Sex, sex, sex. One of the focal points of my ambling thoughts and conversations about marriage in the last year of my own was sex. Not an original theme, but what began to become profoundly clear was that people who had formed a strong sexual union before having children were stronger in their marriages than those of us who hadn’t. Again, perhaps not surprising, but it came as kind of a clarion revelation. This came into stark relief a few years later when I found myself engaged in a surprising conversation with an Orthodox Jewish acquaintance who was describing nuptial guidelines in the Orthodox tradition. Isaac said that when he got engaged, he had to enroll in the requisite marriage preparation class for men, which is taught by the synagogue’s rabbi. Such classes are essential, since, if you’ve been a “good Jewish boy,” he said, you have never even grazed a woman other than your mother or sister. Since these young men know nothing, practically speaking, about sex, a vital function of the classes is to teach them how to be good husbands in that department. Isaac said that everyone, obviously, feels ridiculous and embarrassed to have to learn the finer points of pleasing your wife from your religious counselor, but, he said, the rabbi emphasized the importance of knowing what you’re doing. In Orthodox Jewish law, a rabbi must issue what’s called a get to make divorce official. The rabbi told them that the underlying cause of 99 percent of the gittin he had personally overseen was an unsatisfactory sex life.
Ninety-nine percent. Instinct dictates that Isaac’s rabbi may have inflated that statistic a shade for emphasis. Still, his message is one that any couples therapist would, and does, underscore, and it supports a theory of my own about why sex is so important in a couple’s life now, post-children. In the first three years of a child’s life, virtually every part of a couple’s previous relationship and dynamic is stripped bare. The child’s needs are so urgent, and so constant, that one is almost always in a state of triage, even when happy. There is no possibility of nuanced pillow talk; your brain is just fried. Furthermore, our generation does share child rearing (at least much more than any other), and by the time we have children, both members of the couple have built at least some part of their identity on work. This means that we don’t have much appreciation for each other’s differences and separateness during those early years in our children’s life—and that, I believe, can lead to malaise, resentment, and hostility.
If you, for example, are taking care of the baby and your husband is going off to work, you have a pretty good idea of what his day is like, having gone off to work yourself for a good deal of your life. You are then in a position to compare your day with his, and you decide that you are resentful because his day does not compel him to be so relentlessly alert and responsive. When your husband watches you feed the fussy baby with some difficulty, he may feel free to criticize your style, having perfected a style of his own that seems to work beautifully. Because everyone knows everyone’s business, there is no respect for each other’s expertise; neither can claim it, because both have it.
Except in the area of sex. This is the one relation at this stage of life in which appreciation of differences and separateness are essential, capable of dissolving resentment and enmeshment. Good sex yields a sense of having been imprinted by the other, even as it lends a sense of mystery. If you don’t have this sense of sexual union, or haven’t had it at one point in your relationship, you end up with what’s left: malaise, resentment, and hostility. This is not to say that you don’t love your child with every vein, bone, and sinew in your body. But unless you have that strong sexual bond, it seems safe to say that having a baby won’t bring you closer together. It will drive you apart.
In light of this theory, that outcome was perhaps even more inevitable for us. For one thing, since we both worked from home, there was zero mystery about what the other was doing with his or her day. We saw it all. No wonder Cal said there was nothing to talk about at the end of the day. For another, it wasn’t that the traditional gender roles were askew, or even neatly reversed, in our relationship. We both behaved as though he was doing everything, and that he should, because I was incompetent to do it. We both believed it. It was not unlike a yuppie, Gen-X egalitarian take on The Yellow Wallpaper in which we were both, in our own ways, prisoners of that stifling attic room, isolated and unable to appreciate the pathology of our rapport. To us, and to everyone else, it seemed we had solved the thorny riddle of having it all. But the moment the door first creaked open and an outsider got a peek in, it felt as though a routine police check had stumbled upon bound hostages in a bunker.
I had been helping out an old friend—a single mother—by picking up her daughter from day care a couple of times a week and taking her, along with my daughters, back to their apartment (the girl felt more secure at her own home), feeding everyone dinner, and playing with all the little monkeys until my friend came home from work. It was fun. One evening, I guess I seemed blue, and my friend asked me what was up. Oh, you know, Cal’s stressed and mad, but who can blame him, I said. You know what an incompetent I am. There was a pause. No, I don’t, said my friend. Well, you know, I said, I can’t even make dinner. My friend put both hands on the table and looked me in the eye. You got a major book deal, are writing the book, and are making your deadlines, without child care; you pick up your own children, and my child, from school; you make everyone dinner; you talk to me about my problems when I get home from work; you are funny and lovable. When I tell my colleagues about everything you do, they laugh. You, she said, are a parody of competence. Anyone can make dinner. I stared. Then, I sobbed.
What should Cal and I have done differently? Some would review our decisions and say that in the final analysis, it was the family bed that did us in. Ideally, you’re supposed to sneak out of the family bed to have sex in another room. As the children get older, you’re supposed to work on phasing them out by having them sleep in little nests on the floor beside your bed or moving them into their own shared room (which we had done, with varying degrees of success, depending on the night). It is not supposed to drive a wedge into the fissures in your relationship with your mate. The family bed is not supposed to become an excuse to avoid each other. But polemics are handily plastic, often allowing people to use them as a screen to avoid confronting some other, murky matter of personal discontentment.
It was no fault of the children’s, of our decision to do it, of the practice itself. I wouldn’t have done it any differently. I loved cuddling with my babies at least as much as, if not more than, they did. I don’t know whether any of their sense of confidence and security can be traced to the family bed, but it certainly didn’t hurt, and I don’t think either Cal or I minded hedging our bets in any case. The point here is that if Cal and I had had a different dynamic—which is to say, an immutable sexual bond—the family bed might have come to symbolize not a gulf but a bridge in our relationship.
Friends tell me that it did in theirs. Some women have told me, for example, that prior to having children, their mates had seen them as sexual, but still in a teenage boy kind of way. But after having children, seeing their wives nursing, having the babies in the bed, their mates’ whole idea of womanhood was expanded. For that matter, some women report that their husbands viewed pregnancy as the ultimate expression of their sexual connection. One woman said that her husband confessed after the fact that he had had an erection during her labor. While she was glad, certainly, that he had waited to tell her this until her stitches had healed, she also thought it was kind of awesome. I confess to being rather blown away by this, but okay. For me, the takeaway here is that sexual relationships are powerful by anyone’s reckoning, and particularly so between a couple with children.
Cal and I had not slept alone in the same bed since we had had our babies. In the final four years of our marriage, we had not slept in the same bed at all. I was always in the kids’ room, in bed with them; Cal slept alone, in ours. There had never been reason to do anything else.
At some point, the meaning of my stepsister’s we
dding present, our combined astrological chart, dawned on me: Being parents was the big cosmic purpose of our relationship. Before we had children, Cal had, consciously or not, operated as my parent. But Cal was an actual parent now. I had no pull; I had been severed. He was orbiting in an entirely different system now. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to be with me.
Six months before my book was due to my editor, I got a call from my aunt. How long had it been since I had spoken to my dad? she wanted to know. I don’t know, I said. A while. The truth was that it had been quite a while, maybe more than a year. We had not really had much contact since September 11, 2001. I suppose that means you don’t know, my aunt said. Know what? Your father has bone cancer, she said. He has six to nine months to live.
My aunt’s phone call came in February 2005. Dad didn’t want us to come until summer. So we went that summer. They did not want us to stay in their house; we rented a neighbor’s vacant house down the street from them. Zanny, then four, trotted around, trying to talk to my dad; he barely at looked her. He was preoccupied with erecting a giant mosquito-killing contraption that looked like a 1970s movie robot. After a day of this, Cal and I took the children to a nearby farm to feed baby goats and sheep. What did you expect? Cal said. The next morning, we found a note on our windshield: “Thanks for coming. Love, Dad.” He was gone, had left for work at five-thirty that morning, his wife said, though we all knew he wasn’t working anymore. “Your father is not good at good-byes,” she explained, in a tone that seemed calculated to beam mysterious wisdom. I felt an angry dissertation welling up in me, but I smiled thinly instead and turned to strap the babies into the car. Thanks for the visit, Cal said.
The day after Halloween 2005, I called my dad. Pru had decided to go as both Frog and Toad, the eponymous characters of the children’s books. All night long, she had had an expression on her face that was pure Dad: his signature “give me a break” look. It was uncanny; Cal had remarked on it, too. Dad would like that.
As I dialed his number, I was walking toward the Brooklyn Writers’ Space, down Third Street in Park Slope. The sidewalk was mortared with candy wrappers, leaves, and indecipherable remnants of costumes. It was chilly and clear, and though it was morning, the fall sun was already on its trajectory to set.
At first I thought I was going to get an answering machine. But after a number of rings, my father’s wife answered breathlessly, and on hearing my voice, she passed me to someone else. It was a hospice worker. “If you want to see your father alive, you should come within the next twelve hours,” she said. Ian, coincidentally, had called their house about an hour before. No one had planned on calling either of us.
By the time I got there early that evening, my father was in a coma. He was laid out in a cot in his bedroom, mouth open. His glasses were off. He was howling. The house seemed to be shaking with it.
His wife, sitting Indian-style in an armchair, said that she thought he wanted to be alone, that if he were an Inuit, he would have walked out into the snow by himself. I looked at her. I was not going to let my father, my dad, die alone.
For ten hours, I crouched at his side. I held his hand. I put my head on his chest. He wailed like Lear on the heath. It was a horror. I whispered, for ten hours: “You are not alone. I am here. It’s okay.” My Daddy-Doe. My noodler-in-chief.
When the sun came up, the breathing had become less regular, and the howl had quieted. My brother, who had been sleeping on the bed, woke up. My father’s wife materialized at the doorway. She sat on the bed and, petting their dog ceremoniously, informed us that she had consulted a medium a few months before, and that the medium had confirmed that she and Dad had not only shared their past lives together but would continue to do so throughout eternity. Ian and I looked at each other. After a long moment, I reminded Ian of a time we were all at the movies before our parents had split, when Dad had been in a really, really bad mood and had given my brother the popcorn to hold. My poor brother had been so nervous about the bad mood that he spazzed out with the popcorn, jerking a quarter of it all over the floor. Dad shot him an angry look, and he sprayed it out all over again. Every time he did it, Dad would bark, “Jesus, Ian!” and all my brother could say was, “Jeez, sorry, Dad!” But he couldn’t stop; he was the oscillating popcorn sprinkler. Dad finally started cracking up, and the three of us had stood in hysterics in the lobby of the theater, with everyone staring at us, half-smiling in uncertainty about what sort of moment this was.
Ian and I sat on the bed giggling. Suddenly, Dad grunted. At seven-thirty in the morning, he died.
We had a small service. Then I drove home to Cal and the babies.
I will not, and in any case cannot, describe what I felt on that drive. I will just say that I knew that my father had heard me as I sat with him. My abiding sense of being alone—cosmically alone—is, I now know, a direct result of my own parents’ savage divorce, coupled with my father’s alcoholism. How else could the parent with whom you were so closely bonded simply disappear, to be replaced by this Darth Vader figure? The only answer, in my addled little psyche, had been that love is not real. We are not actually bonded to one another; love does not actually make a stitch in the fabric of the universe. It seems to do so for a time, but it can be ripped out when you least expect it. The cosmic needle coldly moves on to thread together another panel. You are left alone, strings hanging out, fluttering off into the dark. Cal had changed this for me. Until my children were born, my connection to Cal was the closest I’d ever come to feeling what it must feel like to experience a miracle. I do not mean this in any maudlin or fuzzy way. I mean it actually. And I knew that my father needed me to be with him as he left life. I knew that my dad loved me, in spite of everything.
The night I came home from my father’s house, I turned to Cal in bed as he was reading. I felt an overwhelming urge to bind with him, to lock souls. Thank God, I said, we didn’t have to suffer like my father. Thank God we weren’t alone! He turned to me, nodded, and then kept reading. I waited, thinking he was finishing a paragraph. But I ended up falling asleep. For days, weeks—nothing. I went numb. A few months later, I got a serious case of pneumonia, which lasted nearly twelve weeks. I spent a lot of time on the couch, in and out of blackout sleep, with my children coming to hang out and read with me, Cal watching TV. Wow. He’s really gone, I remember thinking at one point. We are alone.
SEVEN
EVERYTHING IS COMING
TO A GRINDING HALT:
THE END OF THE MARRIAGE
The arc of my life story tracks that of many in my generation; I’m a dime a dozen. But in the particulars of the dissolution of my own marriage, I am—everyone is—unique. By the end of my marriage, I had given up trying to do anything in the kitchen and had not washed a dish in a year. Cal had not been able to “find time” to read the book I had written, and he was explosive at any disclosure of my confusion or hurt. We rarely spoke, except about logistics. We hadn’t had sex in months.
Yet I never considered divorce. It never even entered my mind. I just figured that this was my life. I was, by and large, okay with it. At this point, I had a number of good friends—many of them other mothers in our neighborhood—and that comfy camaraderie provided a soft lining. I had found a resting place for my adolescent mania: I loved my babies. Loved my babies. I was grateful that they had a perfect father, for our family meals, for the stability of our home, for neighborhood playdates.
Still, I felt it. The ogre will come in any case. I was beginning to feel it at night in the girls’ room when I was still awake with a boo-boo snoring sweetly at each side. During the day, I was content with work, children, playdates, laundry. But once the sun set, my mind froze in panic. Grendel, it seemed, was just beyond the fortress gates, waiting for everyone to fall asleep.
I had to stay alert; I had to get us out. I instantly picked up my pace. But out of where? To what? Rather than progressing in any one direction, I manically pitched myself this way and that—like a metronome with
no weight on its pendulum. Move, move, move.
Maybe our apartment was too small. The girls were getting bigger. The rooms were tiny; the “nests” were more like pods. We needed more space. We should move to a real house. I had grown up in a house, until my parents divorced; Cal had always grown up in a house. The girls deserved to grow up in a house, too. We should buy a house. Now was the time to do it; our apartment had appreciated, thanks to the kitchen renovation. We could sell our place for double what we paid for it. Think about it. We could afford a house now—not in the Jersey suburbs, not in some shitbag Brooklyn dump! A nice house, in our neighborhood!
This time, it wasn’t Cal who churned frenetically about real estate; it was me. My dad was dead. I had recovered from pneumonia. My book had been published. Now I had time. I searched for a house every moment I had free. What was I doing? I was moving. I was thinking literally. House hunting was not symbolic. We needed to get out of the apartment; we did not fit there; that’s what was wrong. I needed to find a house. More than that, I needed to find The House—like The Magnolia Tree.
Room. Poems. Gash. Sleepwalking. Stars. Ice. Dad. House.
The House would protect us.
In Spite of Everything Page 19
