by
Lyz Lenz
View all notes
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.
Falling in love with C was not gradual. Falling in love with C was encompassing, consuming, life-expanding. It was like ripping hunks from a loaf of fresh bread and stuffing them in my mouth. In those early days, he was a man frying little disks of sausage on a hot plate in a Paris garret, asking me to marry him. Making me laugh so hard I slipped off our red couch. Loving the smoked tacos we got from a tiny shack just north of Morro Bay. Pointing out backyard chickens from the garage we rented behind a surfer’s bachelor pad. Putting his hand on my thigh while I drank contrast fluid that tasted like bitter Gatorade, before a CT scan to find my burst ovarian cyst. Playing the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on a road trip, putting a cinnamon bear on our rental car dashboard because it was our mascot, our trusty guide. Our thing. We had a thousand things, like everyone. But ours were only ours. Who will find them beautiful now?
In those early days, he was a man ordering room-service steak at the Golden Nugget after we said our vows in a Vegas wedding chapel at midnight. He was a man curled beside me watching our favorite obstacle-course program on TV, a man getting my face tattooed on his biceps, a man whispering in my ear at a crowded party.
He is still that man. I am still that woman. We have betrayed those tender people, but we still carry them around inside of us wherever we go.
My mother. After my parents split up, when I was eleven, it was just the two of us. On Sunday nights we watched Murder, She Wrote, eating bowls of ice cream side by side on the couch. She always solved the mystery by the second commercial break; she knew from the lost umbrella in the corner of the shot, or else from the fishy alibi that didn’t check out because the murderer used “he” to describe a female dentist. “Just got lucky,” she’d say. It wasn’t luck. It was her close attention to the details of the world, the same keen eye that kept track of every doctor’s appointment, every passing comment I’d made about a school project, a tiff with a friend; she always followed up, wondered how it went.
Her skin carried the sweet, clean scent of her soap—that blue tub of chilly white pudding that she rubbed across her high cheekbones. She baked loaves of fresh brown bread and gave me heels straight from the oven, still warm.
She helped me write down recipes in a little spiral-bound notebook of index cards so I could make us dinner once a week: sloppy joes with soy crumbles, or a casserole of pop-up biscuits and cream of mushroom soup. My economist father was on the other side of the country, or in his apartment across town, or in the sky. It was hard to keep track. He and I had dinner once a month. Sometimes more, sometimes less. He’d never had my biscuit casserole.
i like this
When I met C, I was thirty years old. I wasn’t a child. But there was so much I didn’t know. I’d never made a choice I couldn’t take back. I was drowning in the revocability of my own life. I wanted the solidity of what you couldn’t undo.
C loved basketball sneakers and bodega snacks, drank soda rather than coffee. He was easily affronted and absolutely forthright. He was not afraid of hard work or a crisis; he was consolidated by difficulty. He always rooted for the underdog. He loved Lloyd Dobler, John Cusack’s character from Say Anything: the kickboxer wooing the beautiful valedictorian, standing beneath her window in a baggy beige blazer and a Clash T-shirt, hoisting his boombox high above his head.
The first time C and I talked about my eating disorder, a few weeks into our relationship, he asked me how much I’d weighed when I was sick. Partway through my response, he broke in to tell me how little his wife had weighed by the end of her life. The memory was so painful it cut through him, like a splinter breaking through the surface of his skin. He had no choice but to say it out loud. In that moment, and many others, everything I’d lived seemed trivial in relation to everything he’d survived.
Still, some part of me had wanted to finish my sentence.
Another part of me thought that making this man happy would be more meaningful than anything else I’d ever done. From early on, he said, “You are giving me another life.” Every time I felt a flicker of doubt, it seemed like a betrayal of this hope.
You must be logged in to see this comment.