by Jo Piazza
Dutch women are fierce, independent, and ambitious. They just use that ambition to craft a life rather than a career path. That did seem like a feminist choice to me.
There’s so much talk about women trying to have it all. That “all” is ambiguous and ever shifting. It can include the perfect marriage, a successful and fulfilling career, a happy family, and a healthy mind and body to boot. It often includes children but doesn’t have to.
There’s less talk about how the hell to do it, how to juggle everything, and what trying to have it all can do to a marriage.
I had no idea what I was going to do next. It wouldn’t be easy for our family to live on one salary; in fact, it would be nearly impossible. Plus, I didn’t want to define myself as a wife. I love working. It’s not that I wanted to check out of the workforce. I just wanted to reset. And if the time ever came, I wanted Nick to have that option too. The only thing I did know is that I didn’t want my next job to dictate my life or my marriage. I’d said in Denmark that Nick and I had to stop existing like two business travelers who happened to wind up in the same place once in a while. I wanted a career that I loved without killing myself and my relationship to have it. There had to be a way to achieve something closer to the reality of a work/life balance.
“It’s not your job to make me happy,” I said to myself as much as to Nick as I picked at a plate of frites at a café along one of the canals. “At the most, it should be a pleasurable hobby, like fantasy football or orienteering.”
Nick nodded in agreement. “You’re right. Do you know what orienteering is?”
“No. But that isn’t the point. I think it involves a compass and birds. Anyway, it is my job to make myself happy. I’m just trying to figure out what that means right now.”
I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.
—LAURA INGALLS WILDER
Boondi, a petite and shriveled woman of indeterminate age with leathery skin the color of a ripe coconut, held both of my hands inside her tiny wrinkled ones.
“When my husband died, he said to me, ‘Bye-bye. I am going. But I will come back again for you,’ ” Boondi said, grinning through lips stained orange from the betel nuts she chewed on all day long. She said “bye-bye” in a high-pitched singsong. Boondi married her husband when she was fifteen. When I met her she thought she was ninety, but she wasn’t sure.
We stood on a muddy road in Boondi’s rural village in northeastern India on the banks of the Brahmaputra River, and she wasn’t going to let go of my hand. The touch was warm and comforting. The only thing that made me nervous was that the boat I’d taken to reach this remote location would float away in less than twenty minutes. I needed that boat to eventually find my way back to New Delhi. I’d been on my way back to the boat after sightseeing at the town’s modest temple when Boondi provoked my fascination.
I’d been walking through rain, nudged every few steps by defiant cows crowding the streets, when Boondi’s laugh caught my attention. It was a laugh too large for a such a small person, and it rippled through her belly, which played peekaboo from beneath her dark violet sari. I beckoned my translator to stop walking. Boondi and her two friends, both as old and stooped as she was, immediately wanted to take a selfie with me on my phone. Everyone in India wants to take selfies with white strangers. I obliged her and promised to send the picture through Facebook to her great-grandson. Boondi was very proud of her great-grandson and his prowess on social media. She asked if I was married, if I had children, if I wanted to have children, and if my husband was in India with me. I nodded yes, no, yes, and no. Then she told me about her own marriage.
Boondi spit the betel nut out of her mouth before continuing. “My husband and I were very happy. I was very happy because my husband loved me. He loved me and we had enough food and we had many children. We never had a bad moment. If you have a husband who loves you, then you need to be thankful for that. You need thanks to make a marriage work.” Boondi was saying this through a double translation from the local Assamese language into Hindi and then into English, but I was pretty sure I was getting it right. When she smiled at me I noticed most of her teeth were missing and her gums shimmered, soft and pink like a baby’s. Wrinkles carved canyons in a face burnished with the wisdom and heartache of age.
“When he came home every day, I made sure I fed him and I gave him massage when he was sore and tired. Do you massage your husband?”
I don’t. I almost always ask Nick to rub my head or my shoulders when I’m cranky and tired. He knows exactly where to dig his thumb in between my shoulder blades to release all the tension from hunching over my laptop for hours at a time.
I made a mental note to learn how to give better shoulder massages.
“How’d you meet your husband?” I asked her.
She batted her eyelashes like it was a silly thing to ask. “My parents talked to his parents and we decided to get married.” It was simple and straightforward. But Boondi was no dummy. She had a great-grandson who was a master of the Internet. Her village had satellite dishes on nearly every roof. She knew Americans could be skeptical about arranged marriages.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “But I did love him very much. True love. The love of a good marriage always comes later, and I don’t care what anyone else says.”
Boondi squeezed my hand with determination. “You are young and strong and healthy. If you have a good husband and he has a good family, you should appreciate it. If you have these things, you must be thankful. To be thankful is most important. To say you are thankful and mean it. Teekay?” she asked. Teekay is the Indian equivalent of “okay” or “understand?” “Teekay,” I responded. Nick and I had plenty of things to make us happy. We had a roof over our heads and food, and we loved each other very much. We should be thankful. We should be happy.
The old woman hugged me, clasping me firmly around my waist, the bottom of her head barely grazing my shoulders. I carefully hugged her back, afraid if I squeezed too tight I’d break her delicate bones.
“My husband and I were so happy!” She looked up at me and her light eyes, the color of the muddy Brahmaputra, sparkled. “You are happy too. I know it.”
Did I need to go all the way to one of the least visited areas of India to understand how important gratitude is for my marriage? It felt kind of silly to travel thousands of miles from home, in cars, trains, planes, and boats, just to realize my life was already pretty goddamned sweet and that I should appreciate it.
It’s not that I didn’t hear about the many virtues of gratitude at home in San Francisco. I did. All the time. So often, in fact, that I was a little over the idea of gratitude. Not actual gratitude, but the unintentional abuse of the word. Sometime in the past ten years everyone in San Francisco started talking like a yoga instructor. You can hardly show up at a dinner party without the host heaving a belly sigh and announcing, “I want to begin this meal with gratitude.” The checkout clerk who sold us our organic vegetables smiled with gratitude for the radishes we’d just purchased from him and my dog walker once left me a list of five reasons he was grateful for Lady Piazza. San Francisco is also a city where people will tell you without irony that sauerkraut changed their lives, so I don’t take any of it too seriously, and after all, their hearts are in the right place. But I still wanted something that felt more genuine: showing gratitude instead of peacocking about it.
Researchers tell us gratitude—the practice of showing appreciation, saying thanks, sending a text that says, “What you did was amaze-balls”—is an integral part of any healthy relationship, especially as couples waltz further and further away from the honeymoon stage and into the slog of real life. Scientists at the University of Georgia once surveyed 468 married people and found that gratitude could consistently predict how happy someone was in their marriage. “Even if a couple is experiencing distress and difficulty in other areas, gratitude in the relationship can help promo
te positive marital outcomes,” said the study’s lead author, Allen Barton, a postdoctoral research associate at UGA’s Center for Family Research. In another study Dr. Amie Gordon, a psychologist from UC Berkeley, asked fifty committed couples to fill out appreciation journals. The couples who were successful in conveying ongoing appreciation were less likely to break up in the next nine months. The researchers reported that a nourishing cycle of encouragement helped to develop more trust and respect.
Dr. Gordon found the “highly appreciative” couples were ones who openly expressed their gratitude, listened to each other actively, and touched each other appreciatively. She also found that having gratitude in a relationship isn’t a static thing. It’s not something you simply have or don’t have. Gratitude is a skill that can be learned and cultivated.
Peter Pearson of the Couples Institute in Palo Alto gives his patients a thirty-day task called the Daily Double. It’s simple. Each person has to say something that makes their partner feel good or improves their partner’s life two times a day. These can be little things like “Honey, I appreciate when you take out the garbage” or “You look sexy in that gray T-shirt.” They can be expressions of thanks or admiration, and they can come in person or over e-mail, Skype, or text. I asked if a thumbs-up kissy-face emoji could suffice. Pearson reluctantly said yes.
After nearly a year of marriage, I still loved most things about Nick Aster, but as we now struggled to make ends meet and shuttled among endless doctor’s appointments, it was more and more difficult to keep that in perspective, to feel thankful on a daily basis.
The most recent doctor’s appointment before I left for India had been particularly challenging. Nick and I met with a neurologist to figure out whether the muscular dystrophy had already started degrading my muscles.
“Can you whistle?” the doctor asked me.
“No. But I’ve never been able to whistle,” I replied.
“Can you shut your eyes really tight and then open them quickly?”
“Yes.”
Determining the severity of my disease required a battery of tests that mostly involved making strange faces.
“Because this kind of muscular dystrophy affects the facial muscles, people often have a hard time smiling, and so people often think they’re unhappy,” the neurologist said. “Do people often think you are unhappy?”
“So you’re saying a symptom of this kind of muscular dystrophy is resting bitch face?” I asked. My posture collapsed, causing me to slump lower into my chair. Weren’t strangers on the street always telling me to smile more? I should have known all along that something was gravely wrong with me, but I bit the inside of my cheek to keep my sarcasm at bay. Nick could tell I was agitated and cast me a look that said, Bear with the guy and we’ll get ice cream after this. I shot him a look back that said, We’re gonna need a big spoon.
“How’s your arm strength?” the doctor asked.
“I can do a handstand. I did one in yoga yesterday, for about forty-five seconds. Okay, maybe thirty seconds,” I volunteered eagerly, wanting to provide pieces of information that would make him jump up and exclaim, “By God, how could we all have been so wrong? If this woman can do a handstand for thirty seconds, then there’s no way she has muscular dystrophy!”
The doctor scribbled silently on a notepad.
“But I suck at push-ups,” I added. “Is that a symptom?” The night before I had dug out a twenty-pound weight from behind piles of boxes in our basement, gripped it with both hands, and lifted it over my head for twenty repetitions, grunting with the intensity of an MMA fighter. I made a mental pact with myself to do this every day. The day when I couldn’t do it anymore, when lifting twenty pounds over my head twenty times was too much, would be the day I started to worry.
In the doctor’s office Nick squeezed my leg, causing me to look down at my pants. Nick called them my backpacker pants. They were a thin cotton with intricate blue and white elephants on them, the kind that travelers pick up from run-down stalls in Thailand and India. We’d bought these in Africa, but they were probably made in China. Why had I decided to wear something that looked like pajamas to this important appointment? All of a sudden I felt very small and childish. I pinched my thigh above the knee…hard, my nails curling into my skin. I needed to feel it.
“I think that’s a symptom of being a thirty-five-year-old woman who hates push-ups,” Nick whispered to try to make me smile, but I could see the concern causing the skin around his eyes to wrinkle.
I pretended not to hear him. “Is there any concrete way of telling when the real symptoms will start affecting me?” I asked, needing tangible answers. “Will I be able to walk? Will I need a wheelchair? When will that happen? Will there be a lot of pain? Is there any way of knowing anything?”
“No,” the doctor said. He had a strange look on his face. No one had ever looked at me this way before. The look was pity.
Frustrated with his inability to tell me anything definite about my disease, I clammed up.
“You’re showing very early symptoms, but the best we can tell you is that you will experience most of the effects later in life, the way your dad did. And you’re healthy now,” the doctor continued. “We don’t know anything else.”
“What about our kids?”
“They have a fifty-fifty chance of getting it too. You can’t screen for it in an embryo, so IVF is out of the question. You can test a fetus, but not until about twelve weeks, and then you have the option of terminating the pregnancy.” The words “terminating the pregnancy” hung in the air like a violet storm cloud ready to burst any second.
On the New Year’s Eve after we were married, Nick and I attended a grown-up dinner party, the kind where kids run loose, and parents get drunk before 8:00 p.m. We celebrated the New Year when the clock hit midnight in Canada’s Maritime provinces so everyone could be in bed before ten. Each person went around the table and made predictions for the year ahead. Some were funny (Justin Bieber will end up in prison) and some were serious (Karen will quit her job to pursue her passions). Nick and I both threw out our own predictions that seemed unthinkable at the time (Trump will be president; we’ll get a goat), but when we went to sleep that night, he whispered in my ear, “This year we’ll have a baby. I just didn’t want to say it in front of everyone else.”
Something changed in me once we got married. Friends of my mom’s and my really old aunts called it “baby fever,” but it was more subtle than that. For most of my adult life children had been something I tried to avoid—both making them and spending time with them. But things were different now. I didn’t hate crying babies on planes anymore. I wanted to stroke them and comfort them and cuddle them and smell their baby heads and put their baby feet in my mouth. I felt an intense heightening of all of my senses around them. I’d never pictured my own children until I met Nick, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I began conjuring a little girl with Nick’s curiosity and mischievous eyes chasing Lady Piazza around our backyard with her face covered in dirt. She’d climb trees and sing loudly but off-key. I’d read her all of the original Nancy Drews and everything Laura Ingalls Wilder ever wrote. But recently the image of that little girl had grown blurry. I had a dream where she waved to me, but I didn’t know if she was saying hello or good-bye.
Nick did everything he could to cheer me up, but I was exhausted by the uncertainty, and it made me snappy and irritable. I knew I should be grateful for the wonderful things I did have in my life—I was currently healthy and I had a wonderful husband—but I couldn’t get there. Some days it was hard to muster even a thumbs-up kissy-face emoji.
Later that week I hunted for my passport in a shoe box shoved under Nick’s side of the bed and came across a pair of small blue notebooks embossed with curly gold lettering: Reasons I Want to Marry You. I’d bought them at the BHLDN wedding dress shop when I picked up my wedding dress the previous summer. In the months before we got married, Nick and I wrote in those books every single n
ight, no matter where we were in the world. Both of the books were completely filled, front and back.
I grabbed a bar of dark chocolate and poured a generous glass of red wine as I cracked open the pages.
MINE:
Because you make me believe we can do anything if we are together.
Because you cook me burritos when I am busy with work.
Because you are trying so hard to love Lady Piazza even though she is a bad dog.
Because staying home and making dinner with you is better than doing anything with anyone else.
Because you invent silly songs to make me laugh.
Because I am not afraid to cry in front of you.
By now I was in tears.
NICK’S:
Because we accomplish incredible things together.
Because you have a cute little belly button.
Because you took a bite out of the cheese and put it back in the fridge when you were drunk.
Because you humor me when I speak Spanish at the taqueria.
Because you snort when you laugh.
Because you have seemingly boundless energy.
Because you open my mind to new things.
Because even in the nitty gritty of life you calm me.
Because the little details of life are little and together we are learning to figure them out.