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Early in our marriage, John had said we should make our life decisions mathematically, with numeric values assigned to each category. His art career and day job both got fives. Mine got threes because my career was more advanced than his and my day job didn’t pay as much as his. When I suggested that we make these decisions together, John didn’t say anything, and the conversation ended.
ack
I was still trying to explain to myself how I’d become this person, this discarded wife, when I’d never even wanted to be a wife in the first place.
I wrote in my notebook, Please let there be a lesson at the end of this.
A husband might be nothing but a bottomless pit of entitlement. You can throw all your love and energy and attention down into it, and the hole will never fill.
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I thought of us walking together, a little bent, bony, stepping carefully, in our very old age, our gnarled hands clasped. His eyes are still a shocking green. Our hair is white. We walk together like people who have had fifty years to learn each other’s gaits and to learn how to respond to each other’s slight teeterings on the pavement. That future was gone. The image of it scraped at me.
But I’d only ever pictured that image from the perspective of someone watching the old couple, even though in the image I am supposedly the wife.
So I wasn’t mourning an experience of being that wife; I was mourning a romantic image of her, walking with her beloved and adoring husband, who had never existed.