Falling Apart in One Piece

by Stacy Morrison

  But sometimes I would instead drop directly into a raging river of anxiety: How was I going to carry the mortgage on my own for the year and a half until we could sell the house without a tax penalty? Where would Zack and I be able to afford to live next? How was I ever going to share custody of my baby and let him go away and sleep somewhere other than his home? But how could I deny him his father? These questions were so impossibly large, I could barely see them whole.

  Amid all this roiling, I would occasionally catch myself living a moment of normalcy and I’d panic, chastising myself for dropping my guard. Who are you to be walking down the street enjoying the sunlight? Your marriage is over! Who do you think you are, daring to lose yourself in a book for twenty minutes before bedtime? Your husband is leaving you! Why are you running on that treadmill? You should be running for your life!

  The temptation to get down on my knees and succumb to the vicious power of what I knew was coming next was immense. The twenty-four-hour vigil probably wouldn’t keep the serious, scary stuff from coming, but because I had missed all the signs that my marriage was unraveling, a relentless, unforgiving focus was my punishment. I had to get hard, close off, get strong. This attitude helped me be removed from it all, so I could handle the weight of everything that threatened to push me underwater.

  Take a deep breath. Slide the shoji screen shut. Hear the calming message in the “shhhhhhp” sound as you gently push aside the thoughts that are too big to be looked at right now. Step back into the small and simple order of what must be done today, and do not stray.

  A friend of mine had seen her own marriage draw close to the precipice just a year or so earlier. It was awful to hear about the confusion and the threats and anger and acrimony and sheer nastiness that her husband was doling out. Yet she was still going to work, still being a mom to her two kids, spending weekend days together as a family with her husband, exploring Chinatown, going to beaches, whatever. I remember when, at one dinner, she casually made reference to “when we were fooling around this weekend.” My fork stopped midair.

  “You mean you guys are still having sex?”

  She looked at me levelly. “Yeah.”

  “How can you do that, the way he’s been treating you?”

  She shrugged. “You just do.”

  I said, “Gosh, you want to?” I had been struggling for years with not wanting to have sex with Chris. I’d chalked up my ambivalence to four or five different things—health issues, stress, nothing having anything to do with our relationship.

  “Yeah,” she said. And she shrugged again, as if to say, “Of course.”

  At that time, I had the huge luxury of hating her husband full force on her behalf. But now that I was myself living this life of In Between, I began to understand that she too had been drawing the shoji screens open and closed, doing the intricate dance of protecting herself and trying to stay connected, daring to stay open, in the hope it would all work out. (And you know what? It did.) I was floored, months later, by the depth of her bravery. And it wasn’t too late for me to be inspired by it.

  The distance between my brain and my mouth is very, very short. If I’m having a feeling or a new experience or a thought, any kind, really, then you are having it, too—whichever “you” is in the room with me at the time. When I was pregnant and working at Marie Claire, I would amble down the hall every day to declaim for the articles department about how creepy and fascinating it was to be pregnant, all the ways in which a woman’s body prepares her mentally for the work that lies ahead in being the mother of a newborn: the craving for a midday nap; the nights lying awake in your bed, hands on your belly, wondering just why you are up at this hour; the way that you lose control over what you do and don’t eat because the body’s in charge, reminding you that you (and your will and whatever big ideas you had about what you were going to accomplish today) are damn secondary to what’s happening inside. My coworkers teased me for being a walking science experiment and an oral report wrapped up into one, but I couldn’t help myself: I was so moved by the way everything made sense in some grand, life-writ-large way.

  And making sense of it all—life, who we are as a culture, why Lost is so popular, my abiding emotional connection to Cheetos—is really what all the talking is about, anyway, even if it sounds like a running monologue on my life. This habit is at the core of how I do my work as a magazine editor, focusing the magazine’s vision and sharing it with the team. When I helped lead the launch of TimeOut New York, there were thirty-eight people, more than a dozen sections, and about a hundred pages for me to manage in closing the issue every week. That’s a lot of talking, cajoling, prodding. And there were definitely days I was totally overwhelmed. One of the funniest wiseguys on staff would catch me on the days I was on a slow-burn silent freakout about some looming crisis or another and say, “I get worried when you’re quiet. Means something no good is going down.”

  Yeah, something no good was going down in my life now, all right. I was being quiet, even with myself; the constant chatter in my head had been replaced with a heavy silence, a protective baffle between me and all I was not yet ready to face. It didn’t help that I was at the freelance job, with no longtime friends and colleagues to aid me in puzzling through the riddle of my messed-up life. I spent a lot of time with Krissy, a savvy, funny assistant on the staff who’d been assigned to help me with the huge project I was managing, and we spent hours poring through research together, or through stacks of back issues. She had a crazy love for babies, and so she always asked me for the latest story about what Zack was up to; he was just nine months old, and so there was plenty of cuteness to share. But one day, talking about how sweet and funny Zack was just bumped into the part of me that was so sad and disbelieving that Chris was willing to walk away from all that. I blurted out to Krissy what was going on, instantly wishing I could take it back.

  Oh, great. I had a breach in my nice, solid wall of denial. Now I was leaking.

  A day or so later, I gathered the strength to tell a friend what was happening. I closed the door to my office and sat down at my temporary desk at my temporary job, my sense of displacement in my life utterly complete. I picked up the phone and dialed my longtime friend Mary Rose, whom I’d worked with at three different magazines through the years.

  “Did you hear anything about the job?” she asked right away.

  Mary Rose was my confidante (and confidence-builder) in my efforts to get the editor-in-chief job at Redbook. We’d first met as assistants at Mirabella more than a decade earlier. She’s the person I’ve relied on in every job transition I’ve made. She’s the one I called in tears when I was sure that the proposal I was writing to land the Redbook job (a proposal that at one point I’d believed had been filled with really good ideas) had turned to total crap in my mind in the final stretch. She’s the one who reminded me that all my proposals turn to dust, or worse, in my mind just before I hand them in, and that, in the end, I almost always get the job.

  I told her I wasn’t calling about Redbook. I lowered my voice and told her that Chris had told me he wanted to leave me. I whispered not so much because I was afraid someone in the surrounding offices would hear me, but more because I still didn’t want to know it myself.

  “I’m so scared,” I said. And then instantly regretted saying it. Telling her what was happening was reporting on an event. Telling her how I was feeling meant it was really happening to me. Saying it made the fear real.

  She just said, “Oh, Stace, I’m sorry.” And then she sat there on the phone with me for a minute, silent, while I breathed in the pain of letting it all be real for the first time, tears rolling down my face.

  In our many conversations about Redbook, Mary Rose and I had kept circling back to the point that what we craved most was honesty and truth-telling from other women about the joys and challenges of grown-up, mom-and-wife life, along with all the good tips and info about how to get stuff done that was already in the magazine. She and I had talked about
the power that comes from knowing that there are other imperfect women just like you—women who didn’t want to have sex with their husbands or had yelled at their kids or had ordered a pizza for dinner for the second time in a week or didn’t manage to make the laundry’s whites whiter (or didn’t even care that they were supposed to want to make the laundry’s whites whiter). There’s strength and comfort in being able to admit your small daily failures and then move on. I wanted to steer women away from the reflexive guilt that comes along with being a wife/mom/friend and instead help them focus on what living their lives feels like: Do you like your life? Do you love it? Are you taking care of yourself? Or are you running like a hamster in a wheel and forgetting to put you on that list of things to do?

  I wanted to encourage women to dare to become the woman they were meant to be, even as their new roles and responsibilities put so many demands on their time. But I thought I was meant to be a woman who was married, with a child—children!—and a career I loved, and now that was all changing and I was so afraid. How was I going to help other people love their lives if I couldn’t even do that for myself?

  When Mary Rose and I hung up, I dried my cheeks, took a deep breath, patted my red nose with some powder, and tucked all the fear and the dread and the utter, shattering grief somewhere down deep inside. I gathered my folders to go head up a meeting with eleven young magazine editors who thought I had answers, at least for their magazine.

  By the time I got to the conference room, I had set the heartbroken girl aside and was leaning into my saving grace: confidence under pressure. Every time I felt the lick of panic start up in my chest, I reminded myself that I was good at this, that I had always sailed through turmoil with the stoic calm of a ship’s carved figurehead cutting through the stormy seas. I can sort out the noise and instead focus on the Things That Must Be Done First, and Next, and not get lost in the tumult. This trait had always served me well in getting magazines off the ground, in managing the bumpy road of continually changing plans to accommodate the many expected unexpecteds that knock well-laid plans off course. Now I just had to apply it to my life.

  At that time I had no idea how much harder life was going to get, how much more roiling water was headed my way. But it was good practice for the months and years of living on two tracks simultaneously—one where I was broken and flailing, the other where I was in charge and had to come up with the answers—that lay ahead.

  Krissy kept my secret, and so did Mary Rose. And then Eric and Alix, and, soon after, Kim and Melanie and Holly, the handful of friends I told in the following weeks, all people in my day-to-day life whom I felt I couldn’t avoid telling because of the many days my heartbreak was written all over my face. They all inherently understood the unspoken rules of having this piece of information that was my own personal kryptonite: they weren’t allowed to bring up the topic first, because it might be a day I wanted, needed, to pretend my life was fine; they didn’t tell me what they thought—about Chris, about us, about whether we would make it—because at that time I still knew so little about what I thought about these things. They treated me like a normal friend, not like the hospital patient I felt like; they followed my lead and did the dance of denial with me. I know how hard it is to do nothing and say nothing when a friend is hurting; after all, I had failed my own friend in that manner myself when she was struggling with her marriage. Their stepping into the cone of silence with me was inaction of the most loving kind.

  Once I was announced as the editor in chief of Redbook, my life switched into overdrive. Only days after I took the helm, I had to fly down to Washington, D.C., for an exclusive interview with President George Bush and First Lady Laura Bush in the White House, three months before the 2004 presidential election. In September, I was slated to host a big luncheon at Lincoln Center celebrating women’s strength and spirit and their charitable work, and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was to be the keynote speaker. And of course there was the ordinary work of taking over a magazine: deciding where to stick your finger into the engine of a magazine in progress and pause it so you can begin rebuilding it, without bringing the full-forward motion to a screeching halt. (You have four weeks to build an issue, and the printer doesn’t care that you’re the new kid in town.) There’s the work of defining and conveying the new vision to the staff, over and over and over, and showing them exactly how to express it; deciding which new sections to introduce, which old ones to kill; and all while helping a staff of creative people manage their fears about not making the cut to stay on the team.

  I had done most of that before. Thank God I had done it before. But renovating a magazine that is already running is very different from starting one from scratch. Launching a magazine is a little bit like building a shiny new racecar and getting it out on the track as fast as you can: it’s all adrenaline and zoom and spark. Taking over Redbook was like steering the QE2: fast changes were more likely to be punished than rewarded—with longtime readers, say, canceling their subscriptions because they didn’t like the new typefaces. My boss had been quite clear with me during the interview process: “Redbook isn’t broken.” Move slowly, she was saying. Be patient. This is a big magazine, with ten million customers. Learn about your audience before you wow them with your own big ideas about who they are.

  At a launch the trick is to get people’s attention and get them to buy into the franchise. At Redbook, Job One was not to scare away the women who were already reading the magazine. Slow was a new speed for me.

  I went home from my first day at work—so much to learn, so many people to meet—with a stack of manuscripts and story lineups and budgets. Chris disappeared into his office after dinner, as he did most nights, and after I put Zack to bed, I started reviewing all the paperwork I’d lugged home. I was essentially trying to stuff as much of the magazine into my head in a single night as possible; the first few weeks at the helm of a magazine are like trying to see every tree on a mountain just after you’ve stepped onto a hiking trail. A heavy rain had started earlier in the evening, and the way it cloaked the house in its muffle helped my concentration. But then I heard a sound that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up: I heard water running freely, somewhere in my house.

  I stood up, took the three steps to the basement door and yanked it open, and the sound rushed up the stairs to greet me. I bent over, craning my neck to look down into the basement. Water was pooling at the bottom of the stairs. My heart jumped in my chest; I kicked off my flip-flops and ran downstairs. Dirty water was pouring in from under the basement door that led to a stairway up to the street, and it was burbling up out of the drain in the middle of the floor. I started screaming for Chris as I pulled boxes and toys off the floor, putting them up on shelves. The water was almost covering my feet by the time Chris ran downstairs, and it wasn’t slowing down. The sump pump in the corner was firing, but there was no way it would be able to keep up with the gallons that were gushing in. After fifteen futile minutes splashing around in the basement trying to decide what to do, I realized we needed a Shop-Vac to suction the water out. I hopped in the car and raced to Lowe’s, straining to see through the driving rain. When I got home, it took almost five hours for the two of us to suction up the water, with a hose snaking up the stairs and out the door and draining into the backyard. And then we had to clean up the leaves and the dirt and the garbage that had come into the house: the water was backflow from the city storm sewer system. When we bought the house, the basement walls and floor had been painted a cheery, bright chartreuse, which had made the basement seem like the perfect playroom for Zack. But the flood created fetid boils in the floor’s paint, the ancient, stained linoleum floor underneath showing through in patches, the fine silt of sewer dirt settling into the ruined surface. Chris and I mopped once, mopped twice, then gave up on the project for the night and headed upstairs, exhausted and dripping wet. We plunked down on the sofa, not believing what had just happened, and somehow we ended up in an embrace. I stil
l remember the heated “survival” sex we shared that night, clinging to each other on the sofa, united in our battle against the elements. The strength of our physical connection in that moment gave me false hope about where we were headed.

  The storm had been the aftershock of a hurricane that had battered the Caribbean and Florida coasts. Unfortunately for us, the forecast for that fall promised the worst hurricane rains in the Northeast in years. My life was leaking, I was leaking, and now so was my house.

  A little over a week after I’d started at Redbook, I boarded a shuttle headed for Washington, D.C., on a hot, humid August day, for my one-on-one interview with President Bush. It didn’t occur to me until I’d landed in Washington that I should have brought someone from the magazine with me; for an interview of this importance, an editor in chief would usually surround herself with a small entourage: someone to take notes while she does the interview; someone to be in charge of meeting everyone in the room, collecting and handing out business cards; the group all there together to fully embody the strength and power of the magazine and the millions of women we represent. It was a strange oversight on my part (and I’m sure it was truly confusing to all my new employees I’d left back in the office, especially Janet, the executive editor of the magazine and the woman who had moved mountains to secure the exclusive interview), but I didn’t spend any time dwelling on my error. I just approached the first of three security gates, pulled out my credentials, and began the process of getting admitted to the White House.

  This was the first time in my career I was running a magazine that didn’t have a solely liberal perspective, and I wanted to honor my readers’ diverse perspectives by coming to this interview with the President with a totally open mind. To prepare for it, I had talked to my older brother and his wife—both big supporters of Bush at the time—for almost three hours, asking them every question I could think of about what being Republican meant to them. I needed to shake the Democrat out of me enough that I could emotionally connect to their point of view. My sister-in-law Melissa, frustrated that she and I saw the world so differently, tired of the conversation after an hour, but my brother Gregg was able to lead me to the place where I could totally see and feel what President Bush represented for him. He said, “You know, Stacy, at the end of the day I live in a different world than you do, and that’s the way I like it.” Got it: he wanted his world to be him and his family and his farm and his decisions and he wanted to be left alone. As for me, I loved living in a complex, incomprehensible world. Through his eyes, I could see why maybe that wasn’t so appealing, and so I took that perspective and tucked it in my pocket when I went to Washington, D.C.