A Really Good Day(13)
My husband is out of town again. He travels often, as do I, but this year it’s been out of control. In the months since September 1 of last year, we have spent 103 days apart. If things go as planned, before September rolls around again, we will have spent a total of 195 days and nights apart. More than half of the year.
We have been married for over twenty years, and our marriage in a very real way defines not just my personal life but my career. A decade ago, I wrote an essay in which I credited my happy marriage to the fact that, though I loved my kids, I wasn’t in love with them. If a good mother is one who loves her children more than anyone else in the world, I wrote, then I am a bad mother, because I love my husband more than my children. In some ways, my career has been built not on my dozen books or the many other essays I have published, but on the outsized response to that essay.
The morning of the essay’s publication in the New York Times Modern Love column, my e-mail inbox was inundated with angry responses. Then I went ahead and made things worse by going on Oprah to defend myself against the mob of angry mommies. In the decade since, I have never given an interview, a reading, or a lecture in which that essay hasn’t been brought up at least once. To be fair, that’s mostly my own fault. A few years after I published the essay, I wrote an entire book, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace, about the destructive impulse of mothers to castigate each other and ourselves.
Because I have become so thoroughly identified with the topics of motherhood and marriage, the prospect of experiencing a rough patch in my marriage terrifies me. Though I know all marriages experience ups and downs, when we are in a low period I panic, imagining the sanctimommies of the Internet gleefully reveling in my unhappiness. (Okay, yes, I’m probably being paranoid, but I bet at least a few people would gloat.)
This patch has been rough. Really rough. I cannot decide whether the continued separations are part of the problem or if they are what has kept us from permanently fracturing. When apart, we fight only rarely. Mostly, we stay in close touch, texting and talking, consulting on every issue, and sending gooey emojis. Hearts. Smiley faces with hearts for eyes. But lately, when we are together, we bicker. Worse than that, we fight. We yell, we cry, we collapse and promise it’ll never happen again. And then it does, over and over.
I’ve been desperate for my husband to come home to help me take stock of my protocol. More than anyone, he can evaluate my state of mind and judge if there’s been a noticeable change. I am also eager to talk to him about the mild perceptual differences I’d noticed in the hour or so after I first took the microdose, the way my senses seemed slightly enhanced, like I’d been bitten by a radioactive no-see-um. Unlike me, my husband has experience with typical doses of LSD. I knew he would be able to give me insight on that aspect of the experience. Also I missed him.
The fact that I have been waiting so impatiently for him to come home makes the argument we had on the telephone, usually our happy place, even more painful. After I woke up wretched from my sleepless night, I called him. I shouldn’t have, because from the very beginning I was gunning for a fight. Nearly as soon as he picked up the phone, I began complaining about our shared workspace.
A couple of months ago, my husband had an idea. The inspiration for this idea is one of the things we fought about, but, because I have vowed to stop imputing bad motives to the people I love, I will present his side of the argument as fact, without picking apart ulterior motives or launching into a digression about whether or not Freud was right about the role of the unconscious in directing behavior.
Not long ago, my husband surprised me with a couch. He placed it in a corner of the studio we share (really his studio, which he allows me to squat in), and moved his own workspace into the middle of the room. He says he bought the couch because I hadn’t been using the studio and he was trying to lure me back. He expected me to recline on the couch, laptop in my lap, and immerse myself with a newfound focus. But the couch is too narrow, the arms are too hard; I can’t get comfortable on it. Moreover, with his workspace now in the middle of the room, I feel crowded. Crowded out.
This morning, when I called him, I suddenly and for no particular reason launched into a familiar litany of complaints. There’s so much I don’t like about his studio! I complained about the couch and the light and about how I feel crowded and pushed out. It was neither the first, the tenth, nor the one hundredth time he’s heard me bitching about this. Is it any wonder he got frustrated with me?
“How many times do we have to have this fight?” he asked. “You should just get an office of your own.”
That really infuriated me. Little postage-stamp offices rent for a thousand dollars a month in the lunatic Bay Area real estate market.
“So we’ll spend a thousand dollars a month,” he said. “It’s worth it.”
“We don’t have an extra thousand dollars a month!” I yelled.
When I am angry, I do stupid things. I hang up the phone (oh, how much more satisfying that used to be when it could be done with a furious bang!). I Google phrases like “The effects of divorce on children.” I check real-estate listings for one-bedroom apartments within walking distance of our house that we could trade off living in while the other is on duty as that week’s custodial parent. After I engaged in these customary behaviors, I began, also as is typical, to berate myself. The whole fight was my fault. It’s always my fault when we fight, because my husband is easygoing and cheerful, and I am a bitch. If it weren’t for me, we’d never fight. I’m an awful wife, a terrible partner. How can he stand me when I can’t stand me?