Martha and I are also in survival mode as a couple, sailors on a capsizing ship. The only way for us to stay afloat is to focus on simple daily tasks. Laundry, changing the Diaper Genie, grocery shopping, burping the baby, cleaning the house, bathing the children and ourselves, feeding the children and ourselves, and always, rocking the baby, rocking the baby, rocking the baby. We are in baby jail.
It takes four months for Ruthie to sleep through the night, just as it did with Elijah, and another eight for the colic to fully disappear. What finally emerges is a lovely little girl who enjoys painting and princesses and farts. Over time, as the kids get more independent, the stress of parenting eases up a bit. We are still in baby jail, but we have been moved to a better cell block. Over time, our jailers give us more and more freedom. Now that the kids are older, I would say we are in a minimum-security facility; we are even allowed the occasional conjugal visit. From time to time, Martha and I talk about having a third kid, the way old prisoners talk about taking down one last score. But we’re all talk. Our marriage wouldn’t survive another baby. Having barely survived two colicky babies, Martha and I are scared straight.
CHAPTER 12
a little hard work
During my parents’ breakup, I remember both of them emphasizing several times that their divorce was not my fault. It was a funny thing to hear because until they started reassuring me that it wasn’t my fault, it had never occurred to me that it was. Their assurances had the opposite effect than what they intended. I mean, if you tell somebody enough times that something isn’t their fault, eventually that person will start to think, Maybe this is all my fault.
But, of course, my parents’ divorce had nothing to do with me. It was my brother’s fault. (That’s a joke.) No, the blame lay entirely with them, two people who never should have married in the first place. Mom and Dad met as students at Indiana University. Even though both were city kids—Mom from Chicago, Dad from Brooklyn—they had each led sheltered lives to that point. Both were quiet, studious Jewish kids—“goody-goodies,” as my mother says. Neither had much experience dating, and I suspect they convinced themselves they were in love because it seemed like the logical progression of their relationship. I imagine their early love to be sweet and trusting and naïve, the kind of love that sees possibilities beyond what a clear-headed assessment of their compatibility would merit—such as the facts that my father was a borderline Asperger’s case, and my mother a closeted lesbian.
They married in a windowless Chicago hotel ballroom in 1968. In the few photos I have from the wedding, the women wear beehive hairdos and cat-eye glasses. The men are doughy, and each one looks as if he is one helping of beef stroganoff away from a massive coronary. The entire affair seems as much like a bowling league awards night as a wedding. It is a smoky world of clumpy dresses and trousers cinched too tight.
I wish I could say Mom and Dad look happy in those photos, but to my eye they do not. They look young and nervous. Yes, they are smiling as they cut the cake, smiling as they pose with their families, my mother smiles as she walks down the aisle in her slim white wedding dress. But their smiles have a starchy determination, something stuck in place, like hair spray. Every caption of their wedding photos could read, “What the hell are we doing?”
I understand the feeling.
After a lot of yelling and trial separations, they broke up for good eight years and three kids later. It was an acidic, drawn-out divorce followed by years of bitterness that still hadn’t healed by the time my dad died. After it was finalized, I never heard my mom say anything nice about my father, and I never heard him speak of her at all.
Nearly everybody I knew came from a divorced household. Among my friends, having divorced parents was as common as having an Atari 2600. Those parents who remained married didn’t seem particularly happy. The one exception I can remember is my friend Kip, whose folks appeared to still be in love after three kids and fifteen years together. But Kip’s parents were stoners who ran a homemade chocolate business out of their kitchen. Also, I think they might have been swingers.
Even though I didn’t have a lot of firsthand evidence around me to suggest that marriage was worthwhile, in my heart of hearts I am a traditional man. I like traditional things: domesticity, a wood-burning fireplace, good old-fashioned masturbation. Marriage fits right onto that list. The idea of marriage is so appealing. You pick somebody out, say your “I do’s,” build a family, then sit on the couch and wait for each other to die. Perfect.
Back when we all died young and beautiful (or at least young), marriage was easier to sustain. By the time you’d grown tired of each other, one of you probably had tuberculosis anyway. Now that we’re all living so long, the idea of looking at the same person every day for fifty or sixty years might be more than our species is equipped to handle.
“You again?”
“Yes, me. Me for the rest of your medically extended life.”
The other night after the kids went to bed, Martha and I are watching TV in the living room when she turns to me and says, “I’m not sure I believe people should stay married forever. I think maybe twelve or fifteen years is enough. You should get married for a little while, then at a certain point, move on.”
We have been married thirteen years, exactly within the time frame Martha has just defined as the point when people should split up.
“Are you saying you want to get divorced?” I ask her.
“Not right now,” she says, turning back to the TV.
This is not our first conversation about divorce. We talk about it all the time. Martha and I discuss divorce the way other couples discuss vacation plans: I hear divorce is beautiful this time of year. In our case, divorce isn’t imminent. It’s just one of those things we daydream about. One of the unexpected joys of being married is the hours of fantasizing it allows me to do about how much better my life would be if I got divorced.
Bachelorhood would be an endless Frank Sinatra song. Booze and dames, dames and booze (or, if not booze, then at least well-carbonated soft drinks). I’d spend my nights hitting on stewardesses at swanky nightspots like Applebee’s. It would be grand.
“Buy you a drink?” I’d say to whichever foxy lady caught my eye. Before she could respond, I’d call to the bartender: “Al! A martini for the lady. And another Diet Pepsi for me.”
Al would bring the cocktails. There’d be a little flirty contretemps.
“I ought to throw this in your face,” she might say.
“Good. I could use a little cooling off.”
We’d toss back our cocktails. We’d rumba. Then we’d have sex. My divorce fantasies always end with me banging a stewardess. Or a nurse. Or anybody with a vagina.
The frequency and intensity of these fantasies waxes and wanes along with my marriage’s peculiar biorhythms. Contentedness, remorse. Contentedness, remorse. We go through these cycles over and over again, sometimes within the same day. Sometimes within the same hour.
During the bad periods, we fight about everything: housework, child care, my work, my lack of appreciation for her, her lack of appreciation for me, my irresponsibility, her anxiety, her opinion that I’m not home enough and when I’m home I’m not doing enough, my opinion that she doesn’t understand that when I leave it’s because I have to make money for us and it’s not fair that she should get mad at me for going to my “job,” which I put in quotes because she puts the word in quotes with her tone, as if the fact that I enjoy what I do for a living disqualifies it from being actual work because she is not experiencing boundless joy in her current position of “wife and mother.”
Sometimes weeks drizzle by like this, weeks where a persistent, dissolute pitter-patter beats down on our heads, each moment another drop in the Chinese water torture that is our marriage. These are weeks when we barely speak and do not touch and any attempt at reconciliation ends up causing more fights. It is during these periods when those distant nights at Applebee’s loom just a little closer. It’s not
even that we’re mad at each other exactly. It’s that we just have to see each other’s fucking faces every fucking day.
If we ever do split up, the end of our marriage will most likely be less about each other and more about the simple fact that marriage sometimes sucks. Nobody told me this before I got married. People hinted at it, but the closest anybody got to actually spelling out how difficult marriage can be were the ones who euphemistically warned me that “marriage is a lot of hard work.”
That’s okay, I thought to myself, I’m not afraid of a little hard work. At the time, my job was writing sketches for a TV show, so I did not have the broadest perspective on what constituted “hard work.” For me, a bad day on the job was when a joke didn’t get a laugh. As far as bad days on the job go, that doesn’t really rate. For some people, a bad day at work is when an oil rig explodes.
A bad day in marriage is when, after a furious argument with your wife over your lack of attention to detail when cleaning the mashed potatoes out of a pot, you attempt to pull the stainless-steel rack of kitchen utensils out of the wall for the purpose of throwing it across the room, but cannot do so because you lack the upper body strength to dislodge the goddamned thing from the drywall screws holding it in place, so instead you pull at it and pull at it without result until you are so embarrassed at your lack of manliness that you scream something unintelligible before storming out of the house and driving your car around in circles for five hours because you feel too angry and ashamed to go home and face the woman to whom you have, bewilderingly, committed your life.
(In the above example, you = me.)
Somebody really should warn potential spouses that marriage is more taxing than the normal definition of “hard work.” Vows about “honoring” and “cherishing” are great, but I would suggest that after all the flowery stuff and the “love is patient and kind” biblical verses, officiants should end wedding ceremonies with the words, “And you know marriage sucks, right?”
“I do.”
That way, at least it’s on record. If wedding vows were phrased that way, maybe fewer people would sign up. It cannot be a coincidence that the word we most often use to describe marriage, institution, is also the word we use for the place we put crazy people.
I’m not saying marriage sucks all the time, not even most of the time. But it sucks enough of the time that people should enter into it with the expectation that there is going to be a fair amount of suckiness involved. The suckiness usually isn’t even anybody’s fault. Both bride and groom enter marriage wishing for happiness and success. Both generally do their best. So why do marriages fail half the time? My theory is that the problem is not with the people, but with the concept itself. Consider the difference between the following two sentences:
“Hey, you wanna hang out?”
“Hey, you wanna hang out forever?”
Martha and I recently had a massive, blowout fight about her insistence on keeping the bedroom clock radio set ten minutes fast.
Her: “Setting the clock like this helps me stay on time!”
Me: “But if you know it’s ten minutes fast, you’re just telling yourself a lie that you already know is a lie! You’re not fooling yourself.”
Her: “It helps me!”
Me: “But when the clock is fast I get confused!”
(I would like to emphasize that one of my arguments to her is “I get confused.”)
Yes, during that fight she told me she hated me. The phrase, “You have lost the right to speak to me for the rest of the weekend” was uttered by one of us. (Her.)
Yes, I responded in the infuriating way I do, with big silent eyes that are meant to say, “You are a crazy person,” the result of which is only to make her crazier.
Yes, our daughter screamed to us in tears from her bedroom, “Stop fighting! Stop fighting!” over and over again.
Yes, we ignored her and continued fighting about the clock radio for another two hours. Martha played the divorce card, as she always does, within the first five minutes of our fight.
“I don’t know why I ever married you!” Martha screamed at me. “We should just get divorced!”
“Call a lawyer!” I screamed back.
No, we did not subsequently laugh about the whole silly fight and then make love.
When we have arguments like that we are so focused on proving our own rightness that neither of us can see any humor in the situation. We do this all the time, this endless cycle of accusation and counteraccusation. Over the years we have piled so many grievances upon each other that sometimes I feel like we are turning into those hoarders on TV who cannot step in any part of their home without fear that their mountainous heaps of junk will collapse upon them.
Some examples of the wrongs over the last decade or so that we have compiled: The time I did not prepare well enough for camping. The time she read my journal without my permission. The time I said I would fertilize the lawn in the fall but waited too long and crabgrass grew in the patchy areas the following spring. The time she could not figure out how to load her CDs onto iTunes and still could not figure it out even after I showed her fifty times, which resulted in a fight about how she never listens and I have no patience. The time she got mad at me for pouting after she asked me to move the outdoor furniture indoors for the winter when I was very busy playing Rock Band 2 on the Wii. All the times I did not see the dog hair on the floor: “How can you not see that?”
“I didn’t see it.”
“You didn’t want to see it,” she says, condemning both my character and my eyesight.
There are only a few options to free ourselves from these self-destructive cycles. The first is that, eventually, one of us will just surrender to the other one. The result would be a lifeless marriage in which one of us just acquiesces to the other one in all matters, a “yes dear” marriage. I couldn’t live with myself if I ever did that, although it would be great if she did.
The second solution, sometimes glittering in its attractiveness, is divorce. But even though I occasionally (often) have lengthy fantasies about life as a single man, I do not want to get divorced. Because I love my wife, yes. But also because I have survived the shrapnel from a divorce and know the pain it causes. The act of blowing up marriages has become so routine in our culture that we don’t even really think about the effects, but I do not want to ever inflict that kind of damage on the kids, Martha, or myself.
Also, divorce is expensive and I value money more than I value happiness. I love money. Which is a terrible thing for a Jew to admit since it just reinforces all the stereotypes. But I can’t help it. Because just as sometimes Russian female basketball teams really are drunks, sometimes Jews love money.
The final option is to enter therapy. She is the one who first suggests it after another one of our more colorful discussions. I have always resisted therapy based on the theory that people should be able to solve their own damn problems. And also on the theory that I don’t want to pay a therapist. But after too many years of bickering with Martha, too many years of being unable to figure out how to quit sequencing through the noisy octaves of our relationship, I come to realize that some problems are beyond my fixing. Even so, I am reluctant to get help.
Because how do you solve yourself?
CHAPTER 13
a perfect date
We find our therapist, Suzy, through a friend who was experiencing similar marital problems as ours. The friend credits Suzy with keeping her marriage intact, which is encouraging because our friend’s marriage really sucks.
This is a few years ago, when the kids are four and two. At the time, Martha and I are suffering through our sentence in baby jail, both exhausted from chasing children, picking up after children, cleaning the perpetually dirty butts of children. Our marriage has become an interminable to-do list of chores. Parenting feels like a job sorting endless amounts of mail at the post office. The only difference is that, when you work at the post office, you go home at the end of the day. Right n
ow, it feels like when I am done with my job at the post office I go to another post office.
I am reluctant to go when she first suggests couples counseling, but after some hemming and hawing I agree to give it a try since we are both suffering so much that I will do anything to alleviate the pain, even if it means talking to my wife.
The other reason I agree to try therapy is that, in my heart, I feel that after listening to the nature of our disagreements, any qualified therapist will come to the conclusion that I am right about pretty much everything. When I lay out my grievances, I am positive any therapist worth her salt will say, “I agree with Michael.”
“But … but …,” Martha will splutter.
“I’m sorry, Martha. But Michael is right. As far as I can tell, he’s always right.”
Our first appointment with Suzy is on a drizzly spring day. We drive the fifteen minutes to her office in silence, watching the rain, keeping time to the windshield wipers. Suzy lives on a wooded property and works out of an old yellow barn beside her house. In addition to serving as her office, the barn is also used as a rehearsal space for local dancers. I worry it will smell like incense and/or feet. There is no waiting room, so we wait in tense silence for her to fetch us from the car.
I play with the radio. Martha asks me to stop playing with the radio. I do not stop. She asks me again to stop playing with the radio. I do not stop. Why does she get to control the radio? We’re both in the car. Why does her right to silence trump my right to listen to music? Hell no, I’m not turning off the radio. And this is why we are going to get divorced.
Suzy emerges from the barn with another client, a woman a little older than us who looks like she’s been crying. Why is she crying? Is she getting divorced? Is this what divorce looks like? I feel compelled to make eye contact with this woman. I’m not sure why. The generous explanation is I want to give her a reassuring smile, a small gift from a stranger. The less generous explanation is that I want to measure her pain against my own, to project myself into her place to see if I could handle whatever suffering she is enduring. The woman climbs into her SUV and drives away without meeting my eyes. Way to leave me hanging, lady.
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