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This was life under the shadow of the question mark. I spent long, agonizing hours on the phone with my mother, explaining my uncertainty to her, hoping she could help me decide. She asked, “What is your gut telling you?” But the question didn’t help, because my gut told me conflicting things at once—that we were soulmates, and that we were doomed—and my gut wasn’t a voice to be trusted, anyway. Recovery had taught me this. My gut wanted to drink and drink and drink. My gut didn’t realize that no matter how much I drank, I’d still be thirsty.
By the time I met C, I was sick of listening to my gut. I was ready to bring in upper management. Upper management said I was done with waffling, done with going back and forth. Upper management told me not to listen to my doubts. They were only coaxing me back into a prior version of myself.
lol
Lying in bed, under the sloping roof of our Paris garret, C said we should get married. I said yes, because I was in love with him, and because I wanted my whole self to want something, no questions asked. I wanted that consolidation. I wanted to believe in love as a conscious decision more than an act of surrender. I’d spent years surrendering myself to feelings and I was tired of it. Surrender was just an excuse. You could bend emotion to your will instead.
This firmness would help me escape what one ex had called my “terrible, fickle heart.” Maybe not escape that heart, but discipline it.
very relatable lol
When we got home from the botanic gardens that day, C was in a bad mood. I could tell from his gaze, and his posture on the couch as he swiveled toward me. I wanted to tell him about the greenhouse, the ways the baby’s eyes had tracked the flickering shadows, how good it was to feel my own pretensions interrupted by her shit. But I sensed he wasn’t in the mood to hear it.
Instead, I asked about his day. He said it had been terrible. “Hope you had fun frolicking in the gardens,” he said, his voice taut with sarcasm.
I didn’t ask why his day had been so bad. I’d asked this question so many times before, I thought I already knew the answers: his frustration with work, or else the unspoken hurt of our distance. Which is maybe how love dies—thinking you already know the answers.
I said none of this to him—just, “Our day was great,” and let him read my tone however he wanted.
Was this frolicking—being with the baby all day? It rearranged my soul, sure, but it didn’t exactly feel like frolicking. I wondered if the only way to make the labor of my day legible to C would be to frame it as entirely exhausting. But I did not want to create a home where the main measures of love were hardship, expenditure, and burden; where these were the only dialects in which the act of parenting was spoken. I wanted language that could hold the wonder and the numbing exhaustion of the day at once. Sometimes it seemed like parenting was only visible to him as sacrifice.
His eyes got teary whenever he recalled the moment he’d seen me wince as the baby’s gums clamped down on my nipple. “You love her so much,” he’d said, as if my love was most visible to him then—in my willingness to hurt, this proof of my devotion.
A friend suggested that his anger was a sign of how much he’d loved me. As if love might curdle to anger with an equal but opposite intensity, like putting a negative sign in front of a very large number. But I knew that some version of this anger had been there the whole time.
One time in couples therapy, after I’d flinched at something he said, he snapped, “Don’t act like you’re fucking scared of me.”
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I came to hold both truths at once: I’d caused him deep and lasting harm, by leaving him. And also, I did not regret choosing a life that would not share a home with his anger.
When I say I held both truths, I mean that I lay with them, sleepless, in the dark.
Unless you say otherwise, people assume the end of a marriage involves an affair. So I am saying otherwise. This one did not. Just the mistake of two people believing they could make a life together, when in fact they couldn’t. Which is its own betrayal.
My parents’ marriage left me more allergic to affairs than to endings. But I knew there were people who felt otherwise—who believed the worst thing was giving up too soon.
I was certainly capable of infidelity—had inherited some version of my father’s capacity, even as I judged him for it. In the past, I’d cheated on two boyfriends—could still remember waking up in the beds of other men, trapped inside my own body like a rumpled, foul-smelling outfit I could not remove.
For me, cheating had been a way to avoid the work of either fixing a relationship or ending it. This time, with C, I did not want to avoid that work. But I was scared of myself. I had no illusions about my own innocence. Whenever I heard myself saying, I’d never do that, I heard a false promise. We can’t imagine ourselves doing many things until we do them.
In the midst of those newborn months, I had a book coming out. It would be published when the baby was three months old. I usually described it as a book about drinking, though honestly it was a book about the only thing I ever wrote about: the great emptiness inside, the space I’d tried to fill with booze and sex and love and recovery and now, perhaps, with motherhood. The book was getting a lot of attention, which made me queasy—and also, like an addict, eager for more.
Four years in, it hurt to hold the things I loved about C alongside everything that had soured between us. But these things stubbornly remained: His wit. His loyalty. His belly laugh. His razor vision. One of my favorite things about being married to C was the company of his gaze. The things he noticed. His deep love for the ridiculous humans of this world. That’s why I wanted to text him about the selfie takers, and the couple on their awkward date. Some part of me loved his rough exterior—his many tats, his gruff candor, his quick temper—because it made his interior seem like a gentleness meant only for me. Me and shih tzus. Me and the characters in his novels. Even when things between us were falling apart, I always craved that feeling of wandering through the world with him—hearing what he noticed, seeing what he saw.
By the time our daughter arrived, we’d already been in couples therapy for three years, all but the first year of our relationship. Once a week, we went to a basement office and sat together on a loveseat that never felt large enough. The harder our home life got, the more guilty I felt for wanting to leave it. This was the same deluded faith in difficulty that made me starve myself at eighteen, running seven miles on the treadmill after six saltines for dinner. This same voice rose up again to say, The harder it feels, the more necessary it must be.
aahh yes