When Carter and I met, he talked about family the way some people talk about architecture or travel, with the specific enthusiasm of someone who has thought about it a great deal and who has arrived at a vision.
Family
He said: I want a big family. Real big. Like, six kids minimum.
He said it on our third date.
We were at a restaurant and the table beside us had four children who were being managed by two adults with the specific attentive exhaustion of parents at a restaurant, and Carter had watched them for a moment and said: I love that. I want that.
I was twenty-four.
I was a graphic designer who worked from home and who had grown up in a family of two, my sister and me, and who had imagined a future that was not necessarily small but that I had not mapped in detail.
I looked at him.
He was twenty-six and earnest and he had the quality of a man who said what he thought without the performance of cynicism, the quality that I had not encountered often enough to be bored by.
I said: six.
He said: at least.
I said: you’ve thought about this.
He said: my whole life.
I said: what does it look like? The family you’re imagining.
Family
He said: a house with a yard. Noise. Chaos. Kids everywhere.
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