I do not know how broken homes and divorces will be stopped. I know that knowledge is our only weapon. We must teach our children the history of our own divorces. We must warn them and beg them to be wiser than we were. We must do whatever is in our power to convince them not to marry until they are old enough to know themselves. How old is that? Thirty for some, forty for others, never for a few.
I am asked all the time about how an artist can balance a family and work. And the truthful answer is that I do not know an artist of great or unusual talent who is married. I will revise that to say an artist of great or unusual talent who uses that talent fully. There is no room in the life of an artist for a husband or a wife or a normal family life. The hours an artist has to spend mulling around in solitude leave no time for the ordinary friendliness and courtesy that a happy marriage demands.
A happy marriage? I am so cynical I really cannot think of one. I know people who are married who have cut deals that allow them to live in relative peace with each other but I don’t know any marriages that seem to be delivering much happiness. Perhaps marriage was never supposed to make us happy. Perhaps it is just the price we have to pay to reproduce and make a nest.
The worst thing about divorce is how long it takes to achieve it. It takes as long to decathect as it did to create the problem. For every romantic thought you had about the man or woman to whom you were married, you must now add a cynical, mean, ugly thought. For every time you decided he was Prince Charming, you must now decide he is Evil Incarnate. For every rapturous account of his virtues you gave your friends, you must now add a general account of his impossibility as a spouse.
Spouse: there’s a word to make one shudder. From the term, espousal, which means to promise. For every ill-thought-out promise, you must add the legal fine print. Thank goodness for sofas and jointly owned automobiles. As soon as the argument can degenerate into a battle over property, the personal emotional ground can begin to be abandoned.
How ugly all this seems to us while we are going through it. How terrible we feel to be walking around thinking dark thoughts about someone we used to sleep with. Just when we think we are making some progress, we run into the person we are divorcing at the grocery store. “Ill met by moonlight, Proud Titania,” Oberon says to his queen in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He has come upon her in the forest, where she is dancing with her fairies and elves. She has with her a young boy, the possession of whom is the cause of her dissension with Oberon. Their conversation begins with jealousy, moves on to Titania’s blaming Oberon for everything that’s wrong with the world, and ends with his throwing the blame back onto her. Especially with a subject as dark as divorce, it is good to stop and drink from the hands of a master.
Titania:
These are the forgeries of jealousy;
And never, since the middle summer’s spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached margent of the sea.
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hast disturb’d our sport.
Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck’d up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land,
Hath every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.
The ox hath therefore stretch’d his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard.
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine men’s morris if fill’d up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable.
The human mortals want their winter here;
No night is now with hymn or carol blest.
Therefore the moon (the governess of floods),
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound.
And thorough this distemperature, we see
The seasons alter; hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown,
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery set; the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.
Who has ever written a more perfect description of the way the injured party feels when a marriage has broken up? The winds have sucked up from the sea contagious fogs. Rivers have overborne their continents. The seasons have changed places. Hoary-headed frosts fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose … And this same progeny of evils comes from our debate, from our dissension.…
Sometimes divorces are caused by children. Even a marriage that was consummated in the hope of having children may break down under the pressure of caring for and supporting the endless and expensive needs of children. Modern, educated women sometimes find the wear and tear of taking care of small children twenty-four hours a day is more than they bargained for.
I know of marriages that are breaking down because the children have become rebellious teenagers. The parents feel cheated. They have given their lives and the sweat of their brows for those ungrateful creatures. They feel they have wasted their lives. Perhaps they have.
Platitudes or shaky moral ground will not save us now. We have big problems in this culture. And all problems begin in infancy, in the home, in the mother-child relationship, and in the force field we call family.
Some people make better mothers than others do. Some men make better fathers. This doesn’t mean that some men and women are better than others, just that they are more temperamentally suited to the job of raising children. Where does this lead us?
One thing I know is that it is a bad idea to marry someone who had bad parents. If they hated their mother, if they were hated by their mother or father, your marriage will pay for it in ways both obvious and subtle. When the chips are down, when someone is sick or loses their job or gets scared, the old patterns will kick in and he will treat you the way he treated his mother or the way she treated him. If she yelled at him and compared him to others and blamed him for her own shortcomings, this is the treatment you will receive. If she expected to be constantly admired and rewarded, he will expect that. And this is just the problem with his (or her) mother. Before we even get to the father.
Divorces are also caused by people outgrowing each other or outgrowing the need for the marriage they have made. Sometimes marriages are broken down by events: the death or sickness of a child, the sickness or disability of one of the partners, sudden wealth, sudden poverty, all the things that the marriage ceremony in The Book of Common Prayer warned against. For richer, for poorer, for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others …
The world that such marriages were made for no longer exists in the middle-class life of the United States. We don’t depend on each other for food, clothing, housing, nursing, and are left depending on each other for company and emotional support. Most of the married people I know go to their friends for fun and gossip and long walks where everyone says exactly what they think.
Also, we live much longer than the people who wrote the ceremonies in the prayer books of our various religions. We don’t want to forsake all others. We leave our troubled houses where children are sick and bills must be paid and travel to our offices where there are bright, well-dressed, good-natured people of the opposite sex, and we forsake. Oh, do we forsake! If not in physical ways, the
n in emotional ways, which are equally damaging to the marriages we left behind that morning.
We live so long we have time for two or three major careers, two or three or more transformations. We become someone new and the person we are married to feels betrayed. They have been betrayed. The person they married has ceased to exist and they feel cheated.
The only hope I can see for the unhappiness of divorce is knowing that it is better than a bad marriage. The unhappiness of divorce ends, in time, for healthy people. Healthy people refuse to stay unhappy. Sooner or later they wake up and decide to be happy again. They lose weight and start exercising. They dye their hair or get a toupee. They buy a red dress and go to a party and start flirting. They redecorate their living quarters. They get out their address books and start looking for old lovers to recycle.
Life goes on. They look back on their marriage and wonder who that person was who inhabited that troubled world. Time, the old healer, has erased the footsteps that led them to the altar and the divorce court.
The Wine Dark Sea
I’M SICK OF EVERYONE ELSE HAVING ALL THE FUN TALKING about menopause. I want to get my oar in. I went through menopause. My experience is just as good as anyone else’s. Here’s what happens. You stop menstruating. Blood stops running out of your body six days a month. You stop ruining all your silk underpants. You stop having to borrow Tampax from strangers in public rest-rooms during ball games and ballets and movies. (The first one I borrowed was in a movie theatre in Harrisburg, Illinois. I was thirteen and it was a Kotex since Tampax hadn’t been invented yet.)
Sometimes you can’t borrow one. Sometimes you have to stuff your underpants full of Kleenex or your handkerchief or a sock. Then you slink home full of shame.
Back to the menopause. First you don’t menstruate every month. You menstruate some months and not others. This is okay except that you think you’re pregnant all the time. I made a lot of money off that experience by writing a book about a woman who has a baby when she is forty-four. It is called The Annunciation and has sold about three hundred thousand copies in the last twelve years.
The other thing that happens is that you have hot flashes. This is very exciting if you let it be. You are walking across a room minding your own business and suddenly you are consumed by heat. Your body heats up to about a hundred and four. This happens in seconds. You break out in a sweat. Then the heat passes and only the sweat remains. You have been reminded of mortality and death and where you are in space and time. You are in the universe of process and decay, of atoms and particles and human biology, that frail and delicate phenomena to end all phenomena.
Take that excitement into your soul. Understand who and where and what you are. You are awake now, not in the stupor in which most of us live our lives. Rilke said it is as though our life is a room but as we grow older we only inhabit a small part of the room, pacing up and down before a window, tracing and retracing our steps. He said, “We must accept our experience as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it.”
Of course, for this you need courage and the strength to be alone with your own mortality. You have to forget what the outside world thinks of you. You have to push aside the trashy notions of our culture. You have to remember mountains and rivers and the motions of planets. You have to remember snow and streams and your life in the womb. You have to bend down to your own unimaginable curiosity, to the dazzling impossibility of being here, in this form, on this earth, with this day before you to be lived. You have to grow up.
There is always a lot of free-floating anxiety in any psyche and it will latch onto anything it can. Menopause has always been fertile ground for anxiety. Don’t give in to this syndrome.
Take estrogen if you can. Or don’t take it. Exercise at least an hour a day. Hard, intense exercise, long walks or bicycle rides, aerobics or dance classes. Make exercise a priority. Use it as a shield against fear. Eat intelligently, drink bottled water, take vitamins, sit in meditation, listen to music, turn off the television set. Don’t be afraid. The best is yet to come. These are the high passes where the air gets thin and the light becomes translucent.
“Keep warm, old man,” the boy said. “Remember we are in September.”
“The month when the big fish come,” the old man said. “Anyone can be a fisherman in May.”*
* Earnest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Blessings
NOW THAT I AM GROWING OLD I AM BEGINNING TO HAVE WONderful dreams. I dream that I am doing things I can no longer do in my waking life, making love to interesting and exotic men, playing highly competitive tennis with exciting opponents on perfectly groomed courts in perfect weather, ice skating down long halls in my mansion. In the ice skating dream a handsome man and I are trying out the halls for the young people and the children. We are deciding how slick the halls should be and how thick to make the ice. This is all easily controlled by a thermostat on a wall in the mansion kitchen. There are ten or twelve young people in the house, ranging from ten or twelve years old to seventeen. In another room are toddlers with their nurses and their mothers but they are playing other games and we are not sure we will let them on the ice. “Hey,” I tell the man. “I’m not making this ice too slick. After all, if they hurt themselves we’re the ones who will have to take care of them.”
“Don’t want to spoil the fun,” he agrees and smiles. He’s falling in love with me, I know. With my intelligence and good humor, with my ability to organize and make decisions. It’s my mansion, after all. The rest of them are here at my invitation.
My dreams are like television situation comedies. They are arranged into scenes which move and blend into other scenes. Old characters remain and new ones are introduced. In the love scenes the men who loved me are my old husbands but decked out in new personalities. One night my lover was a beautiful American Indian with a modern personality. There is no shame or hurry in these love scenes. We talk it over with intelligence. We discuss possible problems that might arise, harm to other people or ourselves, how much emotional weight we should invest in the matter. Sometimes we proceed, sometimes we decide it’s not worth the risk. No one gets hurt in any way. It is passionate but not very. It is like a business transaction or a decision made in a psychoanalyst’s office.
The decisions made in these intelligent, lifelike dreams are all based on what is best for the young people who are in our care. In the dreams I am the alpha female, there are one or two alpha males helping me and we have young children in our care. There seems to hang over the dreams a sense of impending disaster which we constantly monitor. We do not tell the young people about it. It is as if we know there is a hurricane or storm coming and we keep the young near us without letting them be aware of the danger. We are not worried about this approaching storm but neither do we forget it.
I think this is the heaven men have dreamed of. A quiet world with work to do for beautiful young people who look at you with trusting eyes. No matter what I am doing in the dreams, playing tennis, ice skating, making love, I think of myself as a guardian, as someone who is the teacher.
Here’s where the heavenly part comes in. I know I am competent to care for these children. I have no doubt that I will be able to keep them safe. The men who help me are intelligent and thoughtful. There is no way we will make the ice too slick or deep. There is no way the approaching storm will batter down the walls of the fortress we are minding. We go for long walks into the grounds and woods outside the mansion. We tuck the children into safe beds. I patrol the halls while I’m sleeping. I can wake up early if I like or I can go on sleeping.
If this is old age then I adore being sixty-four years old and believe sixty-five is going to be even better. Perhaps then I’ll dream of Medicare and Social Security. Getting checks in the mail from the federal government. Intelligent, good-looking men will call me up and tell me not to send any more money to the I.R.S. “Time to cash in now,” the agent will say. “Thank you, office
r,” I will answer. I’ll get into my convertible and drive off with my good-looking companion. We’ll pop open a can of Ensure and drive off into a sunset.
When I Worry I Run As Fast As I Can
THE GREATEST LESSON I EVER LEARNED WAS TAUGHT TO ME every day as a child but didn’t sink in until I was in my early thirties. My father had been a professional baseball player until I was born and he was forced to settle down and make a living as a contractor and an engineer.
Every day of my life as a child I was being taught to play sports. I was an afterthought in these lessons to some extent because my father had more luck teaching sports to my brothers. My brothers worshipped him and would dare anything and practice endlessly in order to please him. It took more coaching to get me to strap roller skates onto my feet and agree to fall off two more times before I got the feel and learned to love speed. But I could not bear to be left out so if it was daylight and we weren’t in school we were outside learning to pit our bodies against baseball, basketball, roller skating, scooters, stilts, push-up bars, football, ice skating, rope climbing, tree climbing, camping, hunting, bow and arrow practice, and, most importantly to my father, bicycle riding and horseback riding. I didn’t last long in the hunting department. They quit taking me on those expeditions after I shot at a bird when I was behind them early one morning.
I also remember races, running as hard as I could across pastures and down broken sidewalks. When I was in grade school and junior high I swam on swimming teams until I became so saturated with chlorine my red hair would turn greenish blond. In the ninth grade I gave up many of my sports activities for cheerleading, which was not very good exercise in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties.
The thing I longed to do that was not available to girls back then was be on a track team. Part of my mind was relieved not to have to jump over hurdles. I am not very tall and the times I tried hurdle jumping were not successful. So I left track events to my brothers and became less and less athletic as my high school years went by. I was a great reader and read four or five books a week, besides my schoolwork. This worried my father greatly. He was always yelling at my mother, “Get that girl out into the sunshine. Don’t let her sit up there all day reading a book.”
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