. . .
In 2013, when we had two very young children, we went out to dinner at a restaurant near our apartment, on 106th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Date nights in those days always started out as a romantic idea but dissolved into an airing of grievances the minute we were out the door and out of earshot of our kids. The thing about living in New York is that privacy largely doesn’t exist. If you want to argue at home, your kids are always a few steps away. The times when we’ve tried to keep quiet, hissing and making threats through clenched teeth in the kitchen under the pretense of getting dinner ready, the kids are even more attuned. (“What are you whispering about in there? I can’t hear you! Why is Mommy crying?”) That night, walking to the restaurant, we were fighting about division of labor in our household, which will come as a surprise to exactly zero adults with children reading this. You all know how it goes: I have a job, you have a job, but I have more of a job, because I am the “default parent”—a term that had just been coined by a think piece in The Atlantic, I believe—and so I am always home to relieve the babysitter, plus I do most of the cooking and grocery shopping and laundry folding. Our particular fight that evening had begun with my berating Michael about not changing the light bulb in our bathroom, even though he said he was going to do it ten days ago, and degenerated into me sobbing and screaming, “I just wish you were handy! OTHER HUSBANDS BUILD BOOKSHELVES.” Because nothing stings quite like being told you aren’t a satisfactory woodworker.
We fought, loudly and openly, the entire walk to the restaurant. I wonder, sometimes, if there’s a collection of videos on YouTube titled, “Parents of Young Children Yell at Each Other on Amsterdam Avenue—Scary!” recorded by horrified (unmarried) bystanders. Then again, I remember that this is New York, and my children and I once saw a woman walking breezily down Central Park West at 3:30 p.m. on a Friday wearing a prairie skirt and nothing else. Two adults fighting about meal planning is ambient noise. When we got to our table, conveniently located outside, within earshot of passersby, I was still so furious that I snapped at the poor server who was taking my order. I was such a monster that, after neutralizing my anger with a boatload of nachos and several beers, I made myself go inside the restaurant and apologize to her.
On another date, we had a cab driver pull over and tell us to either shut up or get out of his car.
Why am I telling you this? Why am I airing my dirty laundry, as my mother would say? Well, for a few reasons. First of all, I find that telling friends how and why we fight—or showing strangers by fighting openly on public sidewalks in New York City—makes other people feel better about their marriages, in an extremely superficial and temporary manner, and I’m happy to provide that service. In the same way we read about a child dying and go home to hug our own more sincerely, I hope people witnessing me yell, “Are you kidding me? You call that vacuuming?” turn to their partner and think, “I have it pretty good. At least I’m not married to her.”
Also, I think we are all fighting about the same things. Not in the same way; I don’t venture that everyone is a yeller. But truthfully most fighting falls into very few buckets. One bucket is entirely about in-laws.
But let’s take golf. Michael and I fight about golf a lot. Just writing that sentence made me feel like an idiot. We could be fighting about how to invest for retirement or how much screen time to give our nine-year-old, which are both at least worthy of some back-and-forth, but . . . golf. Michael loves golf, and what’s worse, he’s quite good at it. (His handicap is a four—as of press time. He’d like me to note that it could get lower, depending on how much his witch of a wife lets him play in the coming months.) Because he is good at golf and enjoys it so much, he wants to play as much as possible, any Saturday when the weather is above 35 degrees, ideally. It also means that he occasionally plays in tournaments that take two days, Saturday and Sunday, leaving me alone with our children for approximately fourteen waking hours of a weekend. He goes and comes back, and I say, “Hi! How did you play?” and then I simmer for a few hours until I erupt over something small—he didn’t refill the glass of water on my bedside table that he drank—which eventually comes back to how many hours he was gone . . . playing golf. Other times, I get cute and say this: “You know, I love going to spas. And I’m actually very good at spa-ing. I am so still during facials, and I’m very appreciative during my massage, even if the pressure isn’t exactly what I want. What if there were a spa tournament next weekend? And if I do really well at the spa on Saturday morning, I get to go back on Sunday to spa in the finals? Oh, and then there’s a dinner afterward, where all the spa players sit around comparing toenail polish colors and admiring each other’s robes while we drink whiskey with little eucalyptus sprigs in it. How would you feel about that?” You may guess that this doesn’t get us anywhere.
Some husbands, I’ve heard, just give up golf once they have kids in favor of basketball or tennis, which takes a fraction of the time. But then you will end up fighting about basketball too. Because while basketball or golf seem like relatively narrow topics, they fall into one common bucket that all couples are desperately paddling around in, trying not to drown, 90 percent of the time. What bucket is it? Here’s a hint: Other topics in the bucket include hours spent at the office, whose turn it is to go to the gym in the morning, and even the airtight, seemingly egalitarian arrangement, “I cook, you clean,” which will still have someone in tears every now and then. It is the bucket of fairness. Of scorekeeping. Of, I’m doing everything around here, while you are sitting on the couch picking your nose. Trust me, I’ve been fighting about this, mostly outdoors, for fifteen years.
Knowing that I am not a therapist and also, having read thus far, not a particularly levelheaded wife, you’d be within your rights to ignore marriage advice coming from me. But the truth is, I have a great marriage. Really great. We’ve had bad years here and there, most of them in the beginning, but overall I can say that we find each other hilarious and interesting and hot, and we love each other vastly more than we did on our wedding day. Part of the reason is that we have tried to stop keeping score. When I say “we,” I mean “I,” and when I say “tried,” I mean “failed and vowed to try again the next morning.” It is very, very hard for me to resist making a mental list of what I’ve handled versus what he’s handled. And if I actually want it to be accurate, I’d have to make a real list, not just a mental one, and I’m entirely too busy for that nonsense. The truth of the matter is that marriage and parenting will never be fair or equal in a way that satisfies everyone, I’m sorry. There’s the saying that couples shouldn’t aim for 50–50 but rather 100–100. Both of you have to give everything, as much as you can, selflessly. That makes sense. The minute I start to envision an imaginary line denoting half the effort required to keep the household running, and I see my efforts filling the tank past that line, I immediately pull back and start simultaneously resenting whatever task I’m doing and my husband. Whereas, if I’m looking at the tank with no line of demarcation, just doing the best I can to fill it, and he comes along and dumps a bunch of help in, that’s icing on the cake.
Now I have to talk about Gary Chapman for a minute. Gary Chapman is the rare crossover guru who is pretty well-known in Christian and non-Christian circles alike for his famous book, The 5 Love Languages. In a world now complicated by internet Myers-Briggs memes and the circus that is the Enneagram, Chapman’s love languages are like Personality Tests for Dummies. Straightforward, broad strokes kind of stuff. You watch how your partner is showing love to you, and you speak that language back to him or her. Simple and effective. My love language is Acts of Service: cleaning a bathroom, loading a dishwasher, building a mother-effing bookshelf. Throughout all of the fights on street corners in our early marriage, when I was yelling about the meals Michael didn’t cook or babies he didn’t bathe, what I was saying was, “Love me, love me, love me.” And he was saying, “I do love you! I told you, like, seven times yesterday that you looked good in those jean
s!” because his love language is Words of Affirmation. It took a while, but we slowly learned how to love each other the way we needed to be loved, and, miracle of miracles, when I started talking to my husband kindly and less like Yosemite Sam, he started cleaning and offering to stop at the grocery on his way home from work.
The other thing is that I have to remind myself constantly that my husband is not Jesus. He can’t love me perfectly. He can’t forgive me freely, over and over, with no backlash, for the same obnoxious behavior. He is not responsible for making me feel fulfilled or for steadying all my insecurities. He can’t create a household system that is balanced and fair, because life is not fair, and our world is not balanced. It’s way too much pressure on a marriage to try to right the wrongs of society. Only when I remember that I am loved—without conditions—by God can I take what the man on the couch is offering, however limited, and say, “it’s more than enough.” And he can look at me, spewing obscenities in the bathroom over the fact that he can’t fix the hinges on the medicine cabinet, and say, “I forgive you, because I’m forgiven.”
We still fight, by the way. You may have seen us: on the steps of our children’s school, in the baking aisle of Whole Foods, at church on Christmas Eve. I’ve been given the gift of a high threshold for shame, so I guess it’s my duty to show the ugliness of marriage out in the open every once in a while. So few people do it. What I actually wish I could do is wear a virtual sandwich board that would flash notices like, “We are going to be fine; it’s normal to fight,” and “You heard right. I did just call him a deadbeat dad! I will ask for forgiveness later!” Should some twentysomething dating couple walk by, it might be educational, even. When it inevitably happens that we fight in front of our children, I try to be the virtual sandwich board for them. Michael and I make sure that they see us apologize, forgive, and occasionally make out in the kitchen. Am I damaging them for their future spouses? It’s possible. But one of them, at least, emerged from my uterus as a sidewalk screamer, I’m sure of it, so at this point, the best I can do is model the resolution.
What I can tell you about our fights is that they aren’t nearly as long as they were when we first got married. Back in the day, we had more stamina. Now we have kids. Michael still plays golf, but he takes the first tee time of the day, which means he often gets up at 5:30 a.m. on a Saturday and is home before lunch. He shoulders twice the parenting that I do for the rest of the weekend and bikes around Central Park with them for a couple of hours to give me space, because if there’s an opposite of my love language, it’s biking. If we kept score, I’d be trying to assign value to biking, adding bonus points for dealing with a meltdown halfway through, carrying the one, and subtracting two points for feeding the kids ice cream right before dinner. It’s exhausting, and it never evens out. What we aim for is to serve each other, even when we don’t deserve it. That’s what Jesus did—he loved and forgave the undeserving.
Last week, I got really upset about our microwave. It’s broken, you see, and Michael promised that he would fix it. (Fix it = call a repairman or buy a new one. We’ve established that he is not handy.) He has a habit of not following through with those promises, something I resent and stew over. Our microwave has been broken for almost two years—yes, two years—and, on principle, I won’t do anything about it. Because then I wouldn’t have anything to hold over his head, like a mature adult. The baby needs some leftover pasta warmed up? I warm up that pasta in a pot or in the oven, lighting a small, righteous flame of indignation that will turn into a house fire later. Take last week, when I was irritated about something minor, but then launched into my regular rant, “It’s like the microwave. You never do what you say you are going to do . . .” and so on and so on. I’ll admit that I went a little bit mental for a few minutes, and then I retreated to the bedroom to cool off. This is something I’ve learned about myself: arguing is like being trapped in a snow globe. I can keep shouting and stirring up the snow, so that I can’t see anything and am blinded by my own craziness, or I can let the snow settle and see the truth. Only that night, even after the snow settled, I couldn’t see the truth. I didn’t know why I was so mad. I just was. I went to sleep, then continued to be slightly peeved the next morning, while Michael fed the kids breakfast and took the big ones to school.
Finally, around 11:00 a.m., I realized something. I texted Michael.
“I’m sorry about last night. I have PMS.”
“I know,” he texted back. “That’s why I left you alone. I keep track of your period on my calendar.”
The vows included in the Book of Common Prayer that we read at our wedding did not mention anything about a husband counting the days of his wife’s menstrual cycle. Back then, had you told me how loved and cared for I’d feel at the discovery of that fact, I would have said, “Gross,” or, “Fat chance. Like he’d ever notice.” But he does. And I’ll take it over a working microwave any day.
SIX
LIONS
A FRIEND OF MINE WHO WAS a senior editor at a well-known women’s magazine once told me that any time I wanted to write about anger, the magazine would love to talk to me. I believe she said, “Theresa [the editor-in-chief, and also not her real name] is really interested in female anger, and you seem to deal with it a lot, and if you ever want to write about being angry or yelling at your kids and stuff, let’s talk.” This friend knows me pretty well, and I had shared some less savory parenting moments with her over the years, although I believe she was more invested in the idea of female (not necessarily maternal) rage in general. But the bottom line is: I have plenty to spill on the subject.
I’ve always had a temper. It wasn’t the kind of situation where I threw my body on the floor in the aisle of Walgreens or held my breath as a baby until I passed out if I didn’t get my way. My mother claims I was actually an easy toddler. I’d head to my room and entertain myself alone for hours, making up stories and games with my stuffed animals. But the lava was stewing under the surface. Whereas some kids who lose their minds as three-year-olds grow up to be pretty passive, soft-spoken adults, I was the opposite. As I remember my mother saying to me when I was in college, “From the time you were in seventh grade on, I just got on my knees and prayed to survive.” Fun. And to be clear, I wasn’t doing drugs or smoking in the garage or even cursing much, for heaven’s sake. I was just incredibly stubborn and got very, very upset when things weren’t going my way. My aunt Patti once gave our entire family a personality test—this was probably around 1992—where you answered a bunch of questions and were labeled as one of four animals. My dad was a beaver: meticulous, organized, good with projects. My mother and sister were both Golden Retrievers: loyal, people-pleasing, comforting. The third option was an otter: fun-loving, a little off, very into family game night. Patti was an otter. The fourth animal was a lion. I was the only lion in my entire extended family. You can guess what attributes go along with a lion. It’s been the story of my life. A leader! A strong voice! But also a huge bully who will eat your face off. And because I know that at least half of the people reading this—most definitely the Christian half—are going to ask me what my Enneagram number is, I believe, after superficial internet quizzing, that I am an 8. (If you don’t know what the Enneagram is, just wait.) Christians have really latched on to this ancient personality diagram, but, like a bad rash, it is spreading. Eights are called the Challengers: strong-willed, tough, “snowplows” who push their will through, flattening out the people in their way like unlucky little moles pressed down under the ice. My friend Hallie, trying to encourage me once I realized that I was a big jerk of a snowplow and went down a bit of a shame spiral, sent me a few links from an Instagram Enneagram coach (it’s a thing) about the blessings of being an 8. (Hallie does these things because she’s a 9, the Peacemaker, which means she’s a problem solver and also nice.) Here’s what I learned: I am an advocate for the marginalized (will also eat your face off). I am decisive (will also eat your face off). One post exhorted us 8s to
consider how we might try to take the “bricks” we like to drop on people and wrap them in velvet. That’s what my friends and family have to deal with. A brick hurler with no self-control.
This behavior was on full display the night my first child was conceived.
It was April 2009 and Michael and I had been married for almost four years. I was thirty-two years old. We had decided about a year before that we were ready to start thinking about a baby, not because we felt mature or financially secure enough to be parents but because we had bought an apartment with a second bedroom. This is a slight exaggeration, but in New York City, at our age, you didn’t just have empty rooms for no purpose unless you had a trust fund. The apartment and the second room were a sign it was time. I knew the basics of how one got pregnant, but every article and book I read mentioned having sex around ovulation, and I knew that that was a crap shoot with me. Before the introduction of birth control into my life, I’d never had regular periods, never a predictable cycle, no dull ache near one hip bone when I ovulated—something I read about and would still think is utter fantasy if my friend Paige didn’t claim to feel it, like clockwork, every single month. I started my period at age sixteen—an extremely late bloomer—and had, at different times of my life, been told I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, but a mild case. I had extra chin and sideburn whiskers (male-pattern hair growth, it’s called) but not the typical weight gain. “You know the bearded lady in the circus?” an endocrinologist asked me in college. “She has PCOS.” Later, when I lived in New York, a doctor explained to me, in terms that I wholeheartedly appreciated, that my ovaries looked like chocolate chip cookies, crowded with eggs that were supposed to be released monthly but instead stayed put (extra chocolate chippy!). When I went off birth control pills, I got my period maybe two or three times a year. That was my natural state. So catching that elusive ovulation wasn’t going to be easy. To speed everything up, I took Clomid, a drug that forces your eggs to mature in a predictable manner. A fertility specialist monitored them every morning during office hours that started at 7:00 a.m., forcing me to ride the subway to her office at dawn, and then, once I was close to ovulating, just in case my chocolate chip cookies weren’t giving up the chips, I’d inject my lower abdomen with a drug that signaled the release. Fifteen hours later, I’d ovulate, and Michael and I were supposed to have sex.
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