Amateur Hour

by Kimberly Harrington

  I couldn’t have known twenty years ago on our wedding day, or when we got married again six months later at our “official” wedding with the white dress, dancing, and cans tied to the bumper of our getaway car, or during the many years afterward, but I was waiting for someone to invent social media.

  Maybe when you grow up feeling unseen—by boys, by your parents, by the world—you will come away assuming any attention is good attention. And to get attention you need to put something out there. A variety of somethings. You must always be baiting the hook.

  The introduction of e-mail had already allowed me to share and overshare. When my husband and I went on our monthlong road-trip honeymoon, I sent long group e-mails with recaps from the road to a couple dozen people, whether they wanted these e-mails or not. If that had been now, we’d have a sickeningly clever hashtag. And I’d blog and Instagram the absolute bejesus out of it all—the giant roadside tiger muskie in Minnesota, the peak foliage in Vermont, and the hurricanes we drank in New Orleans. Blessed.

  I e-mailed reviews of disposable cameras I had tried out on another trip. I shared thoughts and stories and jokes. I made copies of photos for just about every single person who appeared in them and mailed them off with a card. It took real effort to keep people as one-way informed as I did.

  When the moment I had been unknowingly waiting for finally arrived, it was my sister-in-law, of all people, who sent me the invite to join Facebook.

  Duck, meet water.

  For all my eventual mastery of the rat-a-tat-tat of social media, the mulling over of captions, and the needy exhibitionism, I had become consumed by what it told me I was missing. Better houses, better vacations, better bodies, better light, better weekends, but mostly, better marriages. My daily racetrack laps through the ether left me spinning. Had I had the best, most fun, most visually appealing day? Was I the funniest, the sharpest, the most liked? But more than anything, was I loved? I mean, loved enough for a bunch of random acquaintances to see?

  That night, I splashed cold water on my hot face, pressing its coolness into my eyes, willing it to erase my insanity. I thought, In a few years, I’ll be teaching my kids how to navigate social media—me.

  Although I was the one who had brought up divorce, I wasn’t suggesting we get divorced because of Facebook. I wasn’t quite that unhinged. But I was holding Facebook up as evidence of how other husbands loved their wives in a way he didn’t love me. I was suggesting we no longer loved each other, that this went both ways. I was suggesting I had become a different person; I had moved on, and it was clear he wasn’t coming with me. I suggested every single part of this was obvious to everyone but him.

  Jon is a carpenter, a builder, and a fixer of things. A listener of vinyl records and someone who does not like you opening a carton of milk if one is already open (I have the Post-it notes to prove it). He likes order but doesn’t necessarily want to be in charge. He doesn’t need to set the world on fire to get attention. And he married someone who was born with a can of gasoline in one hand and a book of matches in the other.

  We were married in his parents’ house, the house he grew up in, six months before his mother would succumb to the ovarian cancer that was slowly and painfully overtaking her body. At one point she turned to my father and said, “He will never hurt your daughter.”

  But it turns out not hurting each other in a marriage is impossible. Hurt comes from many places—the pervasive and low-hum hurt of unintentional neglect, the surprisingly damaging hurt of sarcasm taken too far, the near-catastrophic hurt of outside temptation, and the small nibbling hurt of not really seeing each other anymore. The days come and go; we are ghosts shuffling children through their checkpoints.

  But when my father relayed her comment to me, I knew what she had meant. There is no one who doesn’t love Jon. He is easygoing, quick to smile and slap you on the back in conversation (if you’re a man) or gently squeeze your arm or hug you hard (if you’re a woman). He loves his friends openly and deeply, never hesitating to jump in and help. He commands control over keeping our Ziploc containers and lids matched, he plants and tends our vegetable garden with our kids, and he takes them on long bike rides on hot summer Sundays. He looks like a younger Russell Crowe with a nicer smile and a happier childhood. He’s a perfectionist at his job, capable and strong, a serious cook, and a believer in equally carrying the weight of raising our kids and taking care of our home.

  When I hinted to my friends that we were in trouble, serious trouble, the struggling-for-empathy reactions all but said, “So you’re an idiot, then?”

  But that’s the thing about love and marriage over time. There isn’t much that’s rational about it. The heart wants what it wants or doesn’t want, and sometimes it wants the kind of attention that, in the big scheme of things, matters not at all. Sometimes it wants sparkly cartoon Band-Aids instead of the grim open-heart surgery it so desperately requires.

  Up to that point, Facebook had served an actual purpose in my life. Living in Vermont and far from my coworkers and friends from previous jobs and cities, I used it to stay connected. As I scrambled to get freelance work going in the wake of being laid off, all of those old contacts and friends of friends flooded me with messages, supportive comments, project offers. The format and feedback loop of it fed my personal writing in a way nothing else had. And as I began working steadily from home, alone, I found social media was my way of having all the watercooler conversations without needing the watercooler. It was the perfect solution to everything I needed—conversation, networking, writing practice, connection, and inside jokes. And I didn’t even need to shower.

  I rationalized it was no different than spending half a day in meetings or on conference calls as I used to, it was just a different way of wasting time. But as the years went on, I shared more. All the time. Look at me! This is where I am! This is where I’m going! Hey, this is my opinion about this thing! And here’s what I’m doing, right now! Pay attention to me, pay attention to me, but enough about me, why aren’t you paying attention to me? At the same time, I willingly slid down a rabbit hole of competitive posting and hate reading, knowing better than most that social media doesn’t equal real life but choosing to accept it all at face value anyway.

  The world I was connected to became simultaneously bigger (my network grew) and smaller (I barely interacted with most of my neighbors or parents at my kids’ school). In the process, my sense of what a normal marriage was—if there even is such a thing—became pretty distorted.

  On Facebook everyone had their own television show, dramedies shot through with spot-on humor and the tidiest locations, all set during the warm forgiving light of magic hour. Don’t even try being as in love as someone who posts about it constantly on Facebook. Because no one has ever been or will ever be that in love. Not you. And certainly not me. And in my own way I was just as guilty. I was my own showrunner, but for a show my husband had no interest being cast in. It was a show I starred in with guest appearances by my kids and our hapless cat, Oreo. It wasn’t ideal, but as with all midseason replacements, we tried to make it work.

  The night we talked more about the possibilities of divorce, Jon responded to my loop the loop of questioning in the only way he knew how—like a noncrazy rational person. He never posted anything on Facebook; he didn’t really look at anyone’s page; he doesn’t comment or like anything; he barely even checks it! But that wasn’t the point. That wasn’t what this was all about.

  What I was too ashamed to say in those moments was, “Why don’t you understand me?” and “Why can’t you love me more?” and most selfishly, “And why can’t you let everyone know it while you’re at it?”

  Why can’t you crave attention too?

  But that wasn’t the person I had married. He had never been that person. He hadn’t changed since I met him. I had changed, and the world had changed around him. He doesn’t gush or send me GIFs. The first time I texted him a thumbs-up emoji he replied, “That’s not very nice,”
because he thought I was saying “Up yours.”

  What I had forgotten were all the times he had come home from work with flowers to celebrate good news or ice cream to help soothe the bad. Or the many times I told him I was going to be away for two weeks for work or head to Maine for a weekend to write or even quit my job and he said, “Go for it.” Sure, those are sporadic examples, spread out over years. But from the minute we started dating, I have earned more than him, my job has taken priority over his, and anything I’ve set out to do he has supported without question. It’s astounding, really. He has never guilted me into being anyone other than who I am, and if you knew me you might question him on that particular point. He has never asked me to tone down this whole breadwinner business. He has never needed me to bolster his masculine image, because he has had the inner confidence and stability he was raised with all along. He has never needed a virtual pat on the back for any reason. Frankly, it was a wonder we had made it this far.

  He is an excellent father, a great friend, a good man.

  He doesn’t care if he looks cool—as a photo taken on the beach this past summer proves, with his sunglasses placed over his supermarket readers and one of our kids’ bucket hats perched too small upon his head—and it’ll be a cold day in hell before he takes a selfie or arranges things on the floor for a photo. He’s not an Instagram husband. But he is my husband. And marriages aren’t made to be contained in 140 characters or look better with just the right filter. Because it was already pretty good, I just wasn’t looking up enough to see what was right in front of me.

  We didn’t magically solve anything that night three years ago when we talked about divorce. We didn’t instantly fall back in love. I didn’t quit Facebook. But by allowing myself to feel imperfect and stupid in a way I had outlawed on social media, I had shocked myself into seeing how unrealistic—and dangerous—my expectations had become. A few of the couples whose theoretical happiness I had wallowed in split up. We all see what we want to see, even when there’s nothing there. Or maybe especially when there’s a lot there that can’t be neatly contained in a single photo, even with the longest of captions.

  Our marriage has absolutely changed over time, because people change over time. None of us expect to be cradled in the nook of someone’s arm like an infant until we die. We don’t crawl or stumble around like stiff-legged drunks to go to our jobs. We walk, we run, we take the hits as we keep going, paying the toll for every year we pass. We are encouraged to climb, climb higher, be better, do great things. What are the odds that two people do that in the exact same way, on the same trajectory, with the same level of ambition or desire or capacity for change? What are the odds it all works out just fine?

  When we stood in that tiny church in front of our family and friends I can guarantee I wasn’t thinking about how I would handle motherhood or what turning forty might do to me. I wasn’t thinking about how maybe that thing about our sex lives taking a nosedive might not be a cliché or that fights over the most absurdly minor things could go nuclear and sweep up our very existence in their paths.

  I was mostly thinking about cutting that cake and how I looked in my dress and how we had done it. We had really done it. I had done it. I was married! And if anyone had given us any sage advice (which they did, they wrote it down at our reception, I still have all of it) I wouldn’t have listened.

  “It’s complicated.” That’s what Facebook gave us, to some more than others.

  We took a break from talking about divorce. That’s not to say we have Saturday-morning prebreakfast sex or hazy late nights in strip-club parking lots in my ’65 Chevy like we did when we were first married. But we’re planning a twentieth-anniversary party I wasn’t convinced we’d ever see. I no longer look to Facebook as an authority on much, especially love. And I have stopped looking at other marriages entirely, because the combination of two people who aren’t us is irrelevant. It’s like listening to birth stories at your baby shower. It has nothing to do with you; it never did.

  So much is gone now. That Chevy. His parents. Too many friends to count. Our twenties, and our thirties. But we’re still here. We are still here. And as I stand in this spot, much as I did on that day in that tiny church, I can’t at all predict what turning fifty will do to me, or what will happen when our children leave home. I don’t know whether we will survive it as a team vowing to take on the storm together or if we will inevitably drift and break apart. I don’t know, because my incessant requests for a crystal ball keep going unanswered.

  But I do know it took two decades of marriage and eight years of social media to realize I’m someone who has always needed a stage to stand on. And it took almost blowing everything up to remember I married someone who has always been happy to build that stage for me, carefully and quietly. Just the way he wants to, in the background.

  So what we do now is hold on. Hold on to what has gotten us this far, hold on to whatever has made us a successful combination of sameness and difference, and hold on to those things that pass between us with just a knowing look. We can try to do what our parents hoped we would—not hurt each other.

  What I can do is not look to other people we barely know for answers, and instead, finally, read all that advice that was written down in a wave of wine-soaked happiness so long ago. The advice that didn’t have character limits or filters, the advice that was private and from people who loved us.

  I could log in to real life.

  Time-Out

  Your Cute Wedding Hashtags Twenty Years Later

  #DoYouHaveAnyCashOnYou

  #DidYouWriteACheckOutOfTheJointAccount

  #CanYouPickUpMilkAndWineOnTheWayHome

  #AndIceCream

  #ShitAreYouStillAtTheMarket

  #AndThatRiceMixYouKnowTheOneILikeItsInABlackBag

  #OhAndLaundryDetergent

  #UghAndToiletPaperNevermindIllJustGoLater

  #AreYouGoingToShave

  #AreYouGoingToWearThatShirt

  #NoReason

  #WhatAboutThosePants

  #WhatsTheStoryWithThoseShoes

  #ThatDressLooksFineLetsGo

  #WhatsWithTheToothpasteEverywhere

  #AndTheToiletSeatSituation

  #WhatIsHappening

  #WouldItKillYouToMakeTheBed

  #What

  #Nothing

  #IDidntSayAnything

  #ThereWasntAToneInMyVoice

  #NoThereWasnt

  #TheDishwasherIsBroken

  #TheFurnaceIsntWorking

  #TheToiletIsClogged

  #TheBasementIsFlooding

  #HaveYouLeftWorkYet

  #RememberItsGirlsNightOut

  #YesIDidTellYou

  #IToldYouTwoWeeksAgo

  #YouDontListen

  #Whatever

  #WhateverWhatever

  #DidYouCallTheDoctor

  #DidYouBringTheCarIn

  #DidYouCallThePlaceAboutTheThing

  #UghCanIHaveSomeBlankets

  #YesItISColdInHere

  #StopTellingMeHowIFeel

  #YesYouDo

  #YouDo

  #OHMYGOD

  #BrinkOfDivorce

  #WeSeeATherapistNow

  #WeValidateEachOthersFeelings

  #AllTheTime

  #ItsExhausting

  #CouldItBeUntilCrabbinessDoWePartInstead

  #WhatHaveWeDone

  #HappyAnniversaryToUs

  #Suckers

  #SeriouslyDontForgetTheWineAtTheMarket

  Kids, It’s Time You Knew the Truth—Your Mother Is a Real Piece of Work

  Look, I know you guys have sensed something’s wrong, even though we’ve tried hard to hide all of . . . this . . . from you. We just didn’t want you to worry. But we can’t really get anything past you two, can we? You guys are just too smart.

  Your mother has been to a lot of specialists, and trust me when I say we’ve been working really hard trying to find answers. And, yes, I know we’ve shooed you away from our private conversations, but that ends toda
y. You deserve to know the truth. There’s no easy way to say this other than to just, you know, come right out and say it. So, here it is:

  Your mother is a Real Piece of Work.

  . . .

  Sorry, just needed to take a deep breath there, a really deep breath. Wow, it’s finally out there. I can’t believe it.

  I’m sure you have a lot of questions, I know I did. First, let me say there’s still a lot we don’t know right now. We’re not sure how her condition might progress over time or if there was something we could’ve done to prevent it. Honestly, we may never know.

  For example, when we were planning our wedding I let her not only choose what the groomsmen would wear but also what my new last name would be and where we would live. Looking back, I can’t help but wonder if maybe I shouldn’t have let her do any of that. As if I had that kind of control back then. Or even now. Don’t make me laugh!

  Or when you were born, Julie. She said, “I love the name Julie!” and I said, “Well, I’m not really a fan of that name, how about Charlotte or Amanda?” And she responded, “So it’s settled, Julie it is.”

  What? No. No! I’m not saying I don’t like your name! I mean, that’s what I was saying back then. Of course I love your name; I love you, that’s what really matters doesn’t it? I do like your name. Yes, I do. Forget what I just said. Honey, don’t look at me like that. NO, I’M NOT CALLING YOU HONEY BECAUSE I HATE THE NAME JULIE.

  Sorry, lost my cool there for a minute. It’s just this . . . situation . . . has really taken a toll on me. For years I was beating myself up thinking her condition was due to something I had done or not done, that maybe I didn’t love her enough or in the way she needed to be loved, that this was somehow all my fault. It’s such a relief to finally have some answers.

  Don’t roll your eyes at me.

  That reminds me, we don’t know if your mother’s condition is hereditary. I’m no medical doctor or, as it turns out, even a halfway decent insurance adjuster, but if I had to guess I’d say it skips a generation. Your grandmother? Lovely woman! Lovely. Your great-grandmother? Hoo boy, you needed to put a sweater on when she came into a room because it got cold in there, if you catch my drift.