, as
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I had, for the acceptable phrasing. She said,
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because I have spent my life learning to pay
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attention to people, and I have more of it than
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the two of us need, and there is a child somewhere
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who is nobody paying any to them at all. That's
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the whole of it. We have a surplus of exactly
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the things some child is dying for the lack of.
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It would be a kind of crime to sit on it. And
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the social worker stopped writing for a moment
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and looked at her, because it was, plainly, the
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truest and cleanest answer she had heard in a
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long time, the answer of a woman who had thought
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about it not in the language of forms, but in
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the language of her own life. That is Saloni's
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particular genius, the one I have watched for
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years and never learned to copy. She can say
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the enormous true thing in small plain words,
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without armor, without the hedging the rest of
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us wrap the true things in, and it lands every
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time like something dropped from a height. I
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dress my truths in paragraphs. She hands hers
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over bare. I used to think this was a difference
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of eloquence, that she was simply better with
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words, but it is closer to the opposite. It is
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that she is less defended. The armor I wrap my
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truths in is not skill. It is fear. The old fear
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of the unwatched child that a thing said plainly
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might be ignored or laughed at, and so must be
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padded and qualified and made clever enough to
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be safe before it is risked. Celonie was watched
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as a child, loved plainly, and so she trusts
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a plain true sentence to survive being said.
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She has never needed the armor, because she was
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never wounded into needing it. Listening to her
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answer the social worker, I understood that her
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simplicity is not a technique I could study and
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acquire. It is the sound of a person who is looked
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at early, speaking without the fear of not being
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heard. And then, the assessment done. The forms
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filed, the references taken up, then came the
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part one was least prepared for, which was the
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waiting. I had not understood how much of the
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long yes would simply be waiting. Weeks of it,
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and then months, with no way to hurry it, no
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lever to pull, nothing to do but exist inside
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an open -ended interval whose end no one could
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name. And I discovered that the waiting was,
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for me specifically, the hardest part of all,
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harder than the forms and harder even than the
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assessment, because I am a man who has built
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a whole second life on the discipline of attending
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to the present, to what is actually here. And
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the waiting asked me to live instead suspended
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toward a future that refused to arrive on any
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schedule, a child who might come in three months
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or 18 or might. The woman had gently warned us,
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never quite come in the way. We pictured the
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awake are good at the present. The future is
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not our native country. And the long yes is lived
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almost entirely in the future tense, in the not
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yet, in the corridor between the decision and
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the arrival, which is precisely the territory
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the present tense discipline of the notebooks
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had not prepared me for at all. There is an irony
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in it I could not miss, sitting in the long suspended
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weeks. The very discipline that had saved my
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marriage, the relentless attention to the present,
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to what is here now and only now was of almost
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no use to me in the waiting, because the waiting
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is precisely a present mostly defined by what
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it lacks, a now whose whole meaning points at
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a not yet. I had trained myself for years to
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stop living in the future and inhabit the actual
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room. And now the actual room contained an absence,
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a child -shaped space, and to inhabit the present
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fully meant inhabiting a present full of longing
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for something not in it. I did not have a discipline
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for that. I had to begin, late and clumsily,
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to build one. There was an evening. Somewhere
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in the waiting, when I wobbled badly, and it
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was Saloni who steadied me, with the one piece
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of evidence I could not argue against. I had
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said something about not being able to bear the
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not -knowing, the open -endedness, the sense
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of having handed our future to an office and
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a queue and a stranger's timeline. And she had
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listened, and then she said, You know who's good
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at this part? Me. I'm extremely good at this
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part. I once waited years for a man to wake up,
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with no timeline, no guarantee he ever would,
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no lever to pull, nothing to do but keep the
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lamp lit and exist toward a future that might
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never arrive. That was a longer yes than this
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one, and a lonelier one, because at least we're
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waiting together. I already know I can do this.
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I did a harder version of it for you. She said
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it without any edge, as a simple fact, and it
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landed like one. I had been the impossible weight
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she had already endured and outlasted. The fostering
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cue held no terror for a woman who had once waited
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out my entire sleeping soul on faith alone. If
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she could wait years for me with no guarantee,
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we could both wait however long this took, together.
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with at least the company of each other, and
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the same lamp lit between us. It humbled me,
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that comparison, in the way the truest things
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from her always do, because she was right, and
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the rightness reorganized the whole of my impatience.
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I had been treating the waiting as a hardship
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being done to us, an imposition to be endured
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with gritted teeth. But she had already lived
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a longer and far more thankless version of exactly
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this, without complaint, without guarantee, and
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largely alone, for the years I lay sleeping beside
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her. Who was I, who had been the cause of her
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longest wait, to buckle at a cue we had chosen
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together and entered with our eyes open? Her
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patience was not a personality trait she had
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been lucky enough to be born with. It was a skill,
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hard -earned, in the one domain where I myself
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had been her hardest lesson, and she was offering
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to teach it to me now. I came to understand,
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over those waiting weeks, that the long yes is
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not the enemy of the thing. It is the forge of
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it. I had half resented the machinery at first,
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the forms, the assessment, the queue, as obstacles
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thrown up between us and the sacred thing we
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wanted, bureaucratic gravel in the path of love.
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But somewhere in the waiting I turned it over
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and saw it differently. The long yes, with all
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its tedium and indignity and delay, is not gravel
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in the path. It is the path, and more than that,
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It is the test that makes the arrival mean anything.
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Anyone can want a child in the warm glow of an
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empty room on a single evening. The forms ask
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you whether you still want it on a wet Tuesday
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with an expired certificate and four more months
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of queue ahead and no guarantee at the end. The
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waiting asks over and over, in its dull, relentless
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way, the only question that actually matters.
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Do you really mean it? And every form filed and
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every empty week endured is a small yes that
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answers, again yes. We do. Still. The machinery
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I had resented turned out to be doing something
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I could not have done for myself. It was forging
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the wand into a commitment, one dull yes at a
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time, the way the notebooks had once forged my
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attention into love, one ordinary evening at
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a time. It was the same work. It had only put
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on a uniform. I wrote it in the sixth notebook,
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the forms in a folder on the desk, the room down
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the hall still empty, still waiting, but officially
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waiting now. That I had thought the yes was the
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evening in the empty room, and that the yes was
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in fact everything that came after it, the forms,
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the assessment, the unbearable patient waiting,
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the hundred small unglamorous renewals of a decision
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the world keeps quietly asking you to confirm
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you still mean. That this is true of all the
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large things, and I had simply never been awake
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for the long middle of one before. A marriage
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is a long yes. I knew that already. The awake
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years had taught me that you do not marry once,
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but every morning. And a child, it turned out,
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was the same. Not one yes in a bright room, but
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a corridor of them, most of them dull, none of
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them filmed. walked in the dark toward a door
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that might or might not open. And the only people
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who make it down that corridor are the ones who
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have learned that love is not the big yes at
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the start, but the long one that comes after,
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the unspectacular daily renewal, the staying
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which Saloni had always known, having said the
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longest and loneliest yes of all to me, and waited.
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Then the working line, the sixth notebook open,
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the folder of forms beside it, Saloni asleep,
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the empty room waiting down the hall. Beware
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the romance of the single yes. The big dramatic
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decision made in one bright moment is the easy
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and the cheap part, and almost nothing in a life
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actually turns on it. What a life turns on is
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the long yes. The hundred small, unwitnessed
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renewals that come after. The form. The wait.
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The wet Tuesday. The staying when the thrill
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is gone. Anyone can say yes once, in the glow.
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The question every large thing finally asks you
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is whether you will keep saying it, dully, faithfully,
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with no audience and no guarantee, down the whole
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gray corridor between the decision and the arrival.
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Say it. Keep saying it. The long yes is the only
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one that builds anything, and the people who
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can walk its full unglamorous length are the
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only ones who ever reach the door. I capped the
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pen and walked down the hall to the empty room
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and stood in its doorway, as I do now most nights,
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and it was still empty. and might be empty for
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months more, and I found I could stand in the
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not yet of it more easily than I had a few weeks
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before, because Saloni had reframed the waiting
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as a thing she was good at and I was learning,
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and because I had understood at last that we
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were not stalled but walking, that every dull
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week was a step, that the long yes was not the
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obstacle but the road. Somewhere down it, behind
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a door neither of us could see yet, there might
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be a child who needed exactly what we had a surplus
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of. We could not hurry toward them. We could
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only keep saying yes and wait and keep the room
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ready and the lamp lit the way Saloni had once
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kept it lit for me. To be continued in episode
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episode 60, One of My Playful Wife. If this story
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is staying with you, the next episode is already
19:57
waiting. Subscribe so you don't miss it. The
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complete book is on Amazon and early episodes
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plus bonus chapters are on my Patreon. Links
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are in the description. I'm Mia. Thank you for
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listening.