A Uterus Is a Feature, Not a Bug by Sarah Lacy

Author:Sarah Lacy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-11-13T16:00:00+00:00

12

From Subject to Sovereign

I wake up to the glow of the TV. This happens every morning sometime between 2:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. I may return to sleep. What I won’t return to is my bed. I haven’t slept in my bedroom regularly since Evie was born. It’s a big empty room that holds piles of laundry Megan dutifully folds that I rarely find time to put away.

Back in 2013, in the months after Evie was born, I slept in the big bed in her room. Now, a year later, I sleep on the couch. For one thing, I can’t fall asleep without the distraction of the TV anymore. For another, my bed is too reminiscent of my marriage.

Even after we decided we needed a divorce, Geoff lived in the house until August 2014 or so. And after that, his stuff was here for another year.

I turn off the TV and either fall back asleep, grab my laptop, which is likely right next to me, or just stare at the ceiling. Megan will be here soon to get the kids up. I have stress, but for a few more hours, I have silence.

* * *

If Uber had started its oppo research campaign, they would have quickly discovered Geoff and I had already beaten them to the task of destroying our marriage. We were in the middle of our divorce. He’d moved out, and I’d stopped wearing my wedding ring, but we didn’t yet talk about it publicly. Because Geoff had been spending half his time in Vegas since Eli was a few months old, people didn’t particularly notice.

But internally, I was already reeling from the loneliness and betrayal that came with the end of my marriage when the Uber thing came right in and shattered all my illusions about Silicon Valley.

Paul took care of me like I was incapacitated. He slept on my couch at night and went with me to every interview or appearance. I referred every request for my time to him, and he prioritized and booked all of it, while making sure the company functioned during those two weeks after the Emil Michael revelations as well. He’d patiently tell me again and again where we were going, who the audience was. That new reality of my world weighed so heavily on me I found basic functioning almost impossible. I was a corpse who only managed to come to life when a video camera was pointed at me or my kids were near me.

Geoff gave me a bottle of my favorite expensive scotch. He was around as little or as much as I needed in subsequent weeks. He took the kids as much or as little as I needed. But that was about all he knew how to do.

When he stopped by in the aftermath of the news, he was rattled just looking at me. “I’ve never seen you like this,” he said. He’d known me for fifteen years. He’d seen me in labor twice. We’d been kidnapped together.

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