If you're new here, I'll encourage you to start at the beginning and work your way to this point. It will all make a lot more sense that way. You can listen to audio versions or read along. The story begins here.
Three months went by. Months when Sean was not in the house, barely saw the girls, refused to answer my questions or theirs. Erin wanted me to do something. She was angry and confused and tired of waiting and enraged by the uncertainty, and I understood. She kept asking, “What is happening? What will happen? When will we know?”
Those were all questions I asked myself – sometimes dozens of times a day. Sometimes I asked Sean, but he never answered me. He didn’t know. I don’t know if he was more comfortable with the not-knowing than I was or if he just wanted me to do something, like Erin. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer that question, either.
Erin wanted me to call it, if only to have some solution, some marker in space and time to move beyond. Onward. Forward. I get it. Dwelling in that space felt like treading water and it was exhausting. But we had 25 years together, and I didn’t want to look back and think that I acted too impulsively. I couldn’t know what things would look like later. Would ending things make us both feel better? Would it release us to find happiness? Or would it not be a moving forward at all – was it just a way to formalize our not-togetherness and we would both end up feeling confused, lost, sad?
I thought about how much I have learned about holding space and I decided that this is what I was doing for our marriage in that moment. It may have been in its death throes or just suffering a major illness. I didn’t know, but right then, the only thing I knew to do was hold space for it. Instead of trying to find solutions or railing against the Universe or turning my back, I was bearing witness.
I wonder if that is a strange thing to do – hold space for a relationship. I wonder, shouldn’t I have been trying to root out the toxic pieces and remove them? Clean up the landscape? Tidy up and repair the broken parts? What if, by holding space, I was allowing all of the pain and resentment and useless detritus to fester and rot even more? What if I was doing more harm than good? What if it didn’t matter what I did because the marriage doesn’t belong to me alone – it is ours, and at that point, Sean wasn’t doing anything? What if he wasn’t holding space or bearing witness at all, but instead, he was turning his back and slowly rebuilding something else that was his very own, without me?
ALSO TO FILE UNDER “THINGS I WISH I’D KNOWN”
The notion that I get to have (set) boundaries with anyone, absolutely anyone – even my parents. Maybe especially my parents.
When I decided that I wanted a real relationship with my dad – not one where we pretended he’d
never done many of the things he did and it continued to sit between us, but one where we were both adults with equal rights and responsibilities to be accountable to each other and ourselves – I had to set aside my need for retribution. Or punishment. It was hard for me to come to terms with the knowledge that I wanted him to suffer some kind of consequence for his choices and acknowledge how much pain it caused me and my siblings but that it wasn’t going to happen. Or at least, if it was, I didn’t get to be in charge of it.
So much of what we are taught in our culture is that punishment is normal, that when we make mistakes, we deserve to suffer and struggle. And while many of us grow to understand that none of that actually makes us feel better or heal faster, it’s still hard to unlearn that. [Author’s Note: in the past week, James Dobson died and the outpouring of grief and celebration from so many people who grew up in my generation who were traumatized by his ‘advice’ to their parents on how to raise them with brutal punishment was telling, to say the least. If you ever got whipped by a belt, had your mouth washed out with soap, were told you needed your will to be broken as a child, that was James Dobson. Being raised to believe that love is shown in terms of brutal punishment is a hard pattern to disengage
from.]
When I really thought about it, I understood that there was no narrative in which some of my dad’s choices made rational sense. There was no storyline that would cause me to tap my forehead and utter the words, “Ohhh, I get it now. I’d have done the same thing in your shoes.” And so, if there was no defense for the decisions he made, I had to figure out whether it was something that would prevent me from being in relationship with him ever again. Ultimately, I believe in my heart, my bones, that none of the hurtful things my dad did were designed to cause me pain. Most of them were done in reaction to his own pain, for sure, and that brought up the next line of inquiry for me.
Could I have compassion for him and his pain and acknowledge that it led him to make some really bad decisions, and also hold the line for myself with that? Meaning, could I say that I know he was in pain, and likely still was in pain and shame from the things he did, but also know that it wasn’t mine to carry? I decided, yes, and we spent a sweet, tender, amazing eight years in authentic relationship with one another before he was diagnosed with lung cancer.
When it became clear that my father was dying, he sought out therapy – something he’d never done before on his own. At one point, about six months before he died, we sat together in his sunny backyard next to the massive koi pond he’d built with his own hands and he said, “I’m so sorry for the pain I caused. The things I did. The way I hurt your mother and how I wasn’t there for you kids. I hope you can
forgive me in the time I have left.” I wanted the grass to unzip itself and swallow me into the cool, wormy earth. I wanted to unzip my own skin from chin to crotch and step out of it and walk away silently, leaving just the shell of myself slumped on the chair next to him.
“I know, Dad, and also, I can’t hear this. I can’t hold this. I can’t be the container for this confession or apology.”
His head jerked in my direction and I could see the hurt on his chin as it quivered. He thought he was doing the right thing. Saying the right thing. But because so much of my trauma was still unmetabolized, his soft apology felt like sandpaper on a sunburn. It wasn’t my job to absolve him, no matter how much he wanted that from me.
“I love you, Pop. And I appreciate what you’re saying. But there’s so much hurt, and I can’t hold your pain around this. It’s too much. So you can talk to your wife or your therapist or your best friend about this, but not me, okay?”
He nodded his head slowly and put his arm around me. I tipped my head onto his shoulder and we sat
in the sun listening to the water slide down the rocks in the pond.
I don’t regret that. In fact, I’m incredibly proud of myself for recognizing that sensation in my body and not allowing more hurt inside. And it turns out that it was good training for my divorce because as much as I wanted to relate to Sean and work with him to try and make things better, when it became clear that he wasn’t coming back, I was able to give myself permission to be compassionate but not
hold his pain. When he called me one night after he saw a therapist to ask my advice about something, I started to feel that same discomfort in my own skin and head it off. I was able to recognize his pain and hope that he found a way to alleviate it without offering to be the one to help.
There is this cultural messaging that we get (especially women) that says when we know someone is hurting, it’s our job to reach out and try to alleviate the pain. That we somehow have to take on responsibility for it, even if that person’s pain has come about because of the way they hurt us. When I think about it, that’s a totally fucked up message. Why should I have to help you feel better about hurting me? Even if you’re apologizing, what you need to do is go off and do your own work without making me witness it or endorse it or facilitate it.
All the old messages about “being the bigger person” and “going high when they go low” and
“rise above it” played on a loop in my head. That programming I’d received about what it means to be a woman, a mother, a good person kicked in until I remembered how to not lose myself. When I stopped for a moment and recalled that feeling of honoring my own needs and keeping myself from opening up to
hurt from the same person who’d hurt me over and over again, I remembered that what I was doing was unlearning, creating a new reality, one where I could be kind and caring – to myself and others.
The notion of partnership in marriage wasn’t something I think I ever really understood after we had kids. Before kids, I was reluctant to engage in it because of all the things I’d learned up to that point. For the first six years of our marriage, I didn’t want to have a joint bank account with Sean because I wanted to be sure that I could be financially independent if he left me. I worked hard to make sure I was doing my part – that things were 50/50, even after we bought the house with a huge yard to manage. We both worked full time and then on the weekends, I made sure that I did just as much in the yard and around the house as he did. We mostly cooked together, so that was fine. And I never resented doing what I did, to be honest. I felt like we were well matched. I think I’d even say I thought we were partners. But is 50/50 really what a partnership is all about?
After I had Erin and I was home all the time, not generating income, I agreed to joint bank accounts and I also stepped up what I did at home. Somehow, I decided that what I did as a full-time parent didn’t constitute a full-time job, so I took over all the cooking, all the cleaning, all the errand-running. When it came to childcare, I made the decisions about her doctor, took her to the dentist, researched the school stuff, etc. It is as though I had switched from one (paying, time-limited) job to another, but I hadn’t. Raising a child isn’t the same as having a 40-hour a week job, but I treated it that way. I didn’t want to add anything to Sean’s obligations, so I somehow decided – subconsciously – that my new job was anything and everything related to caring for our child and our home, and anything he did outside of his paid work hours was icing on the cake. If I wanted to go out by myself or with a friend and he watched Erin it was “for me;” it was an extra pull on his time and energy. Why? Because it was outside of his regular working hours? Were all of his extra hours supposed to be leisure? What about mine? I had no “extra hours”. It’s shocking how easily I slipped into that role without even questioning.
By the time we had two kids, especially with his travel schedule, I was somehow expected (by him and myself) to take on the additional responsibility without batting an eye. Would you ask your employee to take on twice their normal workload without any sort of accommodation or pay raise? Would you expect them to stay if you did? But I did expect that from myself. Suddenly I had two children to take care of along with the household responsibilities, and I still saw that as my primary job, meaning that I couldn’t expect Sean to take on additional work at home. I still cooked every single night, did the lion’s share of the housework, the vast majority of the childcare, and half the time I mowed our two-acre lawn as well.
When Lauren was about six months old, I did have the presence of mind to outsource bath night to Sean – but only because he seemed to enjoy it. I hated it so much – the mess, the noise, the constant vigilance making sure nobody drowned. By the time the girls were ready for a bath in the evening, I’d been alone with them all day long and I was exhausted and my fuse was short. I knew I didn’t want them to associate bath time with a grumpy parent, so I asked Sean if he’d take it over. Of course, while they were in the bath, I took the time to clean the kitchen in peace instead of lying on the couch with a glass of wine or a magazine because I still felt it was my job to make sure the house was clean. I couldn’t have imagined asking Sean to do bath time and help with the dishes.
Years later, I am still coming to terms with the idea of how deeply the principles of gender expectations and toxic masculinity were embedded in my marriage, and how easily we both accepted them and lived by them. It comes to me in different ways as I witness my own history and think about my choices and also as I look out into the world and see how others move and live.
One night, after I’d been divorced for a year or more, I found myself watching an episode of Queer
Eye:Germany and raging at the television. Normally, I love all the iterations of the Queer Eye franchise for the way it confronts stereotypes and pushes the edges of ideas of social acceptability and how it helps people think about themselves in different ways. But in episode two, the team sets out to help a
woman who is described as having “lost the ability to feel joy”, to feel good about herself. As they introduce her, they talk about how she works two jobs, has teens to raise, and is always tired. She never has time for herself and as the team is talking about her, the vignettes that are being shown are her
making dinner for her kids and her husband, her doing laundry and dishes and other household duties. They swoop in, as they always do, with grand ideas about how to organize the living space, give her a physical makeover, help her build her self-esteem, and generally pamper her for a week. At some point,
while interviewing her husband, it becomes clear that the two of them are struggling to maintain their romantic connection with each other. While the team felt a light bulb go on, I’m pretty sure I snorted and exclaimed aloud, “no shit!” They double checked with the wife and confirmed, yep, they don’t really have that same loving connection they used to have with each other. The team’s solution? Dance lessons. Date night. This time I rolled my eyes AND snorted out loud.
While it is clear that during the dance lessons, the two of them did spark some of that old romantic feeling, my cynical ass wondered if it would have happened had she not spent the week being taken care of by five queer men. I was beyond annoyed at the end of the episode when they departed cheerily and later watched mom and dad head out on a date as though their work here was done. Bullshit. Because here’s the thing: nobody taught those kids how to do their own laundry. Nobody said to dad, “she’s working two jobs and you’re working one. It’s time for you to make dinner most nights and pitch in with other household chores. This is your home, too.” So while they tidied up her house and gave her a bedroom door where she hadn’t had one before, she wasn’t going to be using her new reading nook much at all unless the other three members of the family started taking some of the burden of the daily shit that had to be done off of her shoulders.
The Queer Eye folks did what most people do when women and mothers are exhausted and burned
out – they pretended as if it was a problem of efficiency and systems; that if we just had better organization and a prettier haircut and spoke affirmations to ourselves in the mirror every morning, we’d be just fine. Ladies, it’s our fault we are unhappy and overtired. It’s not that we are doing the work of
three or four people while the rest of the members of our family rely on us to take care of everything. Bullshit. Patriarchy.
I know this because I lived it. After I had kids, I stopped really wanting to have sex with my husband. And while I was told this was pretty normal for lots of women, I don’t think I was ever given an explanation that didn’t hone in on me. Namely, that it was my hormones or that I’d shifted all of my emotional capacity to my kids and away from my husband. It was set up as a competition between the kids and Sean – who would get my affection? And I was told that, even if I didn’t really feel it, I should try having sex with him anyway, because maybe once I started, I’d get into the groove and it would be okay. But I know now that that was utter nonsense, designed to keep me in my place.
I stopped wanting to have sex with Sean not because I didn’t feel sexy anymore. It wasn’t the weight I’d put on or how my body had changed at all. It wasn’t because I was exhausted (although I was – more exhausted than I’ve ever been). In fact, in the beginning, after the first baby, I was still pretty horny, to be honest. It was only after I saw how little his life changed and how much mine did that I started to build resentment. Yes, his sleep was disturbed and there was more pressure on him to keep earning money to support us. I don’t doubt that in the slightest. But my entire life changed. I went from working and getting a paycheck to not getting paid for anything I did. I went from having social contact and some semblance of a schedule, seeing tangible results of my efforts, to flexing and accommodating things going sideways and having to set aside my own goals for a time in order to make sure the household was running smoothly. Whereas before, Sean and I cooked meals together, now that I was staying home, the expectation was that I had way more time to cook and therefore I should make every meal for us. I fully admit that this was one expectation I had for myself as well as feeling outside pressure. In this, I was in agreement with the social contract that said if I was home all day, I should take care of everything that had to do with the home and the children. All of it.
Sean still traveled for work, saw colleagues, got raises, and had paid time off. To be sure, when we took vacations, we were both responsible for the kids, but for him, it was a break from his work life. For me, it was simply parenting in a different place, without all of the creature comforts of home that soothed the children. He was responsible for making money and paying the bills and while I can’t imagine what that pressure felt like, I was responsible for pretty much everything else. Before, we’d been partners. Even if we divided up certain tasks, I felt like we were in it together. After kids, it felt like we were teammates but not partners. It felt as though his choices and work took precedence over my personal choices.
Here’s the thing: I am absolutely certain that this period of time was just as hard for him as it was for me. I am convinced that I worked really hard to present a picture of myself that was capable and willing to do all the things so that he didn’t think to ask if he could pitch in more or do something different. His life changed significantly, too, even if it didn’t seem like it – there was probably a lot more pressure to keep climbing the corporate ladder than ever before with two kids, and as much as he’d probably love to come home from a long day at work to just put his feet up and have a quiet evening, he came home to new and different demands. In the end, it’s not that I was angry with him and so I stopped wanting to have sex with him. It is that the rules of toxic masculinity and patriarchy kept us from being able to talk to each other about what we were each feeling. The pressures of home and work kept each of us in our own bubble, concerned about our own workload, trying to keep up, and putting on a brave face for each other and the world.
Even when I cracked and admitted my depression to him, I think he felt like it was one more thing for him to handle. I know I felt as though that’s what I was doing – putting one more thing on his already full plate. We hadn’t really been shown what it is to be partners, what it feels like to really be in it with someone else. We didn’t have the skills to hold heavy things together or for each other and know that it was going to be okay. We took turns, but we didn’t do it together. That’s because of the world we grew up in, what we were taught. It’s no wonder we lost our connection to each other. How are you supposed to want to be intimate with someone when you feel like you’re in competition with them?
CHICK MUSIC
I was feeling like listening to music one morning while I cleaned the kitchen and I opened Spotify and looked over my playlists. I wanted something peppy, something I could maybe dance to, something that would make the cleaning feel fun. Looking over the different options, I settled on one called Chick Music.
I know Sean didn’t invent that term, but he’s the first person I ever heard say it. We had similar taste in music – well, I liked a lot of the bands he listened to; Rush, Def Leppard, Led Zeppelin, Yes. But he branded a lot of what I listened to as “Chick Music,” with a wink and a nod. It bothered me a little – like a branch that poked me as we walked along a trail – but over time I adopted the phrase and used it myself. More than once, I did try to dissect what made certain songs belong to that grouping, but other than the fact that they were more likely to fit in a certain genre of music, I never came to a conclusion.
That morning, I thought about it again, remembering all the times when we were on road trips with the kids and they would choose certain songs and he’d holler out, “Chick music!” and laugh, as though he were being subjected to something annoying because he was the only man in the car. It had occurred to me before that most of the bands and singers in that category are women, and the ones who aren’t are more effeminate or have a softer sound. It may sound obvious, but I wondered if that sort of conditioning was what made us both agree to use that phrase.
There is a lot of research that says that, in general, men don’t often choose to read books written by women, while women read books mostly regardless of the gender of the writer. I wonder if anyone has done research about music. Do men listen to Pink or Miley Cyrus less because of their gender? Can we even separate out the conditioning and social messaging from our taste in music?
I spent a lot of my life acting like a “tomboy,” enjoying things like dolls and crafts and also learning how to play soccer and basketball and spending hours on the floor with my brother and his Hot Wheels cars. It was a point of pride for me that I could “fit in” with the boys, both at recess and in the classroom, matching them score for score in math and science class. But it never really occurred to me that there were no boys striving to do the same. I don’t remember even one male student in my Home Economics class, but I know a lot of girls who signed up for Shop class and learned to use power tools and safety equipment. In high school, I went to see bands like 10,000 Maniacs and The Eurythmics live, but I also saw ZZ Top and Tom Petty and The Scorpions. I didn’t look around to see whether there were many boys or men at the concerts fronted by women, but my sense is that there weren’t.
I really don’t believe that the conclusion we can draw from this is that male-fronted bands are more universally appealing, or that men’s writing is more universally appealing. I honestly believe that it is our cultural and social messaging that keeps boys and men from exploring music and other art forms created by women. Sean only barely indulged my musical tastes that didn’t align with his until our daughters were born and then he began opening up to more music outside his previous tastes in order to identify with them and have something to talk about. But it was clear that the year he got me Brandi Carlile tickets for my birthday, he was only going because the girls and I wanted to. He would never have gone on his own.
I spent a lot of hours in my marriage avoiding sex. It’s hard to say that for several reasons – first because I’m supposedly a liberated woman, a strong feminist, a person with agency. Second, because it immediately makes me cringe to think that Sean might read this someday and be hurt by it, or angry. And third, because it’s hard to talk about married sex in our culture, as if it has certain distinct qualities that make it unique.
But it’s the truth. I often feigned sleep or ignored bids for attention from Sean and acted as if I had no idea he wanted to connect, and what was behind that was something I think we were both taught by osmosis as we grew up; namely, that the only acceptable outcome for physical intimacy was the male orgasm. Once we’d had sex for the first time – “gone all the way” as it were – it seemed impossible to be physically intimate with each other without it progressing to some form of sex where he ended up orgasming. This is also one of those things that sounds absurd when I write it out because there is no situation in which there is an assumption that I would orgasm every single time we were intimate. I don’t know anyone my age – regardless of gender or sexual orientation – who believes that a sexual encounter is incomplete if the woman doesn’t orgasm, but most of the people I know think that it is if the man doesn’t. I often wonder how different our relationship would have been if we had both felt free to bring each other pleasure without the expectation that it would end with him ejaculating at some point. How much more engaged would I have been with the idea of physical connection if it was only for the purpose of making us both feel good until we were ready to be done, regardless of what that looked like? It’s hard to wrap my head around.
To be clear, I’m not blaming Sean for this. We met when I was 17 years old and neither of us had the vocabulary or the presence of mind to inquire about each other’s experiences when we had sex. There was no pattern of relating that involved asking, during multiple points in our physical encounters, “do you like this?” or “what would feel good to you now?” Part of that is because talking about sex is embarrassing. Part of it is because it’s hard not to take it personally when someone you’re trying to pleasure tells you that the thing you’re doing actually doesn’t feel great. Part of it, as a woman, as a survivor of sexual assault by three different men at different times in my life, beginning when I was eight, is about fear.
There has been a distinct power disadvantage for me as a woman in every single sexual encounter
I’ve ever had and the idea that I could redirect a male partner or give them feedback that could potentially make them feel in any way that they were doing something wrong scares the shit out of me at most, and makes me very uncomfortable at best. He could get angry and hurt me. He could get his feelings hurt and pull away from me physically and emotionally without trying to understand. He could gaslight me and tell me I’m wrong. He could shame me by saying that what I want is “gross” or that I’m not normal for not liking what he likes. Frankly, it’s easier to just go along with whatever my partner is doing until they’re satisfied and move on.
You would think that, once Sean and I were married, I would have felt more comfortable expressing my desires to him. I certainly didn’t feel physically unsafe with him – I know he would never have hurt me. But we’d been having sex for years by then and I was afraid that starting a dialogue at that point would feel strange – as if I’d been resenting the hell out of all of our previous sexual encounters and suddenly now I was changing the rules, or that he was not attractive to me anymore. It felt incredibly vulnerable to imagine suddenly talking about sex with him. So I didn’t. I either avoided it or I went along with it. Because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. And in the end, during one of the three times he agreed to a therapy appointment as our marriage was disintegrating, he pointed out that he knew I’d been avoiding sex with him all those years and it did hurt. Turns out, I actually did the thing I didn’t want to do the most, and I did it because I couldn’t figure out how to talk to him about it. But I learned that in so many different ways throughout my life – how to avoid conversations that felt like paradigm shifts, even when the root cause of the issue was something I felt so deeply it caused me to shut down.