Measure of Love

by Melissa Ford

  “That’s so weird. I totally remember meeting Judd. Tall guy? Whitish-blond hair?”

  “That’s him!” Jared exclaims.

  Once we get over our amazement of knowing people in common, the conversation peters out again. We both smile at each other, looking for something else to stuff into the silence. I try to think of any time that I’ve spoken about Lisbeth in class. “Where was Mike?” I ask suddenly, realizing the appropriate question to volley back at him.

  “Mike,” Jared says grimly. “Mike is sort of doing his own thing at the moment.”

  I’m not really sure what that means, so I open my menu and glance down at the offerings, closing it once I realize that I’m going to order Pad Thai as I usually do. Jared orders first when the waitress comes by the table, and he too asks for the Pad Thai. I reflexively open up the menu again, wondering what my back-up dish should be so we can order different things, try each other’s plates. And then I remember that this isn’t like a date. It isn’t like two friends grabbing dinner. It’s not even like two colleagues sitting down to do a bit of extra work while dining. I really don’t know what this is, so I order the Pad Thai too.

  Almost as if he can read my mind, Jared provides a reason for the meal. “You seem like a smart woman, someone easy to talk to. I mean, I read your blog so I sort of feel like I know you. And it turns out that we both know Lisbeth, so you’re sort of a friend of a friend.”

  A little “oh” floats through my body like a bubble blown from one of those soap wands. It makes more sense, bringing the meal into context. He has a problem, I seem like someone who might be a good listener or have some advice, and he just wants someone to talk to over Pad Thai. He’s not bi; he’s just plain lonely and confused.

  Believe it or not, though usually not over rice noodles, people do this quite frequently. Write me, a perfect stranger, and tell me their situation. Maybe I seem friendly and approachable via the blog. Maybe they are also going through a divorce and want to glean some advice before the book comes out. Maybe they have no one they feel they can talk to in their face-to-face world, and it feels less nerve-wracking to throw your fears out there to someone you know you will never meet.

  Usually it’s pretty anonymous—they’re a random woman in Kansas, and I’m a random woman in New York, and we connect for a moment over the Internet. This is a bit different, needing to face the person while he places his problem on our table, but once I realize that all we’re going to do is talk, my body relaxes, and I call over the waitress again to throw an appetizer of fried tofu triangles into the mix. I can already tell from the look on Jared’s face as he tries to figure out how to start that we’re going to need some fried protein reinforcement. I am an expert on . . . something, I remind myself, sweeping Amy Appelstein’s conversation under the carpet for the time being. If not divorce, then at least an expert on listening and doling out advice.

  “Okay,” I tell him, pushing the condiment trolley off to the side of the table. “Spill.”

  He seems a little taken aback by my eagerness, not quite at ease with this arrangement even though he’s the one who requested it. But he begins anyway. “So you remember that fight in class a few weeks ago?”

  “The two crazy couples,” I prompt.

  “Yes. Well, it kicked off something with Mike. Or maybe I kicked off something with Mike. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just finally getting the right to be married here in New York. All our friends are celebrating, but it’s brought out all sorts of weirdness between us now that we can finally cement our relationship. Legally, I mean. Anyway, we were on the subway that night after the blow-up in class, and at first we were having a general discussion about raising kids, and at some point, it turned into a discussion about the two of us having kids. And he said . . . he said that he didn’t know if he wanted to have children with me, because he wasn’t sure we would raise them the same way.”

  “How does he want to raise them?” I question, imagining Mike flanked by two little mini-me’s in matching khaki trousers and button-down shirts.

  The waitress places the tofu triangles in the space between us, and I motion for Jared to take some. He pinches one with the end of his chopsticks and holds it over the peanut sauce. “Mike, believe it or not, has this vision of unschooling our kids. Of keeping them home and not doing any sort of curriculum but allowing them to travel all over the city—by themselves—and having some sort of free range adventure. Like they’re chickens.”

  “City chickens?” I question, the Mike in my brain and his two identical sons fizzling out.

  “I mean this whole free-range thing. Mike doesn’t want our kids to be raised in the whole right-nursery-school-leads-to-the-right-college mindset. I don’t want to put enormous pressure on our kids either, but we discovered that night that I’m more traditional than I thought. I want them in a classroom—any classroom—with other students. I want our kids to play Little League or do Girl Scouts. I want to take vacations to Disney World. Oh, that was the other thing—no consumerism. No Disney, no labels on clothing, no hand-held gaming devices.”

  “That sounds a little hardcore,” I admit.

  “I admire it,” Jared admits, taking another tofu triangle. “I mean, at least he’s consistent. He has this vision for the world, and he wants to mold his kids in it. But . . . do you know what elimination communication is?”

  “Do I want to know?” I ask.

  “Going diaper-free. Trying to read your baby’s facial cues and get them to the toilet on time. It’s potty training from birth. He told me he wants to do that, though conceded that we could use cloth diapers at night.”

  I am trying to picture Mike, in his button-down shirts and stylish trousers, holding a wriggling baby over a toilet. “And you guys can’t compromise on any of this?”

  “I can,” Jared says. “I mean, I can do some of it: cloth diapers over disposable diapers. But I don’t want to go to a breast milk bank and purchase some random woman’s breast milk. Plus . . .” Jared pauses as if he doesn’t know if he’s going too far over the line to admit this. “He wants us to wear this device so it’s sort of like we’re breastfeeding the baby.”

  “That’s a little . . . odd?” I suggest, trying to guess how Jared wants me to respond. I mean, it is a little odd since men can’t traditionally breastfeed, in the same way that it would be odd if someone dreamily told me that they hoped to hook up the family dog with fake boobs so it could suckle the newborn. And yet, there is something sweet about the idea of a man getting to experience what usually only a woman gets to experience. I try to imagine Adam wearing a set of empty, plastic boobs while I pour milk into a small opening in the fake cleavage. Though I know Adam well enough to know that he would never, ever go for it.

  “You never knew any of this about Mike before that conversation?” I question. “I mean, it’s sort of a huge vision to spring on you all at once.”

  “He’s always been the reusable bags and recycling sort. He gives donations to all sorts of green organizations. But those are things that affect us. I’m happy to schlep the canvas bags to the store because I’m the only one affected by how I bring home the groceries. But this is about someone else’s life. Unschooling, letting the child roam around the city unattended, feeding them a stranger’s breast milk—those are all things that affect our child. Once you bring a child into the picture, it’s no longer about us. About our likes or dislikes. The choices you make when you raise a child say a lot about how you view the world—what you think is right or wrong—in a different way from what we do as adults. Our actions that are solely for ourselves don’t make quite as strong a statement about our point-of-view. If you had asked me to talk about Mike before that conversation, I would have told you that Mike likes the environment. But now I’m seeing how far it goes beyond that into terms of right or wrong. Oh my God, he’s probably just been enduring me all this time because I am su
ch a fan of individually-wrapped portions.” Jared pushes the final tofu triangle in my direction and sets down his chopsticks. “He called me wasteful.”

  Jared stares so deeply outside that it’s as if he’s trying to catch his reflection in the windows across the street. “Apparently, the little things that he has found annoying about me have become downright offensive when he thinks of them in terms of his future children.”

  I notice the pronoun has become third person possessive. Singular. “Where is Mike now?” I ask gently.

  “Staying with a friend of ours. I know it sounds silly to talk about breaking up because I can’t stand the idea of elimination communication.”

  I pause thoughtfully, considering how little I know on gay issues. Everything I know comes from Lisbeth, who can never be called a reliable source. “I think it’s actually smart to stop a relationship that doesn’t have a future. And it doesn’t have a future if you both want children, but he’s unable to compromise at all, and you find his parenting ideas conflict this strongly with your own. I hate to put it this way, but marriage has a lot in common with a business partnership. If you both had such vastly different visions for your store and were unable to come to any agreement, it would be detrimental financially for both of you to still proceed with creating a store. Replace store with baby, and I think the same thought still applies. There’s a human’s well-being at stake here, and that baby needs both of you to be somewhat in agreement, or at least willing to yield.”

  “Mike isn’t willing to yield. He said it would make him sick to raise his child any other way.”

  “Then you have your answer.”

  “But where does love fit in that business analogy? Because I love Mike.”

  Jared has been sitting so calmly on the other side of the table that it barely registers that I essentially just told him to leave his boyfriend. I scramble to undo my damage when I realize that his eyes look like that moment right before the rain starts splattering on the windshield. “I don’t mean your answer is that there’s nowhere to go from here. Couples counseling . . .”

  Jared cuts me off with a sigh. “Again, I would be willing to do that. Mike tells me that he doesn’t believe in therapists.”

  “Doesn’t believe in them?” I scoff. “They’re not fairies or unicorns.”

  “He doesn’t believe they work,” Jared continues. “I suggested that we see a counselor, but Mike won’t go. He told me that he’s horrified that I would want to raise his child differently. He didn’t realize I was only using the reusable bags because I knew it meant so much to him. He said that the conversation made him see me in a whole different light.”

  “Jared, I am so incredibly sorry,” I tell him because I honestly don’t know what else to say.

  “I’ve just been sitting with this argument inside my head for the last few weeks. I didn’t want to tell any of our friends. I really don’t want to hear anyone bad-mouth Mike right now, and that seems to be the only way our friends know how to show support.”

  I swallow back my natural tendency to indeed throw out a few well-timed, “He sucks!” and instead pause politely as our waitress sets down our plates and whisks away the empty tofu dish.

  “I’m sorry,” Jared says. “You thought you were getting some Pad Thai and didn’t realize you’d have to contend with my incredibly dysfunctional relationship. Are you and Adam on the same page about children?”

  “I think so,” I tell him, suddenly realizing as I bring a floret of broccoli toward my lips that I have no idea if we’re on the same page. I assume so based on the fact that we are usually on the same page with things: where to go on vacation, where to go for dinner, what color trash bin to buy for the kitchen. Those, of course, are not slam dunk evidence that we’ll mesh on the parenting front, but I’ve always thought that it bodes well for future decision-making. The years we spent not meshing as we struggled with the work and communication issues that led to our divorce aside. After all, we’ve moved past that now.

  I start sweating as I realize that I have no idea how Adam wants to parent, and for that matter, how I want to parent. How have I gone from being a self-assured (albeit slightly neurotic) woman who knows exactly what she wants to someone who is so wishy-washy that she can’t seem to get any traction on decisions as small as what to order for dinner and as large as whether or not to get married again? I don’t know how I want to parent, I don’t know what sort of wedding invitations I want, I don’t even know if walking down the aisle is a good idea, and I sure as hell don’t know how to broach any of these thoughts with Adam, not while he seems confident that we’re on the right path.

  The anxiety runs down my chest like rain on a glass pane—like a waterfall behind a glass pane; one of those Sharper Image numbers—and it takes all my willpower to resist the urge to throw a handful of bills on the table and run home so I can call Adam and demand that he tell me exactly how he plans to diaper—or not diaper—our future children.

  “Well, you might want to make sure you’re on the same page before you get engaged,” Jared says morosely, as if it’s salt in the wound to have to use his hard-found knowledge on me rather than fixing his own relationship.

  “Too late,” I say, holding up my ring finger with the three Me&Ro rings. I realize that this is going to get old quickly if I always need to explain to people that these rings mean that I’m taken.

  “Oh,” Jared says quickly, glancing at my hand. “I think I missed that on your blog. Congratulations.”

  “No, you didn’t miss it. I just haven’t written about it yet.”

  “Oh my God, like it just happened?” Jared asks, pinching a carrot wedge with his chopsticks. “Right before he left?”

  “No, it was a few weeks ago.” This is one of those times I hadn’t considered back when I’d wished for a huge readership. Frankly, it was easier back when there were only a couple hundred people reading it, and I was pretty much anonymous. Writing back then felt like this conversation; unloading without any sense of responsibility because the listeners weren’t those close to me, affected by whatever thoughts I was dropping on their plates. Jared knows that I’ll go home and probably forget about this conversation by tomorrow morning, and I assume my readers do as well. At least, my readers a long time ago treated my space like that. Now they’re much more invested in the story. I owe them—those people who sat with me online in the middle of the night during the divorce, reassuring me that it was completely normal to be wearing one of his old shirts while I simultaneously cursed him. It’s almost as if Amy Appelstein has one arm, and the readers have the other, and Adam is somewhere in the middle, watching me with what I hope is a bemused expression. Or maybe it’s an annoyed expression. Life suddenly feels unbelievably messy and not really whistling-worthy.

  “It was actually the night of the cooking class blow-up. We got back to the apartment, and he cornered me in the bathroom when I got out of the shower.”

  “Holy shit, that is so romantic,” Jared tells me, his mouth half-open as he listens.

  “It’s actually . . .” I’m not sure if talking about this is rubbing what he perceives to be my good news in his face. “It’s actually the way he proposed the first time too.”

  “Oh my God, you’re remarrying the exact same person. That is so romantic comedy. That is so Liz Taylor.”

  “I know, exactly!” I shout, startling the woman at the table next to us who drops the egg roll she was picking up. “It’s very Liz Taylor. It’s not bizarre at all.”

  “ God, no. It’s romantic. It’s beyond romantic. You have to write a post about it. Please tell me that you’re going to write a post about it.”

  And maybe that is it. Maybe it isn’t really real until I write about it on my blog. My online space crystallizes my life, clarifies events, records what has happened. It is my memoir in real time; I am constantly making decisions about wh
at to include, what to gloss over, what I should tell for prosperity, and what I will most likely regret putting in print. And the bizarre thing is that I am only famous because of my memoir versus having a memoir because I am famous. People want to read about my life not because I’m a fantastic actress or singer, and they’re curious about what takes place off-stage—the reason most people write their memoirs. The whole thing makes me feel dizzy when I think about it too much, but perhaps it explains why I have been so reticent to talk about it. Because once I put it in writing, it has happened. It is happening.

  “I am going to write a post,” I assure him. “It’s a long story. Actually, can we just say that anything we talk about at this table will stay at this table? No Lisbeth, no Mike, no Adam?”

  He looks positively giddy over the idea of hearing something that isn’t even going to be on my blog even though ten minutes ago, he essentially agreed that he needed to leave his boyfriend. I pause hesitantly over this thought but then realize that he must be trying to distract himself from his own bleak news. Isn’t that why we read blogs in the first place? To hear about what is happening in someone else’s house so we can either confirm that ours is normal or feel a sense of relief that we’re at least not under their roof? At least, that is what I selfishly decide so I can unload my own thoughts.

  “Er . . . so my mother-in-law-to-be-again—Lisbeth’s mother—had this great idea to contact a family friend at the New York Times who wants to run our story as the featured couple in the Vows section. But my publisher . . . because I have this book coming out . . . just asked me to keep everything low-key because she thinks it will hurt sales to have the author of a divorce book get remarried before the book even comes out. And then there is just the enormity of getting married again. I mean, I’m positive that I want to be with Adam, and I couldn’t be more in love and sure that I want to spend the rest of my life with him—I mean, I’ve known this for too many years to count. We just lost sight of it for a bit. But then I start thinking about forever and how badly we messed up everything the first time and how there is no possible way I could go through divorce again. And it’s always a possibility when you’re married—that you could go through a divorce—I mean, no one is immune to endings. So, yes, that’s probably why I haven’t written about it yet: because I am scared shitless by marriage itself. I’m scared about having it announced in the New York Times, and I’m equally scared to not have a big deal made over this just because it makes my publisher nervous. This is the one chance I get at life . . . or, I mean, the second chance I get at marriage, and I don’t want her influencing my decisions. Mostly I’m a big wreck at the moment because I don’t know how to get over my fear of failure; to trust that even if I messed up marriage the first time that I’m not doomed to do it again. And that if I’m making those marriage vows again, that they will really mean something. That they’re not just empty words that I recite because some rabbi told me to recite them. That they mean something, and part of them meaning something is that they’re a huge promise that you have to keep. And sometimes I get overwhelmed by the blank post box on the blog when I think about spending the rest of my life keeping this promise, more so than the jitters I had the first time around. Maybe I just know too much now. I wish I could go back to being that naïve bride the first time I walked down the aisle.”