Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls

by Nina Renata Aron

  I looked around the classroom, its every inch plastered with multicolored finger paintings and collages, flags from the nation of childhood. Nearly every other kid had both their parents there and I wondered at the luxury of that, wondered why it seemed no one really had to work in Berkeley, whether the moms had pressured the dads or if they showed up of their own volition. I wondered if people liked doing things like this and whether they should, whether I should. I wondered about the state of others’ marriages—my favorite pastime, right up there with looking into strangers’ lit windows at night.

  My husband only rarely materialized at events like this. Tell him sorry I’m not there and to have fun! he’d text from the office. I hated having to brave these things alone, having to hold it all—the nerves, sweat, smiling, my son’s feelings and my own, but I didn’t demand my husband’s presence. Would I feel better if he were there? Would I be better off with a nebbish like these husbands, a guy who’d record the sing-along on his phone and refill my paper cup of grape juice? Any time critical or angry feelings toward my husband crept up, I quickly corrected them, the way an anorexic snaps a rubber band against her skin to stop herself from feeling hungry. It was the same with my parents and sisters. Why isn’t he here? I thought. And then immediately: He has to work! It’s not necessary for him to interrupt his day when I can just be here. He has a real job, it’s not graduate school.

  My husband’s benign neglect reminded me of my father. What was especially similar was the way I let him off the hook. It wasn’t quite his fault. After all, it wasn’t like he was purposely letting me down. It was simply that he never thought of me in the first place.

  After the celebration, I fled to my car, dreading more small talk, dodging other moms as though there’d been a bomb scare. Mommy will be back to pick you up in a couple hours, I told my son. I should have been preparing for my oral exams, writing long literature reviews demonstrating my mastery over fields of anthropology. Instead, I drove around Berkeley looking for the emptiest parking lots and sat in my car listening to music and reading, sometimes taking driver’s-seat selfies, the worst kind.

  My pregnancy with my son had been chronicled by my mother. We drove cross-country together when I was seven months along and she’d photographed me leaning back and laughing on a motel bed in Indiana. When we got to California, we walked the dog at Albany Bulb, a landfill-turned-peninsula, and she took photos of me looking large and glowing and happy with the dog’s leash hanging around my neck and big, bug-eye Target sunglasses. But this surprise pregnancy hadn’t been documented at all. At this point, no one loved me enough to capture it, I thought. This child will think she was deposited by the stork! I laughed to my husband, instead of saying, Will you take some photos of me? I tried to remedy the situation myself with my new iPhone and its Hipstamatic app, which overexposed me glamorously, blew out my fine lines and dark circles, made my hair look obscenely shiny. An entirely false image. But there was no angle that would accommodate the fullness of my body, that could believably replicate the easy joy of the same body sitting in the same car or on the same furniture just three years prior.

  My husband and I moved between loving, civil, and openly hostile. I worried that the fetus was a sponge soaking up my worry and confusion. Was sadness blood-borne? Could my emotional waffling make her schizophrenic? It would probably make her depressed. How would she greet the world? I imagined her emerging weakly, already cynical, emitting a halfhearted wah.

  Seeking ever-bigger adventures, like a Kennedy, my husband bought a motorcycle. Promise me you won’t ride it drunk, I said, in a feeble attempt to set a boundary. Weeks passed. Then, he rode it drunk and got into an accident. He wasn’t badly injured but he had scared himself, or shown himself something, a capacity. He decided to try to stop drinking and to move out temporarily. As Berkeley grew darker and rainier, he moved duffel bags into a furnished sublet. I nested. I avoided people and stayed in with my son and my belly and the dog. My mother-in-law came to watch my son so we could see the couples’ therapist again—now that I was sober and carrying the first granddaughter in a family of boys, I felt newly worthy of her love. My husband’s face looked suddenly new after days apart, and each time I saw him I had to spend a few moments reorienting myself to it. Were we staying together? the therapist asked. Would my husband move back in? How would we protect my sobriety? We don’t know anything, I said. Still, it felt like maybe things were getting better. The impending birth, at the least, would bring change. I was growing heavier and would soon burst, and something would be washed away.

  At the time, I was a teaching assistant for an introductory women’s studies class, an undergraduate survey course that drew mostly underclassmen whose faces looked childlike. My graduate advisers had reacted calmly to the news that I was pregnant with my first child. Having a baby while pursuing a PhD was certainly not encouraged, but it was done occasionally. A baby was a sweet accessory and it was understood that an ambitious woman could stay the course if she so chose. Many professors had one odd child who skulked around the department on days off from elementary school. But when I began to show with a second pregnancy just a few years later, their eyes went dead. No one needed to say a word: I knew what they were thinking, or thought I did. That I should have at least waited until I had passed my qualifying exams, done my fieldwork, or begun work on the dissertation. Unless you had a wife, two children was simply not done. In academic terms, I was a goner.

  I stood in front of my discussion section that December, talking passionately about material constraints to women’s equality, the social construction of the role of motherhood. The irony of teaching about the struggle from inside what then felt like the prison of my obscenely pregnant body was not lost on me. By the last day of the semester, when I took a seat at one of the desks in the classroom to proctor the exam, I could just barely fit.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  My daughter was two weeks early and barreled into the world so fast that the midwife couldn’t even get there in time. When we called, she was at a holiday party in Sebastopol, an hour and a half away, and had to talk loudly over the festive din.

  She says it’s probably a false alarm and to try a bath? my husband repeated gingerly to me, angling the phone away from his mouth to relay her words.

  NO! No bath! I shouted loud enough for her to hear. It’s not like that! The contractions were already only a few minutes apart and I buried my face in a pillow when they rolled violently through my body. Kill me, kill me, kill me, I thought, imagining my vertebrae like train tracks beneath this hurtling wagon of agony. The hippie childbirth guides I’d read urged women to think about a contraction as a “rush,” an intense sensation rather than a closing or shrinking. I couldn’t ever manage that, but momentarily, I was able to conjure a blankness, the vision of a nothingness changing color. Two-dimensional space, pink, then peach, orange, red. The semester had ended only two days prior. I thought momentarily of the stack of final papers I still had left to grade, but then the spreading stain of pain arrived again and emptied me of thought. Even in its brutality, there was something welcome about it. I suppose if life feels like it’s falling apart, that brain-blasting pain is, among other things, a reprieve.

  My mother had planned to stay through the birth—it was the reason for her visit. She had by then witnessed the births of my son and two of Anya’s babies and had proven herself to be an ideal attendant: confident, wise, soothing, intuitive. I wanted her by my side, holding my hand, smoothing sweaty strands of hair behind my ear, and I was relieved when she told me she’d come stay for the weeks surrounding my due date to be sure not to miss the main event. But Lucia had told me that, impressed as she was by my commitment to home birth, if “shit starts going down,” she was going to gracefully make her exit and stay at a nearby hotel. I just don’t think I can handle that, she said. Is that okay? I’ll come back once she’s born, of course. I told her I
completely understood, that there was no pressure to stay and observe, and anyway, we were still a couple weeks away from the due date. But then it happened, and there was no time. Lucia and my mother had only arrived in California the day before, and all of a sudden, I was in the middle of labor, howling into my pillow, feeling the pressure of the baby bearing down on me like a dropping watermelon, the momentum of the event picking up, reaching a kind of emergency pitch. There was nowhere to go in the thousand-square-foot house—we were trapped, it seemed, as if on a ship. Lucia came into my bedroom, her eyes wide.

  I’m sorry, I said between contractions. We stared at each other, eyes round with fear. Her long hair, dyed dark, fell past her shoulders. She looked like me.

  What are you sorry for?! she said.

  You said you didn’t want to be here for this part! I cried guiltily.

  Lucia smiled and put her hands on my shoulders. Well, she shrugged. I’m here. We both laughed and our eyes welled. Do you need anything? she asked. What, do we boil water or something?

  In the oncoming wave of another contraction, I began to lose her, to lose the contours of the room itself, but I was afraid to miss the chance to thank her for staying cool. Lu, thank you! I grunted as she backed out of the room, leaving my husband and me to tend to our deranged nativity scene, which looked like something from another century.

  The whole thing was over within a couple hours. My daughter was delivered by my husband in the narrow bathroom of our rented house, right into the chaos of our crumbling marriage, while the dog whined and the Christmas tree twinkled and the two-year-old slept. Everything but terror, hope, and the fiery burn of birth fell away as I braced against the sink and pushed her into his open palms. He looked right into my eyes, his giant hands open like he was waiting for a football, and said, It’s okay. It’s okay.

  No one was looking at a clock when our daughter emerged sometime around midnight, so we’ll never know her true birthday—a pretty good origin story for a wild girl. We became unwitting homesteaders that night, crying, laughing, looking for kitchen scissors to cut the cord. We were deliriously empowered, happy and free. My mother brought me cereal in bed and Lucia, stupefied by the scene, took a mop to the bloodied floor.

  By the time the midwife arrived and weighed our daughter in a fish scale, the long, clay-red soles of her brand-new baby feet sticking out the sides, she was nearly an hour old. In my mind I said a prayer for the feeling I had then to last—not just the serenity of the finish line, but this communion. Family love. Did I really need any more than this homespun joy, the life I had right in front of me? How arrogant that I’d thought there could possibly be more. I’d said a version of this prayer so many times—take away my selfishness; my darkness; show me how to do this; let this be enough—but I didn’t even know who or what I was praying to.

  The next day, I pulled Lucia aside and asked if she would do me a favor. Anything, she said. I handed her K’s phone number on a slip of paper. Just tell him I had the baby, I said. Please. Tell him I’m okay. She took the paper quietly and nodded.

  chapter eighteen

  “Good morning, destroyer of men’s souls,” temperance crusader Carrie Nation reportedly said when greeting bartenders. At the turn of the twentieth century, thirty-five years before the founding of AA, the severe, six-foot-tall Nation, desperate to wake the country to the “dreadful curse of liquor,” began taking a hatchet to the oiled oak bar tops of popular Kansas saloons. She had tried peaceful marching, and made impassioned appeals to lawmakers to curb the illegal drinking in the state, but those had scarcely yielded results.

  Nation was intimately acquainted with the private miseries of alcoholism. Her first husband, a physician named Charles Gloyd, suffered from the disease. Gloyd fought in the Union army, and Nation fell in love with him because he was expressive and passionate and represented to her a radical departure from the culture of her conservative family. Gloyd wrote her breathless letters, citing the instantaneous and undeniable attraction he’d felt when they first met. He couldn’t wait to be married, for then “our deep, pure love may gush unrestrained from life to life and heart to heart.” The couple wed in 1867 but the brief marriage was a bitter disappointment. Nation’s husband was unaffectionate, remote, and, she would later write in her autobiography, “not…the lover I expected.” Gloyd drank himself to death in 1869 when their child was not yet a year old.

  Carrie went on to marry David Nation, a journalist, lawyer, and minister who was almost twenty years her senior. In addition to running a hotel, she began working as the head of a local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, and praying about how best to help the cause. She buttressed her WCTU work by singing hymns and playing a portable organ outside saloons. Soon, she claimed she was called by God to go to the nearby town of Kiowa and destroy a saloon. Over the next decade, Nation would endure beatings and arrests and do numerous stints in jail. She and her supporters, mostly women calling themselves the Home Defenders Army, would destroy more than one hundred saloons throughout Kansas, forcing the state to better enforce its liquor laws. She called the bar smashings “hatchetations” because a hatchet was her weapon of choice, and she proudly affected a fearsome public image. “I will make all hell howl,” she promised from inside a Wichita jail cell.

  Nation was a particularly radical representation of the temperance movement sweeping the country. The way women articulated their intolerance had mostly been constrained by the conventions of Christianity and traditional femininity. Men, too, had lamented the effects of alcohol. An 1853 tract on “Martha Washingtonianism” by Lorenzo Dow Johnson opens with an anonymous quote that speaks to the stunning impact of drinking on women’s lives: “Alcohol, the foe of humanity, is the demon curse of the domestic sphere, the murderer of countless thousands of wives and mothers—that which has robbed woman of her beauty, her comforts, her rights, her health, her home, her reason, her life. The tears woman has shed, would form a river; the groans she has uttered, collected and concentrated, would be louder than the earthquake’s terrific sound.”

  Sadness and grief were acceptable, but there was little space in American society for public expressions of female anger. Arguably, however, at the heart of the temperance spirit was a rage that dare not speak its name, and Carrie Nation gave voice to it. “I represent the distracted, suffering, loving motherhood of the World,” Nation would later write, “who, becoming aroused with a righteous fury rebelled at this torture.” The torture was living with alcoholic men, and these lines contain the whole of the codependent experience—the one foisted upon a woman with few means of escape. Distraction, suffering, and a love that feels futile. These are the ingredients that combine to produce fury. I thought of my email drafts to K: the boiling frenzy of anger I felt typing fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  Nation became an easy target for derision because, unlike so many of her contemporaries, she was unable to square her anger with the expectations of traditional femininity. The same year she committed her first “hatchetation,” Edison Studios released a short single-reel comedic film called Why Mr. Nation Wants a Divorce. In it, a character playing Nation’s husband is left to care for the house and children by himself. When his wife, Carrie, returns at day’s end she finds him relaxing with a single drink. Her response? She throws Mr. Nation over her knee and sternly administers a spanking. Many accounts during this era, including an entire genre of temperance fiction, dramatized the damage wrought by alcoholism. But this short film flips the typical script, suggesting that it is perhaps radical temperance women, not alcoholic men, who bring ruin upon the family. The film illustrates the way that Nation was regarded by many; as “half-mad,” in the words of documentarian Ken Burns, “a figure of fun, even ridicule.”

  Nation earned folkloric stature. To this day, bars post signs reading ALL NATIONS
WELCOME, EXCEPT CARRIE. Eventually, her husband left her on the grounds of desertion. She went on to edit a temperance paper called The Smasher’s Mail, bankrolling her activities by selling pins in the shape of hatchets.

  It was easy for men to characterize temperance crusaders as killjoys—they were literally threatening the saloon, where men went for entertainment and fun, and where they were able to maintain a boundary between their free public lives and their private lives, which took place at home. But in spite of her reputation, Nation was a complicated woman. And if we broaden our focus beyond her hatchetations, she might be credited with inventing the approach that Al-Anon would later call “tough love.” In many ways, Carrie Nation was an early proponent and symbol of “tough love,” the cool-but-caring detachment and air of moral superiority. As she stood outside a Topeka saloon, she urged the men inside, “Boys, boys, come and let me in. Your mother would like to talk to you….I’m not mad at you, boys. I’m not hating you a bit, even when I come around with my hatchet.”

  In the Al-Anon literature a few decades later, encouragements not to nag or show anger were reframed through the idiom of powerlessness. Anger was pointless because the more elemental reckoning required of recovering codependents is with our powerlessness to change the alcoholic in our lives. Nagging, too, was but a futile attempt to control that which we cannot control. “Each of us is responsible to himself and for himself,” reads the introduction to the 1967 book The Dilemma of the Alcoholic Marriage. Instead, the emphasis was on individuality, personal responsibility, and love.

  chapter nineteen

  In 1956, German American psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm wrote The Art of Loving, which took off from the idea that people don’t interrogate the subject of love, that “hardly anyone thinks there is anything that needs to be learned about love.” He didn’t mean that people didn’t find love compelling—he acknowledged that they tumble into it as though it will bring them salvation—but that they did not conceive of it as an area of study, something they could acquire skills around and improve at. Fromm challenged the idea of falling in love, writing that this “type of love is by its very nature not lasting. The two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy loses more and more its miraculous character, until their antagonism, their disappointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial excitement. Yet, in the beginning they do not know all this: in fact, they take the intensity of the infatuation, this being ‘crazy’ about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness.”