by
Lyz Lenz
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The truth about accepting help is that it requires asking for it and coordinating it and paying for it, emotionally and financially. Financially, I took on extra freelance work to pay for housecleaning because it wasn’t in the budget. Emotionally, I dealt with my husband’s heavy sighs when he’d walk into a professionally cleaned home, and his angry silences that would fill the space between us until I’d explained I’d sold a little article to pay for it. It didn’t come out of the shared checking account. Sometimes my husband would say, “If you want help just ask,” and I would wave my arms around me like someone drowning. “Just look!” I’d say. “This is all a cry for help.” But truthfully, I didn’t want help. I was grateful for it, sure. What I wanted was an equal partner.
As I was working on the book, my husband suggested we have a third child. He brought it up in therapy one day that summer when I was in the middle of research and writing. Maybe I could quit writing for a while? he suggested. Maybe I could just write a nice little novel and write it at night after the kids were in bed. And we could have another kid. Wouldn’t I be less stressed out?
lol
The woman is an editor, was an editor. She laughs and corrects herself. I meet her at a party in Washington, D.C. She’s tall and blond and holds a glass of white wine in her manicured hands. I tell her I’m working on a book about divorce, and her eyes narrow.
“I want one of those,” she tells me in a whisper. “A divorce. I want to leave.”
She’s married to a very wealthy man, she tells me, and all she has to do is take care of the children and read books and go to parties with him looking beautiful.
“I think, actually, it would be a problem for him if I did try to do something more,” she says. She thinks she should feel lucky, but she tells me she lives in a beautiful trap.
“Then you should go,” I tell her.
Someone comes and whisks her away, and I don’t talk to her again until the party is winding down. She finds me to say it was nice to meet me. “Forget what I said about my husband, I didn’t mean it!” she tells me brightly.
I squeeze her hand, and I refuse to forget.
It’s hard to tell the truth about a marriage. We are, most of us, loyal to our loves. Revealing all the hundreds of tiny horrors, the everyday indignities, feels disloyal. I had a friend who was a pastor’s wife who would stop any conversation that devolved into frustrations about husbands by raising her hand for silence and say, “Are you tearing him down or are you building him up?” As if speaking the truth about him refusing to wash the bathtub was worse somehow than him actually refusing to wash the bathtub. Speaking those small betrayals makes them real, makes them problems you have to deal with. Even now, I remember the tiny things I hid with little excuses or jokes. But now I want to tell as much of the truth as I can. I want to be completely honest in a way I could not be if I had stayed. Telling the truth is often a demolition project.
One early summer day, we sat on the deck, fingers greasy from Popeyes, watching our older girls chase our little boys. My husband was working late, and I didn’t tell him we wouldn’t be there when he got home. I told Matthew about my misery and how I wished there was another woman. Something I could point to, some event I could hold on to and say, “This! This! Is why I am allowed to go.” Something that would justify my act of selfishness.
Instead, I was just unhappy. I was so unhappy. I had dreams I was drowning, pulled under a green murky water by his hands.
“Is it enough to break my life apart just to be happy?”
“Yes.” Matthew said this so simply. So clearly. As if it shouldn’t even be a question.
In All of This, Rebecca Woolf writes of her own marriage, which ended when her husband died of cancer, “At the time, I thought I was being brave by sticking it out. By staying together for the kids. But it isn’t brave to sit passively in your misery…. The bravest women I know are not widows. They are divorced.” I’d spent over twelve years asking for someone to give me my happiness. Finally, I stopped asking. I just took it.
This is what people call being selfish. After all, I am a mother, I was a wife. It is my duty to think of others over myself. But what Matthew’s simple answer gave me permission to do was to think about myself. And think how, perhaps, if I was happy, if I did every desperate thing I could to grasp for it, maybe I would show my children that life is not misery, and their happiness belongs to them. That their freedom is worth fighting for.
The last time we had sex was his birthday. We spent the night fighting. And when we finally had sex, I felt empty and shelled out. I was just a body. A flesh bag used for another person’s pleasure. After he was done, I sat on the couch and cried. I wouldn’t do it again. I wouldn’t separate myself from my body just for the enjoyment of someone else.
They wanted me to say they are the exception to the rules. But I don’t know this. I don’t know their hearts or their deeds. I don’t know the socks they leave on the floor or the sex they refuse to give. But more important, I don’t want to be the arbiter of someone’s morality. I think of my father saying about my mother how she was so good, the best one out of the two of them. Better than he deserved. And I think of her brittle goodness in the face of their volatile marriage. I do not want this. I do not want a life so rigid and righteous that it has no room for my own failings and humanity. What I wanted was to be as fully human as these men are. Not to push the stone of moral goodness up a hill day after day.
After the party, she’s wine drunk, and we are sitting on the back porch of her beautiful home. We told her husband we were going for a walk.
“Sure, leave! Don’t worry about cleaning up,” he said brightly. “This is why I pay people, to do all of this. So, sure, walk!”
I am afraid of him. I’m afraid of his forceful sarcasm and his beautiful home. So we do not go for a walk. Instead, we sit on the porch, and she cries. She tells me that she can never leave all this. It’s too much.
He comes out to check on us. “You still writing feminist drivel?” he asks and laughs at his own good humor.
“Yes,” I say. “There is a huge market for it.”
He walks away, and she cries more. I tell her leaving is the hardest part. We sit in silence staring out at her backyard. The pool is covered for the winter, and it looks like a black eye in the middle of the beautiful green lawn.
I once lamented to my friends in a group chat that I missed dating someone because I missed having someone who was forced to try new restaurants with me, or a standing lunch date to keep me, an extroverted writer, from losing my mind when I’ve been working alone too long. My friend pointed out that I didn’t have that when I was married and that I could just ask friends to fulfill this role for me. What you are looking for is companionship, she told me; you can get that from a good friend.
Rebuilding the ties of community is essential for combating loneliness and not just for divorced women, but for everyone. Author and academic Anne Helen Petersen has written extensively about the need for community and how building it requires humility. “It requires bravery, and vulnerability, and intermittent tolerance for people being annoying, and practice. Like, you just have to keep doing it, and doing it, and eventually it just feels like the thing you do, the people you’re near, the community you’re a part of. So many people have lost this skill or never had it modeled for them in the first place—and, depending on your identity, you may occupy spaces that are actively hostile to its development. (White bourgeois America is one of those spaces!)”
Community is a practice. And you have to ask for what you need. And keep asking. And if people do not give it to you, you have to find a way to take it. You do not have to settle for the life you were told you should want. You do not have to settle for good enough if good enough requires you to sacrifice your hopes and dreams. You do not have to be a martyr. You can fight for your happiness through whatever means necessary. It will not always involve breaking your life apart. But if it does, you do not have to be afraid. You can Thelma and Louise yourself right off that cliff.