Sometimes, when I’m out of the house during the day, while the rest of you are off and gone, the alt-rock radio station will break out Depeche Mode for its noon-hour throwback show. Usually, it’s just “Enjoy the Silence,” which is vile. Once in a while, it’ll be “Personal Jesus.” You know that song. When we were kids, growing up strangers, everyone in the cars on the way to the stake dances renamed the song “PJ,” and when the time came to sing the title, the person in the passenger seat would crank the volume all the way down for two beats, until the blasphemy had passed.

Can’t blame us, we were just kids. We’re old and married to each other now, no more strangers, and when PJ comes on the radio these days, I roll up the minivan’s windows, blast the bass, and think about you. Some days, it’ll make me cry, driving down 104 Avenue, between the snowbanks and skyscrapers.

God, I love you. Between us, that’s no blasphemy.

In the new ward, where you’re already called into the Bishopric, everyone falls in love with you when our five-year-old wakes up after the intermediate hymn, looks left, then right, and pukes goldfish crackers all over the pew. You fly down from the stand at the front of the chapel, a towering angel, unhesitating in a Hugo Boss suit. You take our littlest boy outside to finish throwing up in the shrubbery while I beg Sister Marquez to go back to her seat and let me clean up the worst of the mess myself.

By the time we’ve finished with the vomit kit, our brothers and sisters are singing a closing song from the ironic section of the hymn book. It’s not “Love At Home,” but it’s close. Today, no one seems to mind it, though it could use more bass—synth bass, and a pounding guitar riff.

God, I love you.

There was never any discussion of Mrs. Me withdrawing from school before finishing my degree. I have it, hanging in the kitchen because bittersweetness is the only thing that seems honest to me. Twenty years and five babies later, I’m back at university, taking undergraduate classes I don’t need as a pretense for meeting the faculty and amassing new academic references. I can’t apply to a graduate program without references and all my old ones were from men who have either retired or died since I was last here, nobody’s mother.

The university’s Humanities Centre has grown old without any renovations. I post a picture of the original stanky vinyl couches in the atrium for my girl-friend to see. She’s another one of the Mormon student-wives who graduated from here with me—another one of the “least talented, least articulate, least nuanced thinkers” ever to thrive on the dean’s list of the arts faculty of this secular university. Our school has been preserved, just as we left it, as if the bones of the university understood, obeyed, waited.

This semester, I’m in a creative writing seminar, telling my classmates that slagging their parents is worn out and boring and universal and they’ll get over it.

Our oldest kid is a student at the university too—our angsty nominally grownup son, nowhere near a mission. He had some free time on campus one day and he came to the shabby burnt-orange environs of the Humanities Centre, trudging over icy sidewalks all the way from the glass and chrome of the new engineering complex. All alone, he climbed the stairs to the fourth floor and stood in the quiet of the empty upper room where I meet with my seminar on dark Monday afternoons.

This is the same son who claims to feel weird on our anniversary because it’s exactly nine months before his birthday. What he means is he knows for sure we must have been fooling around that day, long ago. I scoff and tell him human pregnancies are actually ten months long. And he can pick any day of the calendar year and be sure we’ve had sex on it at some time in the past.

You look smug when you hear me say it. The boy is proof sex happens, that sometimes it works exactly like we think it should, that people combine and stack together like shuffled decks of cards. Look at him. The boy is made of my head on your body. He’s my image boy-ified and stretched out to six feet three inches. He’s you with your handcart-pioneer-diaspora robustness faded and your face skewed long.

He thinks it’s funny to pick me up, like a damsel in a chivalrous stunt, and pass me to you, laughing while I scream. Our great big baby—he comes so close and then feints, always feints, unwilling to speak the name of what named him. He’s resisting the drum machines, the march tempo skipping along the melody in the minor key.

It’s not my fault, you tell me, hands on my head, standing as I sit in a chair pulled into the centre of our bedroom. Our oldest boy has gone decidedly wrong. He told us so even though I’ve watched him crashing for years, like a meteor out of the stratosphere, flaming toward impact. I’ve watched him falling from above and from below, all at the same time. He’s fallen out of us. He’s fallen into us.

Before today, you’ve never wept over my head when giving me a blessing—rain upon the mountains, heart swelling wide as eternity. I sit and you stand and we pause to weep an interlude into the blessing.

The grownup student boy still lives with us, in the basement. He doesn’t know what he can’t see through our bedroom door, gets it wrong over and over. But the sun is up right now so he’s bold enough to come up the stairs, looking for us, knocking, speaking through the wood.

“Can we eat the cream cheese in the fridge or are you saving it for something?”

I cough. “Yeah, okay.”

He leaves and we go on with the blessing. We make moot the truism of how “no priesthood holder can lay his hands on his own head.” Of course we can. What’s mine, what’s yours; what’s head, what’s hands—questions like that mean nothing now.

And oh, PJ—God, I love you