Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls

by Nina Renata Aron

  Now, in California, I was medicated, but pooling all around me like slick dark blood was the discovery that medication wasn’t enough. I was at the beginning of a PhD program, but I operated at a remove from my intimidatingly smart and competitive classmates—they called one another colleagues, as though we were already important. My husband was building his career and that was demanding, consuming. He didn’t quite know how to be with me in the pain of the miscarriage, a wound we patched up hastily with the engagement and then the baby. He didn’t seem to notice how far I’d been carried after the birth of our son by the tides of postpartum depression and existential uncertainty. Or maybe he just didn’t know what to do. I certainly didn’t. Weren’t we basically children? How had we expected to know anything at all?

  When our son was a baby, my husband became a weekend sailor. He had often been gone for a night or two during the week on short business trips to New Mexico or Nevada. Then on Saturdays, he left for long stretches to race around the bay on his wealthy boss’s cutter. When would he be back? It depends on the wind, he would say, a line I can now hear as Odyssean in its grandiosity. Why didn’t I just say don’t go? Because he’d worked all week? Because he made most of the money, and had “earned” it? Because I wanted him to be happy? Because I didn’t know the word “no”? Why couldn’t I be one of those bitchy wives who just says, You’ve got to be kidding me, absolutely fucking not. The kind who says, We’re ottoman shopping on Saturday, it’s on your calendar. Even the kind who says, I can’t do the whole day on my own. I’ve always wondered what that feels like. But I was a different wifely species altogether: The kind who tells her husband to go, that it is fine, and then cries that she is lonely. Who wants her feelings to be intuited, not subject to the vulgarity of needing to be spoken.

  The tears I cried in those early years—they seemed like a fairy-tale quantity. Would they fill a measuring cup, a gallon jug, a stockpot? I was Rapunzel or a seaweed-haired hag. It depended on the day, the rain, my mood, my meds, my milk. I say I was carried by tides, which implies helplessness, which is how I felt. I created the chaos I lived in, but I wasn’t able to see that. Some days I could see it, but still felt there wasn’t anything I could do.

  All of my metaphors then were marine—shades of blue and shipwrecks. Fetuses I imagined were fish moving through the dark ocean of me as I leaned seasick over the bow. I was boundary-less, my marriage aqueous. A note from my diary while pregnant with my second child reads, “I am sharing my body with a moving, swimming creature, the curvature of whose back I can sometimes lay my hand against. It’s uncomfortable, this pressure against the walls of me. I try to take a breath and make more space to share myself.” In my diary, I wrote that this second saucer-eyed baby was an ocean liner turning herself around. She was a tiny whale. I wrote about my panic, fear, self-hatred, confusion. I wrote, “I want to make it to more solid ground, even if I have to paddle my way there like this, in humiliating desperation.” One day I walked to Urgent Care and said with a dissociated calm that I was afraid I might hurt myself. The receptionist looked at my belly. I was sent straight back to be seen.

  In one photograph from that time, my husband is standing alone on a boat on the black surface of the water, holding on to the mast, looking tall and commanding and handsome and entirely alone. Literally adrift.

  “I want to SWIM,” I wrote. “I want to feel the clogged, perfect quiet of underwater and feel this big belly (big body) FLOAT. I want to float I want to float I want to float.” I was fucking drowning.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  The hot, young, carefree love I had with my husband was transformed by marriage, babies, and the daily dulling of adulthood, forces I imagined working on our relationship the way a pair of hands acts on a piece of pottery as its spins on the wheel. Gentle pressure. Every day a new ridge, a narrowing. We had been together only a few years but daily life was already a struggle. The threads of hardship were all braided together. Who knows if they were correlated, causal, or all one thing. 1) I was depressed and anxious. 2) We both drank too much. 3) No matter what, the baby wouldn’t sleep through the night. I was up with him at midnight, 1:00 A.M., 3:00 A.M., always up for the day by about 5:15, nuzzling his neck and watching the dog pee in the yard. You have to sleep train! people would tell us, as though we hadn’t tried that yet. By 6:00, he’d had hot cereal and an episode of Sesame Street and sat bouncing in his ExerSaucer, a veritable command center of pointless toys, smacking its plastic tray, looking to me with his beautiful turquoise eyes for the day’s direction, its activities and its zest. I was on my third cup of coffee by the time the sky brightened into dawn, my own eye sockets like dry, grainy pits in my pounding head. At 6:30, my husband got up with the alarm and smoked on the stoop first thing, in a shearling-lined coat, peering with disdain at another harsh, damp morning. When he’d kissed us goodbye and the engine turned over and he was gone to work, my stomach plummeted. I felt plunged into uncertainty as though alone in a falling elevator. I was ashamed to discover that I was a little bit afraid of the day and that made me feel a little afraid of myself. Craaaaaazy. I locked the door, drew a long breath, and turned to my son. Me and you, baby, I said, and he stomped his feet in recognition.

  I had wanted a baby so badly. From the time I became a mother’s helper at age twelve, or possibly before, naming and raising countless doll babies, snaking fabric Cabbage Patch doll legs into cotton outfits. In college, I worked as a nanny and found joy in the ardent, uncomplicated love I felt for those children, in the way complexity fell away when I only had to slice melon into chunks for them, tell them their drawings were lovely.

  I’d feared falling into the kind of postpartum depression where I would feel nothing for my baby—or worse, I’d feel ill-will. But I never had that. I was madly, swooningly in love with my son in those hazy early days. That love arrived with him and was immediately incontestable, a blunt new fact like the sky being blue. In so many ways, babylove was better than any romance I’d ever felt. I danced him around the house like we were at a Victorian ball. I inhaled him and breathed his sweet milky breath. But I was still sad, maybe more sad. The babylove should be totalizing, I thought, it should neutralize the sadness, all the other feelings. That it didn’t—that I still hated my body, feared for my career, worried I now lacked a common language with my husband—compounded the desolation. I felt confused, worried behind the scenes that I must be doing it wrong. Life had lost its previously recognizable shape. Nothing can prepare you for the formlessness of that time, which spreads like dough, traps you. As Rachel Cusk writes in A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, “The day lies ahead empty of landmarks, like a prairie, like an untraversable plain.”

  I had less patience for my husband now, but I would never show a lack of patience. That seemed uncouth, unkind, unladylike. I would store it away instead. Part of what had drawn me to him in the first place was that he was so much like me. A good boy who could be very, very bad, who was lured just enough into badness—into drinking, drugs, and misadventures—but who never fully turned his back on his responsibilities. No matter what had transpired the night before, he always made it to work in the morning. Clean-shaven, hair combed. It was the kind of balancing act I had perfected, too. It started in high school, while playing second-fiddle to Lucia, the genuine bad girl. I sometimes looked upon her missteps with pity. She acted out dramatically, which called attention to her, which got her into trouble with our parents, but it didn’t have to be that way. Didn’t she know that if you flew just under the radar, got good grades, and pretended you were okay, that you could get away with basically anything?

  I learned to temper my own dark impulses, and finding my footing between two worlds became a kink of sorts. A secret. But now there was a baby and no leeway at all. Raising him could not be faked or phoned in. His life could not be set on autopilot.

  * * *

  •   •   •

&n
bsp; What is the difference between me and a person who can live this life, who can coffee up and muscle through until the kids are school-age and she can get more sleep? Until there is more money to buy a house or take a family vacation? What is the difference between me and somebody who stays in a marriage—for ten years, twenty, fifty? I think about those mornings when I felt like a husk and wonder if I just had a bad attitude. A lack of patience. If I was simply immature, not a hard worker, a team player. Or if the darkly intertwined beanstalk of depression, drinking, and lack of sleep is insurmountable, attitude notwithstanding. Sleep deprivation is a form of torture, as new parents like to remind one another. Sometimes when people ask what happened to my marriage, I reply bluntly, I didn’t sleep for years, so I lost my mind. I don’t know why it feels good to say it that way, to drop a hint of mental instability like a small bomb, but it does. This is rare, though. Mostly, when asked, I perform a chipper little skit, collapsing a few years of anguish into a couple neat lines. Oh, we just didn’t know what we were getting into, I say, as if anyone does. You know, we get along better divorced than we did married! I say, though I don’t think that’s even true, just a tidbit it seems a well-adjusted divorcée might offer up. I’m always surprised that people even inquire about divorce. Maybe they think I want to be asked? “Divorces and separation—that is the way to get attention,” wrote Elizabeth Hardwick in Sleepless Nights. I do appreciate banter that gets honest quickly, but still, it’s a peculiar feeling sitting at a playground and having someone pry into this particularly private corner. Besides, what do they think happened? Marriage happened. I always want to ask, Isn’t it much harder to keep one together than let one die?

  There remained throughout, of course, the counterweight of joy. There was laughter and warmth. Music. Hearts tacked to the front window in February. Attraction coursed between us, purring dependably like a sated cat. From across every room we smirked at each other, confirming it. Motherhood had made me an unequivocally better person, I thought, even as it unglued basic pieces of me. The days were very long, but buried in all of them, if I could be patient, was some momentary treasure or other. On weekends, we pushed the stroller to a coffee shop or drove up into the woods and rode a small steam train around as our son, in a toddler-sized version of the same shearling coat as my husband’s, grunted with glee, and I thought, Look at me! A mother!

  We were fixated on him. Our twosome had become a triangle. He made us laugh, especially as he learned to talk and began aping us, with that glint in his eye that kids get when they know they have your full attention. We’d censored our swear words, shortening the phrase “what the fuck” to become “what the f,” which became, in our son’s interpretation, “what the earth,” a rhetorical question I thought beautifully encompassed the enchanting, maddening mysteries of being alive. I was touched by the philosophical magnitude, the accidental profundity, of his every utterance. What the earth?! I still sometimes think when pissed off or puzzled.

  My husband was handy and high energy. Before, in every place I’d ever rented, I’d prayed that nothing went wrong and avoided solving problems when they arose, but he made living in a house feel like it was simply a series of small, doable projects. He had an easy combination of luck, competence, and confidence that was almost annoying—he baked bread, he built things, smoked meat for eleven hours, enjoyed elaborate preparations for road trips and hikes. He decided casually to try his hand at growing marijuana and weeks later, our garage was filled with vigorously bursting, towering plants, one named for me and the rest for each of my girlfriends, our names Sharpied on masking tape on each of the big black buckets. Claire is lookin’ strong! he’d say after checking on them. But poor Miranda could really use some more light. We harvested and trimmed the plants and gave the weed away in large mason jars like the chill Californians we were becoming.

  We lived next door to good friends, a couple, one half of whom was a chef at a famous Berkeley restaurant. A few times a week, we brought the baby monitor over with us and laughed into the night over homemade cocktails and dinners made from the variegated Bay Area bounty I was learning about through her. Persimmons and puntarelle, chicories and little gems, meat and fish doused in thick sauces: chermoula, salsa verde, romesco made from the freshest peppers. I can still picture the quality of light in that kitchen next door, the smell of fresh thyme in the air, my pleasure at making my husband laugh as he swirled bourbon around in his glass. The flash of his perfect teeth. “May you always have what you want and want what you have” goes a common wedding toast in my family. The way I’ve always heard it is that having what you want is the easy part. It’s wanting what you have that grows harder over time—that can require multiple, simultaneous tricks of the mind. At that time, I wanted what I had. A beautiful family, things to laugh about, the gathering rhythm of an everyday life that was not beset by hunger or poverty. I did feel far away from my own roots. I was making something new, I reasoned.

  Our relationship was the simplest I’d ever had. And yet. “Never was there enough of what we thought we wanted,” reads a line in AA’s Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Was I called by a darker force? Codependents grow accustomed to chaos and get bored and antsy when there isn’t enough of it. They want to tend to a crisis, and with K’s return came a familiar drumbeat—fear—to which I began to tap my toe. I’d been groomed to be a sort of social worker of the heart—did I need a needier case to work on? A purer dose of romance?

  My husband had a math brain, efficient and unsentimental. He made a spreadsheet for our household budget. He mollified me before air travel by explaining in physics and engineering terms that the plane wants to fly. I laughed when he told me he believed that it was the role of scientists to chip away at a wall of objective truth. But it was humans who came up with the notion of objectivity in the first place, I said. When it came to certain philosophical matters, we had to agree to disagree. But I was impressed by the way he saw the world; it seemed like it could save a person a lot of time and heartache. I hoped it might rub off on me. For one Christmas early on, I bought him a volume of the letters of the physicist Richard Feynman. “For my Fine Man,” I inscribed it.

  At times I found his rationality lacerating. Before the arrival of our first child, I enrolled us in a six-week birth class, and one evening each week we sat among other couples on the carpeted floor of a perinatal education center listening to a doula explain the miracle of life. In later weeks, as she described the dramatic viscera of the actual event—a catalogue of horrors: mucus plugs and bloody shows, perineal stretching—I even sat between my tall husband’s splayed legs, leaning back into his large, warm, enveloping form, like a couple in a movie. I could feel his heartbeat in my back and I thought about the baby’s heartbeat, the three of us, really, sitting like that, curved into one another like a shell, the healthy, hopeful pumping of our family’s hearts. After the final class, we did not linger to exchange phone numbers, as some of the others did. We were first to push through the glass door into the moistened Berkeley evening, and we walked half a block to the car in a pleasant, pensive silence.

  So, what did you think? I said, pulling the seatbelt over the taut torpedo of my belly.

  Of that last one or the whole thing? he asked.

  No, I mean the whole class, I said.

  Ah, he said, sounding already slightly distracted as he pulled up to the curb and flicked the turn signal. What did I think? he repeated absently as he drove. I think…that the entire class could have fit on one PowerPoint slide.

  Our son was born in spring, and by Mother’s Day he was six weeks old, curled and wriggling in his plush muted clothing, still looking in-utero some days. I wondered what nod to mainstream domesticity my husband might ironically unveil to mark my first Mother’s Day. A gift certificate for a facial or maybe a brunch of too-sweet waffles at the overcrowded French café on Shattuck Avenue. But he didn’t do anything special that day.

  Y
ou could have just written a card, I said teasingly, when I realized late in the day that no surprise was forthcoming.

  Babe! I’m so sorry, he said. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it.

  He apologized when things like this happened and I always knew he meant it. What’s more, my mind scrambled to fill in the blanks for him—he was young! He was a man of good intentions. He knows I’m not that attached to holidays. Holidays are cheesy anyway. But somewhere in my heart, I kept the score.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  I’ve met—collected—other mothers along the way who also bucked against the confines of their marriages, who in spite of seemingly stable circumstances found themselves all of a sudden feeling the same way I did, nested greyly inside the wifely paradox of solitude and suffocation. We usually become friends. We usually spend our first few coffee dates crawling out from behind the curated stories we’ve told, the display-case divorces we describe to the still-marrieds as though it was no big deal. We share our wonder at functioning unions (how do other people pull this off?) and our shame (why couldn’t I?), and we talk about what it’s really like dismantling the marital edifice brick by painful brick, to text with the ex, date, raise children in two houses, to face the heartbreaking existential questions we’ve forced them to ask far too early and for which we have only paltry or faltering answers. We talk also about the feeling of liberation that dawns as this unknown opens before us, a dark, starry highway leading who knows where. As Deborah Levy writes of her divorce in her memoir The Cost of Living, “Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realize we don’t want to hold it together.” That terrifying and exciting feeling is a lot like the beginning of love. Maybe it’s the beginning of finding out what loving oneself looks like.