I remember that moment perfectly, as we headed toward the Verrazano Bridge. I remember thinking: Soak all of this in now, every little bit. Really listen to the giddy joy erupting in the backseat. Really appreciate your husband’s small kindnesses. Relish the feeling of looking forward to spending time with your in-laws. Feel these things. Love is real. Everything is different now.
SIX
COUNTDOWN TO ARMAGEDDON:
MARITAL BREAKDOWN
When you talk to recovering alcoholics or drug addicts about their stories, one of the most striking themes is that no matter how bad it got, it never seemed to dawn on them that their problem was drinking or drugs until they hit bottom. “Denial” is the usual invocation, but that doesn’t seem to cover this particular neurochemical trick. To deny something seems to me to require that one recognize the problem and then decide, consciously, either that it’s not a big deal or that it isn’t a problem at all. In these cases, the problem was never even identified. A young woman I know reports having peed into empty beer bottles when she was drinking alone in college so that she wouldn’t have to use the common bathroom, lest she encounter a dormmate who might be “judgmental and weird.” One man I met once used to turn tricks in the woods behind a rural turnpike truck stop so that he could buy crystal meth and bourbon. “I thought my problem was that I lived in a small, backward town,” he said.
So it is, I have learned, for many of us whose marriages are disintegrating. Things get worse and worse, but there is not so much active denial as misattribution: “I just need time for myself,” “He just hates his job,” “We’re so tired all the time,” “It’ll change when the kids get older.” Certainly, these are all very real problems common to people with young children, and all have a corrosive effect on couples. But like the alcoholic narrative arc, things can get overwhelmingly bleak, and even worse, before the real problem reveals itself to you.
I now wonder if some of this blind spot isn’t generational. After all, we married our soulmates; we are deeply attached to our children. Critical and contemptuous of how our own parents handled divorce and children, we think we know better and have done better. Whereas Baby Boomers outsourced the concerns of domestic life, Generation X husbands and wives share them: We are people, individuals—not roles, thank you very much. Few of us will admit, or commit, to abiding by any one polemic or philosophy: We take what we like, make it our own, and leave the rest. Whereas our parents regarded each other darkly through gendered lenses, Gen Xers view each other as friends, partners, compadres. X is famously proud of its approach: terminally unique. And it may be that such hubris is what makes us so blind to signs that our married lives may be falling apart. At least it was for me.
Like any two people who have been attached to each other for a long time, Cal and I had perennial quagmires. Affectations that had seemed charming at the outset had calcified into causes for grumpiness. I continued to reel from his TV watching, though I became inured to it. He thought my literary taste was rarefied and impenetrable, while I was disdainful of his fondness of the wizard-fantasy and space-opera genres. To Cal, this further confirmed what he thought already: I was a snob. Plus, he thought I was a blabbermouth. He was (and still is) right. I walk into stores and chitchat with the proprietor; I always stop to talk to people I run into. It’s one of the reasons why I liked being a reporter. I was aware that this was a point of difference from Cal, who was more aloof; that via my logorrhea, he would become roped into frivolous conversations that he undoubtedly would have crossed the street to avoid. But I had always thought that his irritation with my chattiness was, so far as character infractions go, on the same continuum as my irritation with his TV watching.
Same thing with his neatness and my sloppiness. Whether it is congenital or the legacy of an unkempt upbringing, I am a native slob. I am the kind of person who can leave dirty dishes in the sink overnight and not give it a second thought. Do them in the morning. Do them when you get home from work! I can appreciate that my sensibility is rather gross and guyish, but truly, I don’t care. He did. He super did. The idea that food particles could be left to the open air for any longer than the time it took to eat them was so totally noxious to him that it pointed to the presence of some character defect lurking in the psyche of the person who could countenance such deviance. Early in our relationship, this contrast made for moderately funny back-and-forths about the Odd Couple, Lockhorns-era badgering, gender reversal, and so on. But this division—along with work issues and chattiness versus diffidence—became one of the most contentious and stressful issues of our sixteen-year relationship. Even after I had changed my habits, the ghosts of those defects continued to haunt us.
Maybe it was naïve and foolish to think, as I had, that marriage can change a person. But I do believe that its impact can at least propel a person toward change; it had done so for me. I still, naturally, harbored feelings of incompetence and fraudulence, but overall, I had become a much happier person, had become interested in other people’s troubles more than my own. I definitely wanted to be a better spouse and helpmate. Any residual problems we had, I was sure, were my fault.
In truth, they probably were. One of the mind-blowing things about being involved with a recovering narcissist is that the minute she stops behaving poorly, she wants everyone around her to share in her sense of accomplishment and closure. Ding-dong, everybody, the witch is dead! You can come out! We can be happy now! And of course, everybody is thinking: Fuck you. We spent years as your hostages; now we’re supposed to thank you for releasing us? Cal claimed he did not feel that way. But swells of repressed anger and resentment do not evaporate; they just find another course. As Dr. Ian Malcolm said in such a Jeff Goldblumy way in Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way.”
So. There were fights, fights that began as small, well-meaning criticisms of my maternal and domestic style and blossomed into larger, more all-encompassing ones. And they were not the angry, hand-gesturing psychic tussles of my youth, family of origin, and, in general, temperamental style. They were crackling, solitary wars played out in barbed digs, icy deadlocks, and silence. These wars were played out on Cal’s turf.
One of the things we fought about was work. As established, I had vacuumed up the subject of work during our twenties. Then it was his turn: He launched his start-up company, and I supported him. Maybe it wasn’t enough, and maybe it was too late. But one of the things that you hope for is that after you defer to your partner for a time—perhaps even a long time—things will even out, that a renewed, secure relationship will form. Four years into it, this still had not happened for us. He was furious, particularly about work. To be clear, he never said “I am still furious about work.” He didn’t have to.
We had one computer at home. We were supposed to take turns using it for work: he for his consulting company, me for my book. That his company had managed to remain standing in the carnage of the dot-com bloodshed was nothing short of miraculous, which said a great deal about Cal’s preternaturally effective salesmanship. But it had been necessarily amputated to within an inch of its life to keep it alive, and supporting a family of four on its strength alone in New York City—never mind in wildly expensive Park Slope—was growing increasingly impossible. So getting the book deal had been not just a great thing for me professionally (especially since I had just about dropped out for two years) but also a genuine coup for our family. When we got the news, Cal and I had literally done the Hustle in the living room with our two-year-old and eight-week-old daughters, Zanny bopping around, dazzled by our boisterousness, and Pru, our little froglike newborn, open-eyed and astonished. We were going to make it—again! The money supplied by the book advance essentially doubled our combined income, which meant that though our work-family life would have to become the best-oiled machine in town, we did not have to live in constant fear. And we could buy books for the kids! And pay for private preschool! And go on family vacations!
But the thing about writing a book, as anyone who h
as written one or who has lived with someone who has written one knows, is that (a) you need big swaths of time to get any momentum going, (b) you need relative quiet during these times, (c) you need to hit your deadlines to keep your editor’s, and your own, confidence afloat, and also to get paid the next installment of your advance, and (d) you actually have to write it. If these conditions aren’t met, the chances that your book will not materialize are great. It’s just the way it is, which is one of the reasons why books are hard to write (and you can multiply that by fifty if you are the mother of young children). However, the conditions for writing a book are not appreciably different for getting any kind of desk work accomplished. That was the case for Cal’s variety, and we knew it would be difficult, particularly with no outside babysitting help.
Instead, we had our own child-care relay-race method. Was it a little insane for us? Yes! I was on a book deadline, still nursing Pru, and Zanny was in preschool only a handful of hours. But I would not have been able to work had I been worrying about what might be happening with my seriously little children with a sitter I didn’t know well enough. I just would have lost my mind, period. I knew that this was an incredibly privileged position to be able to maintain. I also knew that my decision to make my life just this side of unmanageable stemmed from my own childhood experience of babysitters. Did my excruciatingly acute self-awareness give me pause? Certainly it did. Did it stop me? No, it did not. Our working friends thought we were nuts, but they empathized. In fact, fellow working mothers rarely, if ever, criticized our decision. No matter what any of us did, we all seemed to sense that there were actual trade-offs, something important that we would miss. There was no ultimate answer, no real rest. In this respect, it was like everything else that had always been on the insecure X continuum—job, field, location, family, even marriage. Maybe that’s why we wanted the answer so desperately. Maybe that’s why everyone thought Cal and I had it down.
And to the extent that anyone can have such a life down, we did have it down. While Cal worked in the morning, I would nurse the baby, take Zanny to preschool in the morning, nurse, play with the little one during the two and a half hours while our big one was at preschool, nurse, pick up the big one, give her lunch, nurse, bring everyone back in the early afternoon, and then pump breast milk, at which point Cal would take over so that I could work from midafternoon until evening. We always had dinner together. Bath time was also family time. Cal would bathe the little one and I would bathe the older one, each of us enjoying one-on-one time with the babies. I would then lie down with them, read stories, snuggle, and wait until they fell asleep, with the intention of sneaking out to debrief with Cal about our days. More often than not, however, I just fell asleep.
And more often than not, as time went on, the schedule did not work as planned. By the time it was my turn to use the computer, Cal would already be so engrossed in work that he could not stop, or would have been pinged by a client who needed to have a conference call right away, or his business partner would need him to cover, or I would conk out with the kids on returning home from preschool and forfeit my turn, or someone would get sick, or something else. It became clear after a few months of this that I was never going to be able to use the computer. My requests to use it enraged him. Fine, I could use it—he just wouldn’t get his work done! Fine—he’d just have to tell that prospective client to forget it, that his company was just too busy to take on a new project. Fine—just tell him how we were going to pay the bills. The force of his outrage made me think that I was wrong to have asked, that he was supporting the family, of course. I didn’t argue: I was wrong. Ultimately, I joined a writers’ space in our neighborhood, ceding the home office to Cal. God, you’re so lucky, friends in the neighborhood said. I wish my husband was like that—what doesn’t he do? I had no answer—there was nothing. He did everything. Perfectly.
For Cal, control was paramount. It is true that living with someone whose inner weathers are tempestuous can drive even the most laid-back of souls to develop tics. But to those for whom a sense of control is inherently critical, it is disastrous. So even after I had made efforts to defer to his work schedule and to become a decent housekeeper, we both continued to operate as though nothing had changed—or rather, as if things had gotten worse. We went from the historical premise that I was a slob to the sense, somehow, that I was too inept to handle virtually any domestic task. We both believed it. This, like most developments of this sort, happened gradually; nothing was ever said explicitly. Soft pokes, over time, became sharp jabs. No offense, but my homemade cleaning products really reeked. And, actually, were they effective? Just wondering. I mean, it just didn’t seem like things were really clean. Oh, I’d already scrubbed the bathtub? Oops, sorry about that—he couldn’t tell. As soon as we got some more money, wouldn’t it be great to hire a housekeeper? It would make such a difference to get the place really clean for once. Oh, no—please don’t touch that pan! He had spent so much money on it, and it had to be washed in a special way, and he’d prefer to do it himself; he didn’t want it to get ruined. Oh, God—don’t clean the stove! Sorry, it was just a really sensitive piece of equipment. Don’t put that knife in that slot—it doesn’t go there! Just let him do it, please. Actually, if I needed something cut or chopped, could I just let him do it? Okay? Please. No, no, he’d make breakfast; the kids wanted pancakes, and they were used to his pancakes. No, no, he’d make lunch; he knew what the kids liked, and he had already planned it anyway. No—what would I make for dinner that the kids would eat? No, there was no point in my doing the shopping—how would I know what to buy?
And we went from the working premise that my propensity to being a chatterbox was an irritant to the two of us barely talking at all. This, too, happened over time. No, you set up the playdates—you’re better at chatting with people than I am. No, you go to the teacher conference—you’re so chatty, people respond to that kind of thing. Can’t you ever just walk down the street without chatting? Do you always have to talk to everyone? Uh-oh, look out—Mama’s going to start chatting now! (No chatting, Mama! No chatting, Mama!) Why should we hire a babysitter so we can go out to dinner—so we can spend a shitload of money just to chat? Why should we spend money on a babysitter so that we can go to a movie—can’t we just wait for it to come out on DVD? Plus, if we don’t have a babysitter so we can work, why should we have one just to go out? What are we going to do out that we couldn’t do at home? Can you just let me watch TV? There’s nothing to talk about.
By the time our older daughter was six, we had been out, as a couple, no more than ten times. He didn’t want to. It wasn’t just me. Cal’s friends still invited him out to concerts and parties every so often, but he never wanted to go. He didn’t want to stay out that late, he said; he’d be a wreck for the kids the next day. Then go out for just a little while, I would urge; no one is asking you to go out until two in the morning. They have nannies, au pairs, rich parents, he’d say; their lives are different, not hard like ours. I countered: But I’ll stay at home—you go out! It’s not hard! And also, our life did not have to be hard; we were, at some level, choosing to make it hard. Since we didn’t have a sitter during the workweek, I argued, it actually made a lot of sense to ask someone we knew well—or at least his parents, who lived only fifteen minutes away!—to take care of the children for a few hours just once a month so that we could have a date. Even people who had full-time child care did it; they even went out together once a week. It would be a healthy thing to do, important for us as a couple. We needed a break! He didn’t want to. It was too disruptive to the family schedule, to his rhythm.
He didn’t want to. My initial thought was that he had fallen into a serious rut—maybe even a mild depression—and needed help shaking out of it. Beyond the communications breakdown, the classic signs were there. He didn’t leave the apartment if he could avoid it. He’d always been a solid dresser; now, he wore the same outfit virtually every day, changing only his undershirt. His thre
adbare jeans and flapping sandals, and his unaccountable refusal to buy new ones, became a running joke with the few family friends we now saw. Cal and I laughed about it in their presence, but after they left, I would raise the issue more earnestly. Hanging on to those things has become ludicrously symbolic, I’d say. You’re hanging on to a system that no longer functions, and it’s literally undermining you. Bartleby the Scrivener, man! The weird guy in Office Space! Come on! He was not amused. He didn’t want to change, didn’t want help, didn’t want to talk about it.
Maybe he and his business partner should rent a cheap workspace, just to get out of the house? I found him a rent-controlled one-bedroom in the city, near our subway line, that was laughably inexpensive. He didn’t want to. That was an outrageous suggestion, he spat. Not only would it be a waste of money; it would be a waste of time commuting. Who would make dinner? So maybe the real problem was that he wasn’t happy with his job; he should think about what he would really like to do. He was a phenomenal chef—maybe he should look into the restaurant business, or at least cooking school? He didn’t want to. That was just crazy, he said. When would he have the time for that? Maybe he was unhappy, depressed—maybe he should see someone. Are you kidding? He didn’t want to.
And then there was the matter of sex.
Since the first woman gave birth to the first child on earth, the sex lives of the parents of young children have taken a nosedive. But Generation X parents, it seems, are diving headlong into the abyss. In 2008, The Journal of Sex Research published the results of a study on “sensual and sexual marital contentment in parents of small children.” Six years prior to the report, researchers had tracked the sex lives of 452 parents whose babies were six months old; they were reevaluated four years later. “Sexual contentment remained low,” the study said. “More parents had changed from being sensually content in 2002 to discontent in 2006, than the contrary.” Even those who hadn’t had a second child weren’t back to their pre-parenthood sex lives: “The average sexual frequency was low both at six months and at four years for both parents with and without additional children.” Moreover, a 2005 study of more than eight hundred parents had discovered that “the majority of parents had sexual intercourse once to twice a month when the baby was six months old.”
In Spite of Everything Page 18
