Chapter Two:
Desperate Housewife

THE NEXT MORNING

0600 LOCAL
BRUMBY RESIDENCE
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

After slipping into an uneasy sleep at 0230 (even though she was no longer a marine, Mac refused to stop using military time), Mac found herself walking up promptly at 0600, a habit developed from years of being in the Corps and honed-in on by being a parent. She slipped noiselessly out of the bed, careful not to disturb Mic even though there was no way she possibly could've.

Walking over to the bay window, Mac pulled the curtains back. The bedroom was flooded with the dim light of early morning, and Mac peered down at their quiet backyard. Their pool was sitting there, still covered despite the girls' begging to use it, because it still wasn't quite warm enough. There was also no fence around it, something that Mic and Mac swore they would remedy before they took the cover off this season.

In hindsight they should've been proactive and done it when Mac was pregnant with Sophia, but Mic had been busy with work, and Mac had been so busy with regular depression before she got postpartum depression that it had never happened.

Granted, it hadn't really become a problem until last summer, when Sophia had figured out how to get through the child-proof lock that was over the regular lock on the sliding glass door that led to the backyard. That had led to a fun and completely stress-free summer.

Now they really had to put one in, not only because it was a huge safety issue for their two existing children, but because by next summer, Mic and Mac were going to be outnumbered.

Changing out of her nightgown into leggings and a sweatshirt, Mac returned to the bed, kneeling across her side of it to gently shake Mic's shoulder. He groaned, turning over to look up at Mac with sleep clouded eyes.

"I'm going for a walk," Mac told him before he could clear his throat to speak. "Could you keep an ear for the girls?"

"Of course," Mic frowned. "Is something wrong, love?"

Mac smiled. "No," she shook her head. "I just need to clear my head, that's all."

"Okay."

She bent down to kiss his cheek. "I'll be back in a little bit."

Mac walked past the stairs and to the girls' room. They were both awake, something that wasn't surprising at all. Mac had learned that toddlers didn't have any concept of sleeping in long before she had any toddlers of her own. She had watched Little AJ overnight a couple of times for Bud and Harriet whenever they went on weekend trips or just needed a night to themselves. From that, she had learned the hard way that toddlers hated sleeping in.

Pressing her ear against the door, Mac listened to their tiny whispers with a smile on her face. It almost hurt how much she loved them. With their brown eyes, freckles, and weird mix of American and Australian accents, Sophia and Olivia were Mac's pride and joy. Sure, Mic liked to boast about them at work parties or to anyone who would listen, saying that they were his girls, his perfect little daughters that the sun rose and set around, but he would never know them the way Mac knew them.

He was at work five days a week, and if Mac didn't tell him about what went on while he was gone, he wouldn't know anything. She was with them practically all the time, and knew everything about them. It was a certain intimacy that she had never experienced before. It was overwhelming at times yet completely fascinating.

It wasn't a competition, Mac knew this, but she was still winning. Mic was losing.

She nudged the door open, noticing how Sophia and Olivia's conversation ceased once they heard the door creak. It was amusing, how the two of them existed in their own little world. They were only eighteen months apart, and people who didn't know anything about child development were already confusing them for twins.

The two of them were sprawled out on the carpet, most of Sophia's toys spread out around them. Sophia and Olivia were usually okay with sharing most of the time, but there was one thing they were territorial over: toys. Mac was shocked they were still playing nicely.

"Good morning, sleepyheads," she cooed, crouching down. Maybe it was selfish, but she loved the way their eyes lit up as soon as they saw her, the way they immediately came running over to her, almost knocking her over with their combined weight.

They weren't like that with Mic.

Mac brought both of them in close to her, one daughter in the crook of each arm. "Do you want to play a game?" she asked, watching as their eyes lit up, both nodding eagerly. "Do you want to race to see who can be the first person to wake up Daddy?"

One time, after a particularly stressful day with the girls, Mac had been venting about it to Mic who, to his credit, had gotten marginally better at listening to her over the years. He'd walked behind her as she did the dishes, reaching out to massage her shoulders and placing a kiss in her hair.

"Don't worry about it, love," he'd told her, "I'll take care of them on the weekends. You won't have to lift a finger."

This was Mac, not lifting a finger.

After counting off at three, Sophia and Olivia raced down the hall towards Mic and Mac's bedroom. Mac hurried down the stairs, making a break for the front door before the girls noticed her absence. The fresh morning air felt crisp on Mac's skin, and she double-checked to make sure the spare key to the house was under the same flower pot that it usually was before pulling the front door shut behind her.

The Brumby household was located in one of the newer suburbs outside of Sydney, one built in the mid 90's. They had been a little late to the party when it came to moving in, so most of the couples had already been living there several years before Mic and Mac moved in. The house had been purchased from a divorced couple, which made Mac concerned that they might've been moving into a cursed home, or that the fate of the previous couple might be some harbinger of what would happen to Mic and Mac's marriage.

Also, for the first month they lived there, Mic and Mac were almost exclusively known as 'the new couple that bought Cliff and Jeanette's house,' which was more comical than anything else.

As Mac walked down the street, she thought about the other couples that had gotten divorced. There had only been a few in the neighborhood in general, but there none of them had been people Mac had actually known. It had made for fantastic gossip with the other stay-at-home-moms in the neighborhood, though. There was one wife that kept taking prescription pills that she didn't need to take, one husband that would stick his dick into practically anything that moved. The third couple apparently just got tired of each other.

Despite their supposedly cursed home, Mac wasn't actively thinking about divorcing Mic. Unless things reached an absolute breaking point, Mac wouldn't divorce him. She was a lawyer, she knew what a shitshow divorces could be, especially when there were kids involved. Mac would much rather lay in wait to see if Mic divorced her, so she would get painted as the poor single mother rather than the bitchy American that got tired of being a housewife.

According to Mac's research, there were two specific windows in a marriage where divorce was statistically the most common. The first window was between the first and second years of marriage, which Mic and Mac had made it through (Mac just barely), and the second window was between the fifth and eighth years of marriage, a stage they were just starting to head into. That combined with the stress that would inevitably come with having three kids didn't exactly give Mac a warm fuzzy feeling.

This was thanks to statistics she'd received from Harriet when she first found out she'd been expecting twins. "You know, I read somewhere that having three kids is when parenting becomes the most stressful," she'd told Mac over the phone, "And after that, it's the same amount of stress regardless of how many you have, so I don't think it's that big of deal that Bud and I are going straight from two to four, right? I mean at this rate we may as well just have five."

Mac, who had still been relatively new to being a mother of two at the time, could only nod, even though Harriet couldn't see her do so. She didn't have the heart to tell her best friend that she sounded absolutely batshit insane.

She could manage three kids, though. She'd been shot at before. She'd actually been shot before. She could manage three kids.

It had become a hot topic among their friend group, the speculation of when/if Mic and Mac would have their third baby. Mac wasn't dense, she knew all of the casual questions of "So, are you and Mic going to try for third?" that she got at most parties were code for "Are you and Mic going to try for a boy?"

Out of all of their married friends who had children, Mic and Mac were the only ones who didn't have a son. The other couples all at least had one. The question mostly didn't come from a place of sexism (sometimes it did, though), but rather a place of plain curiosity, and acknowledgement that Mic and Mac were the odd couple out.

It also didn't help that Mic desperately, desperately wanted a son. If it were the 1500s and Mic was a British monarch, Mac would've been beheaded a while ago.

When they'd found out Sophia was a girl, there hadn't been any disappointment because there was just a general excitement surrounding Mic about becoming a father. Mac found it strange because he'd never really expressed a strong desire to have children, even after they'd gotten married. But when Mac got that positive pregnancy test result in March of 2002, it was like a switch had been turned on.

Mac had been utterly indifferent when the ultrasound technician had informed them that they were going to have a daughter. Not indifferent in the way that she didn't care, but rather she just didn't mind. The part that Mac was the most hung up on was her little girl's due date - it was October 25th, Harm's birthday. Mac truly couldn't believe that the universe decided to be that cruel to her. Thankfully Sophia hadn't inherited her mother's sense of punctuality and had decided to be a week overdue.

Mac had found out she was pregnant with Olivia the day after Sophia turned one. Neither of their children had been necessarily planned, but Mac had been expecting to get pregnant not too long after moving to Australia, just because it made sense. It was the natural step after getting married, no? Have a baby? But Mac had been completely blindsided by her second pregnancy. Even Mic, who always liked to use optimism to minimize Mac's distress about things, had looked at her with wide eyes and said, "What the hell are we going to do with two kids?"

Mic had eventually come around to the idea, saying that maybe this one would be a boy and then, since they'd have one of each, they could stop. Even Mac, who once again didn't have a preference because she thought it was ridiculous for parents to have a preference over something they didn't have control over, was expecting the baby to be a boy this time. It only made sense.

Mac wouldn't even go as far as to say Mic had been angry when the ultrasound tech announced that they would be having another daughter. Mac wouldn't even go as far as to say that he had been disappointed. It just…wasn't what he was expecting - it wasn't what he wanted.

They'd had a discussion about it that night that had later turned into an argument. Something about Mic had been off after the appointment, and Mac had known exactly what it was even though Mic didn't say a word about it.

"What is your problem?" Mac had finally snapped in bed that night. "Are you mad about this? Are you disappointed?"

"No, Sarah, I'm fine. This just…wasn't what I wanted-"

Mic had stopped himself mid-sentence, realizing his slip up when it was already too late.

"Oh so you don't want her?"

"That's not what I meant, Sarah-"

"Well what did you mean, Michael?" Mac sat up and glared down at him. To this day this was the most angry she had ever been at him. "Is she not good enough for you? Are our daughters not good enough for you?"

"Of course not! I never said that."

Mic had apologized for that blunder with a bouquet of red roses and probably the longest letter he would ever write to Mac filled with superfluous words talking about how happy he was and how he wouldn't trade "his girls" for anything in the world. Mac still had the letter tucked away in a keepsake box, because it was probably the most earnest thing Mic would ever do for her - and even that act was only half-believable on a good day.

The answer as to why Mic wanted a son didn't so much lie with Mic as much as it lied with his father. Mic's father had passed away a year before Mic and Mac started dating, and Mac never thought that she would know so much about a person she had never met and would never meet.

Mic idolized her father and it only made sense for Mic to want to replicate the relationship he had with his father with his own children, but why those children had to be sons was something Mac didn't understand.

Even though Mac didn't have a preference the past two times, this time she did. She hoped this child was a baby girl, even if it was purely out of spite. It would be the perfect poetic justice for Mic and everyone else who thought he was so unlucky to be the only man in the house. If the daughters he already had weren't what Mic "wanted," then why did he deserve a son?

Mac crossed the street, heading over to the second street that made up their little cul de sac. She didn't know everyone in the neighborhood, but it was alarming the amount of stuff she knew about the people who lived with her on these two little streets. It was like a tamer version of Desperate Housewives, a show Mac had started watching so she would have something else to discuss with Harriet besides childcare.

Was Mac desperate? She didn't know. She did enjoy the stability of her current life - the social, financial, physical reliability of it all. Her daughters weren't going to have to grow up the way that she did, and Mac took comfort in that. There was very little they were going to have to want after, and there was even less that they were going to have to worry about. If it meant her daughters were going to have an idyllic childhood, then Mac was willing to stay married to Mic for another twenty-something years.

And even if Mic didn't enjoy having daughters, he didn't show it. Of course he didn't. That would ruin the perfect image he had of being a loving husband and father.

"Sarah! Good morning!"

Mac turned around. As the sun was rising, more signs of life were being shown around the neighborhood. One of Mac's friends, another woman in the neighborhood named Tanya, was standing on her front porch, still in her robe and pajamas, coffee mug in hand. Out of all of the women in the neighborhood that Mac had befriended over the years, Tanya was the closest thing Mac had to a close confidant. Out of everyone in that suburb, Tanya was the person who most resembled another human being.

She was about a decade older than Mac, and had two college-aged sons. Since she was an empty-nester who still adored children, she made the perfect babysitter whenever Mac needed an afternoon off.

Mac knew she would never be that type of person. As soon as all three of her children were out of the house, she would be hard pressed to watch her own grandchildren. Mac loved her children, but motherhood was by far the most exhausting thing she had ever done.

As much as Mac wanted to be left alone, she couldn't ignore Tanya. She turned around and walked back towards Tanya's house, walking up the sidewalk towards the porch. "Morning Tanya," she replied, glad that it was at least Tanya who flagged her down, and not one of the other wives whose conversation skills made Mac want to get a lobotomy.

"Here, come sit," Tanya gestured to the white wicker front porch swing that Mac loved so much she asked Mic to get her one for their first anniversary. "What are you doing out so early?"

Mac shrugged as she sat down. "I just decided to take a quick walk. Mic's watching the girls."

She added that part before Tanya was able to ask. Another thing about being a mother that Mac never expected was that it would suddenly become illegal for her to be seen in public without her children.

"Oh, that's nice."

"Isn't it?"

Mac watched Tanya as she sat down next to her. She was planning on telling Mic today anyway, so what was the harm if Tanya knew a few hours before he did?

"Yeah," Mac said with a sigh. She thought that after the first time she announced she was pregnant that, the next time, the nerves wouldn't be enough to kill her. But she was wrong. Here she was, either about to throw up from nerves or morning sickness. She ran her fingers through her hair. "I was just trying to clear my head."

Tanya immediately frowned. "What's wrong? Did something happen?"

Mac turned to face her. "I have to tell you something, but you have to promise not to tell anyone," she said, fully aware that Tanya would probably at least tell her husband before Mac was able to get back to her house. "Mic doesn't even know yet."

"Of course."

"I'm going to have another baby," this was the first time Mac had said the words aloud, "I found out this past week."

"Oh my god, Sarah, that's wonderful!" Tanya exclaimed, her eyes widening in surprise. Mac forgot that Tanya was like Harriet; there was no such thing as a reaction to a pregnancy that was anything other than positive. "How do you feel about it?"

Mac shrugged. "I'm still trying to wrap my head around it, I guess."

"Are you hoping for a boy this time?"

There it was. The question that Mac was waiting to hear, and was sure she would hear a million more times from every person she talked to for the next nine months.

Despite the choice words coming to mind, Mac smiled. "I just want a healthy baby," she said, the lie slipping off her tongue with ease. "But Mic would love another little girl."

I would really like to talk to the JAG writers for many reasons, one of them being to ask why they decided to have two characters named "Mic" and "Mac" be in a relationship. It really makes writing a bitch. I've lost count of the amount of times I've accidentally typed Mic when I meant Mac and vice versa. If I made that mistake in this chapter and just didn't catch it, I apologize.

Anyways, I have to admit I wasn't expecting to enjoy working on this story as much as I do. There's just something about it that is making my muse fixate on it. I still don't know which direction I'm headed in, but I do have some very good ideas. Also I promise Harm will be making an appearance...eventually...

Thanks for reading!

-Harper