I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(45)

“But . . .” John said, choosing his words carefully, “I don’t want you to leave me.”

“I wouldn’t be leaving you,” I said. “Just having a separate space. I’d still be with-you with you.”

“But everyone would think we were separated.” He was thinking through every angle. What it would mean for us, but also what it would mean for people around us. How much gossip would we have to deal with?

“And we could say, ‘Fuck you, everybody, it’s not your business,’ because we would know we were still married.”

“Would we need . . . another sofa? Two of everything?” Bless his practical soul. At no point did he panic. At no point did he raise his voice or call me insane.

He did want to know how we’d explain it—or would we explain it?—to parents and in-laws. “So when your mom comes to visit, you’d just act like you lived here?” he asked.

“Well, I don’t know. I don’t want to make the kids lie.” This was getting complicated.

“They’d be the only kids in school with still-married parents who live in separate houses.”

“Would they?”

If someone were watching us have this conversation without sound, it would probably look like we were talking about what kind of takeout to get for dinner.

I kept thinking, I don’t belong here, I need to get out, and I wanted space desperately, but as I tried to bring this hypothetical scenario into focus, I understood that I didn’t really want to be without John. I didn’t really want to be without our children. I wanted to step out of my everyday somehow—to hop in my time machine and let it lift me out of my life for a while—but I wasn’t able to translate this desire into anything realistic. I wanted to get “away” the way you tell someone to “go away” when you’re little and you don’t want to play with them anymore; and the person I didn’t want to play with anymore wasn’t John, but myself.

When you say “Go away,” you don’t care where the person goes, you just want them out of your sight. I wanted to put myself out of my own sight—out of my own regular life. I’d become an angry person who cursed at cars on the highway, a sad person who sat and stared out windows. I didn’t know how to fix myself, so I wanted to step away from the story in which this self was the main character.

But I couldn’t make a good guess at what “away” might look like. The idea of setting up separate households unraveled before it ever came together. John listened as I talked about it for several days, before eventually I let it go. It made no sense.

(I shouldn’t be surprised Diane von Furstenberg’s living arrangement didn’t fit me. Her wrap dresses never have either.)



* * *



Instead of thanking John for his patience and support throughout the months when I slumped like a sandbag on various pieces of furniture and made few, if any, useful contributions to our household, I often snapped at him. I blew up over tiny things. (“WHO PUTS A BOWL IN THE TOP RACK OF THE DISHWASHER?”) As I tried to pin my unhappiness to some cause, I made various arguments in which he’d have to share blame: Was I the beleaguered spouse, forced to give up her dreams and run carpools all day? No. No one forced any of my professional decisions, and if I wanted to change the carpooling schedule, nothing was stopping me. Was I tied down to domestic life, inhibited from a life of desert roaming and deep-sea fishing because I had children to drive around town? No. I mean, I did have children to drive around town, but (a) I wanted children. No one just handed me kids I didn’t want to raise. And (b) I knew damn well that left to my own devices, I don’t really do any deep-sea fishing or desert roaming. None of it added up.

Still, my mind tried to find ways to resent him, because he’d been there all along, part of every adult decision I’d ever made. If I was miserable where I’d ended up, wasn’t that a little bit his fault?

One evening, waving the paper towel I’d just torn off to wipe the countertops, I said, “I mean, what if I wanted to go bungee jumping tomorrow? I have meetings! I have carpool! I couldn’t even go!”

“Do you want to go bungee jumping?” he asked.

“No. The point is EVERYTHING HERE IS KEEPING ME FROM BUNGEE JUMPING. Why aren’t you listening?”



* * *



We go through life looking for proof that our choices have been right. Psychologists call this confirmation bias. If you’re a scientist, confirmation bias in experiments can lead to errors, because without realizing it you give greater weight to any findings that support your hypothesis and make excuses for findings that don’t. You draw faulty conclusions, because you’re not being objective.

In our personal lives, we also look for proof that our choices have been right. Even when it comes to small everyday decisions, we can talk ourselves into justifying a wrong as a right, because that feels better than saying we were wrong. (How many eyeshadows do I own that make my eyelids look like gilded lizards? Several. But I don’t get rid of them, because I’ve already bought them and I don’t want to believe I wasted my money.)

Here’s the problem with taking that approach to life all the time: It’s totally normal to look around every now and then and see that some things aren’t working—that you need to adjust the dials, retool your life a bit. That’s what people do. But you have to overcome confirmation bias in order to do that. You have to be willing to call something wrong, to say something feels bad. That’s hard enough for any human being. For me, a person whose very identity and peace rely on looking at things and thinking, Yes, that’s right, looking at my own emotional state and feeling, No, that’s wrong, was more than unsettling. It felt disproportionately catastrophic. It made me think, Wait, if I’m not the person who makes the right choices all the time, then who am I? That I might have made choices that were “right” at one time but feel “wrong” right now seemed impossible. Right choices are supposed to feel right forever . . . right?