The boxes were taped shut. The movers were coming in the morning. I was standing in the kitchen, drinking a glass of wine and saying a silent goodbye to the granite countertops I had picked out three years ago.
Then, David walked in. He wasn’t alone. He had Jessica with him—the twenty-four-year-old reason our marriage was ending. She was holding a spiral-bound notepad and a pen, looking eager, like an intern on her first day.
“Glad you’re still here, Brenda,” David said, clapping his hands together. “We need to go over a few things before you leave.”
I raised an eyebrow. “The lawyers settled everything, David. You got the house. I got my sanity. We’re done.”
“No, not the legal stuff,” he said, waving a hand dismissively. “The household stuff. Since Jessica is going to be taking over… well, the domestic side of things, I thought it would be professional for you to do a handover.”
I choked on my wine. “A handover?”
“Exactly,” he nodded. “My husband asked for a divorce, but then had the audacity to ask me to ‘train’ his new girlfriend on how to run the house before I left“.
He gestured for Jessica to open her notepad.
“We need you to run through the schedule,” he listed, ticking off items on his fingers. “He wanted me show her the kids’ allergies,” specifically which brand of peanut-free snacks the school allowed and where we kept the EpiPens.
“And recipes,” he added. “Jessica tries, but she doesn’t get the roast right. I need you to teach her how to cook his favorite meals“.
I looked at them. They were serious. They actually expected me to transmit fifteen years of maternal instinct, emotional labor, and household management to a stranger in a thirty-minute orientation session. He viewed my role in our family not as a mother or a wife, but as a staff member who needed to train her replacement.
I set my wine glass down. I walked over to the junk drawer—the one I had cleaned out yesterday. There was a single, cheap notebook left inside.
I took it out. I walked over to David. Jessica poised her pen, ready to write down the secret to my life.
I handed him a blank notebook.
David stared at the empty cover. “What is this?”
“That’s the manual,” I said.
“It’s empty,” he frowned.
“Exactly,” I smiled, picking up my purse. “Figure it out.“.
“But… the allergies! The schedule! The roast!” he sputtered.
“The allergies are in the medical records you never read,” I told him. “The schedule is on the calendar you never look at. And the roast? It’s just meat and heat, David. Good luck.”
I walked out the door and into the cool night air. I didn’t look back. I left them standing in the kitchen with a blank book, about to learn the hard way that you can replace a wife, but you can’t outsource the soul of a home.
