As I mentioned, Martha is Catholic and an occasional churchgoer. She was raised in a fairly devout household and unlike so many other Catholics I know, retained her faith into adulthood. Her religion was a nonissue for us until Elijah was born, when she told me she wanted to have him baptized. I didn’t really know what baptism was other than I was pretty sure it involved a carnival dunk tank. She explained to me that baptism is a ceremony that welcomes Christians into the church.
My initial reaction was, “But I don’t want my kids in the church.”
She wanted to know why.
“Because I’m not religious.”
“So why did you have Elijah circumcised?”
“Tradition.”
“This is tradition, too.”
“Religious tradition.”
“So is circumcision!”
“That’s penis tradition. It’s different.”
We went back and forth like this for a few days while I tried to wrap my head around my feelings. Clearly, she was right. Circumcision is a religious tradition that I chose to uphold. I was obviously being hypocritical on this point, although I have always been okay with hypocrisy as long as the hypocrite is me.
The larger issue was that, by agreeing to have Elijah (and Ruthie when she arrived a couple years later) baptized, I was tacitly agreeing to have the kids raised Catholic, a decision I struggled with. My feeling was that the kids should not be coerced into any one religion. That if they felt the need for religion later in their lives, they could seek it out for themselves. Martha’s argument was that the kids should have some spiritual foundation, a vessel in which to place their faith.
“Why?” I asked. “I don’t.”
“Exactly,” she said.
Oh, I get it. Crippling existential angst is good enough for me but not my kids? In the end, I acquiesced because giving our children a religious education was more important to Martha than not giving it to them was to me. I’m not one of these strident atheists who think that religion is only a destructive force. I do believe that a faith in God helps some people. I also believe we all need guidance, and that if some people get that guidance from religious teachings and texts, that’s fine. Father Edmund, the priest who married us, said something that has since informed my entire viewpoint on religion. He said, “Religion should serve man, not the other way around,” a statement so simple and obviously true that when he said it, I knew for sure that he was a terrible priest.
My favorite moment from Elijah’s baptism came during the ceremony when the priest asked each of us, “Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?”
“I do,” I said, but I had my fingers crossed behind my back because I think a little wickedness is good.
The kids go to Sunday school now. Martha and I have agreed that they will attend until they achieve their First Communion. After that, we will allow them to decide for themselves whether to continue. Personally, I don’t think they’re getting a single thing out of it but I don’t think it’s hurting anything, either. They have occasionally asked me about my belief system.
“Do you believe Jesus was the son of God?” they ask.
“No.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t.”
“What do you believe?”
“I believe in loving Mommy and you guys,” I say, feeling very proud of myself for that answer.
“What about Lily?”
“No, not Lily,” I say, but I am joking.
“Dad!”
“Okay, Lily, too.”
If I have any faith at all, I guess that’s it. Faith in the small love that keeps our family together. Faith in making dinner and helping with homework and taking walks in the woods sometimes as a family, even though I know the kids are going to bitch about it. If I had to describe my faith in a single word I would say it is “earthly.”
In the end, I don’t really think I’m going to live forever. Not physically, and not as part of the Matrix. Chances are pretty good that I’ll die before Martha, if not from butt cancer then something else. I’m fine with going first provided she spends the rest of her life in mourning. Black veil, the whole bit. On the off chance she is the first one to die, I will honor her memory by living the rest of my days the way she would want me to, in a succession of meaningless relationships with much younger women.
Like anybody, I wonder what death will be like. I used to lie awake at night trying to imagine nonexistence. It’s impossible, of course. We cannot imagine the unimaginable. We can only surmise it will be “like” something else. “Like” being asleep. “Like” taking Ambien.
The only comfort I take from my lack of belief in God is the knowledge that I turn out to be wrong about so many things; hopefully I’m wrong about this, too. That would be great. I hope God is real. And if He is, I hope He’s nice. And I hope there’s an afterlife and I hope that it’s at least as good as Saturday mornings in my house when Martha and me and the kids are all sitting around the table in our pajamas eating pancakes together.
What if when I was twenty-seven and sitting in Father Edmund’s office, I had known how the next thirteen years were going to turn out? Would I have still done it, knowing what I know about the sleepless nights with babies and pointless screaming matches with my wife and all the stress and worry that comes with being an actual grown-up person? Would I have done it?
I have never regretted any of it. I mean, maybe my choice of words at times (“cunty” could have been expressed more elegantly, perhaps), but not my decision to go ahead with this life. I catch Martha looking in the mirror sometimes. I know what she’s looking at. The creases in her cheek where the bedsheets have left their mark after a night of sleep, creases that no longer disappear upon waking. She sees the lines on her neck, the little lines around her eyes. She worries, as I do, about getting fat, about the veins on the backs of her hands. She worries, as I do, about becoming invisible. Sometimes when I try to take her picture, she will not let me. “I look terrible,” she says.
The thing I want to tell her … the thing I want to tell you, Martha, is that you will never fade for me. In the beginning of this book, I mentioned getting older, how the word forty looks spindly and weird. Getting older scares me, too, but I would not trade it for getting younger. Time moves in peculiar ways. Fast and slow at the same time. When I look at you, I don’t see whatever imperfections you see. Our faces are just geography. They tell us the story of who we are and who we used to be. I see you as I have always known you: I see you at twenty-five and thirty and now forty-two. I see you as a little girl camping with your brother and sister, a purple bandana tied around your head, looking so much like Ruthie does now. I love the story your face tells me because I love you.
That is the real gift of marriage, I think. When people talk about “growing old together,” what they are really talking about is the desire to see somebody all the way through, to connect your life with somebody in such a deep way that the word old loses whatever scary power it might have had on us alone. Yes, we change. Of course we change. I am no longer the six-year-old on the Big Wheel, the nine-year-old receiving his first kiss, the fifteen-year-old getting his ass kicked in high school. Those are just stories I carry around like old seashells. Nobody cares about old seashells, but you put them in a big glass and once in a while maybe you run your fingers through them and feel their surfaces. We keep them safe and add to our collection, one by one, over the years, and maybe the kids take some of them along when they start their own families, and in the end, I think that’s enough.
When Elijah was six months old I had him by myself in New York City for the afternoon. He’d been fussy all day, squirming in his carrier, whining, letting out little bleats of annoyance. Exhausted and hungry, I stopped at a Mexican restaurant to grab some lunch. The waitress seated me at a booth and got a booster seat for Elijah. There we were, two guys out on the town, sitting a
cross from each other after a tough day. I remember his eyes focused on me, wide and curious. I gave him a tortilla chip to suck on. My food came and the two of us ate together, quiet.
When Ruthie was two, I was outside on the porch working. She was in her room, asleep. After an hour or so, I decided to check on her. I went into her room and her crib was empty. I stopped to think: Did Martha come home without me knowing and take Ruthie somewhere? Is that possible? No, no it’s not. How did my daughter just disappear? I had a moment of movie kidnap panic, the kind where the phone is about to ring and a voice goes, “We’ve got your daughter.” Good Lord, was I going to have to go vigilante on somebody’s ass? Before I let that thought process go much further, I gave myself a second to work out where she would go if left to her own devices, and then I walked straight to the master bathroom, where Ruthie was sitting on our counter, her face covered in lipstick, the entire mirror coated in a thick sludge of Noxzema. Little handprints everywhere. We looked at each other and she started bawling.
Last night, Martha and I had a huge fight about which are the correct rules for Uno. She insisted that players continue to draw from the pile until they have a playable card; I said you only had to draw once per turn. “Are you telling me I have been playing Uno wrong for thirty years?” she yells at me. “Are you really going to tell me that?” The fight had been brewing all day: a hurricane knocked out our power and we’d spent the day arguing about my forgetting to fill the tub with water before the storm, her paranoia about every item in our refrigerator turning into Ebola, and our general crabbiness at having to deal with the kids during this inconvenience. Unlike in years past, this fight did not escalate into a referendum about our marriage. The words “I want a divorce” were not uttered, not even once. Like the hurricane, the fight blew over, and we ended up in bed together an hour later reading by candlelight. Suzy would be so proud.
So yes, I would do it again. I would do it, because as confused as I am about matters of the heart (and pretty much everything else), I do have my small earthly faith in this life I chose, this “déjà who” life I sometimes do not even recognize as my own.
Father Edmund tells us we are married and she has trouble lifting her veil so I help her and we kiss.
I don’t know.
appendix
For those readers who wish to know the correct answer to the Uno question from the final chapter, “I Hope He’s Nice,” I have taken the trouble to reprint the relevant information from the Wikipedia entry from the “Official Rules” subset of “Uno (Card Game).”
… If the player does not have a card to match the one on the DISCARD pile, he/she must take a card from the DRAW pile. If the card picked up can be played, the player is free to put it down in the same turn. Otherwise, play moves on to the next person in turn.
Notice that the OFFICIAL RULES say he/she must take “a” card, not “two” cards or “ten” cards. ONE. Hopefully this clears up any confusion readers of this book, or my wife, might have about Uno.
One of the things Suzy taught us is that keeping score is an unproductive way to keep a marriage strong. In this particular case, I was definitely right and she was definitely wrong, but that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that we resolved the argument in a constructive manner.
Also important: I was right.
acknowledgments
Many people read early drafts of this book and gave thoughtful suggestions and advice. The thing they gave the most, however, was encouragement. Writing about myself in an honest way proved to be one of the most difficult things I have ever done. There were many, many days when I felt like abandoning this project. I am grateful for the people who kept me going when I did not think I could. Thank you Rob Burnett, Jon Beckerman, Tom Cavanagh, Kelly Oxford, Mike Birbiglia, Mike Berkowitz, Ira Glass, Kimberly Lorah-DiLestri, Jessi Klein, Justin Chanda, Jay Gassner, Ted Schachter, and Barry Goldblatt. Special thank-yous to everybody at Gallery: Alexandra Lewis, Abby Zidle, Kristin Dwyer, and especially Tricia Boczkowski, who continued to champion this book all the way through.
Thank you also to my family. My story is not their story, and I thank them all for allowing me to tell my story.
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