In Spite of Everything (15 page)

It would have been folly to point out to my dad that he lived alone and rarely had visitors, and even if he had, there was no guest room where they might stay because he had claimed the entire house as exclusively his already. Not that I didn’t point this out anyway. If there was ever a man who required a good-hearted roasting to a crisp on a spit, it was Dugal Thomas. I saw it as my duty to stand and deliver it, mostly because, so far as I know, no one else would. But while he mostly enjoyed my skewerings, if he was in the right frame of mind, I was only able to sear the surface; his insides always remained raw. If the Carlin Room could talk, which it did via my dad’s every gesture, it would have bawled the state motto of New Hampshire: Live Free or Die! I didn’t bat an eye when he actually did move to New Hampshire two years later, holed up by a lake with an arsenal of shotguns and handguns and his third wife. (My brother and I cracked up when, in the mid-nineties—when Dad was still living alone in Massachusetts—the FBI started closing in on the identity and whereabouts of the Unabomber.
Thank God Dad is dyslexic
, we said,
because that Unabomber guy is doing it on a manual typewriter, and he’s a good speller. If spell-check was involved in any one of those communiqués, Dad’d be in a lockdown at Quantico.
)

As Cal and I were driving home from the trip, I was hyperfocused on the great time I’d had and greedily probed Cal for a report on what a great time he’d had. Cal was quiet. Then he said, “Dugal is a
great guy—I can see why you thought I’d like him.” The “but” dangled from its precipice. I pushed it. “That ‘Carlin Room’ says a lot,” he said. “There’s a fundamental selfishness about your dad. He’ll always be alone because of it.”

That Dad was an alcoholic, a charming bastard, a self-absorbed prick, a dilettante, the tragic hero in the story of his own life (and mine) were all facts that had been as firmly established as my social security number or the city of my birth. But they were the kinds of character assignments one makes to establish a cast list to which you can refer when you forget why certain people are acting in certain ways. They are useful name tags, but they don’t do much to describe emotional reality. Cal had done it. He had absorbed my father’s essence: alone.

That was not going to be me.

W
hat can anyone say that the Greeks haven’t said in three dozen ways already? Did I end up strong-arming Cal into becoming a sexless caregiver? I foam with remorse and self-loathing at the thought.

I did not enter marriage with such intentions. In one way, my expectations were coincident with everyone else’s. According to research, Generation X does, by an overwhelming majority—94 percent—look first for a “soulmate” in marriage, and 86 percent expect to find theirs.
^*
I had found mine. Like my peers from divorced households, I entered marriage with the presumption that Cal and I were going to outdo my parents altogether. After all, we’d already been together for nearly eight years before getting married—even though divorce rates are up to 48 percent higher for those who have lived together first than for those who haven’t.
^†
There was no question in my mind that we would beat those odds. Part of the reason this happens, I think, is that many people our age consider it old-fashioned and naïve to think that marriage fundamentally changes a person, especially if you lived with your spouse out of wedlock beforehand; the essential dynamic is entrenched, and there seems little reason to expect innovation. Moreover, while everyone acknowledges that even though the big bridey moment is exhilarating, fabulous, swelling with feeling, it also represents something of a media marketing benchmark and therefore has the patina of a sham. The X subtext on the wedding day celebration is, be clear-eyed; enjoy the moment, but remember that it’s only a day; after that, you go back to the relationship.

The Relationship
. By all accounts, no American generation has been more devoted to attending to the every nuance of The Relationship than X. We are, say sociologists, anthropologists, and other manner of cultural observers, more emotionally invested in our spouses than previous generations were in theirs; our marriages are deep friendships and genuine partnerships. We depend on each other and work together. Because of all these things, adultery, for example, is far more devastating for us than it was for our parents or grandparents. Indeed, it’s fascinating to look at studies of this, because the generational attitudes toward sex and commitment are so profoundly different that some researchers muse that they may suggest that an evolutionary change is taking place in male and female
brains
under our very noses. In a 2003 study, the late Baltimore psychologist Shirley Glass, Ph.D., a specialist in infidelity research (and also the mom of the awesome Ira Glass, host of public radio’s
This American Life
), found that the mores of sexual infidelity were metamorphosing, in epic proportions. The traditional standard for men—love is love and sex is sex—is essentially dying out. Increasingly, men and women are developing serious emotional attachments long before they commit adultery.

“The sex differences in infidelity are disappearing,” reported Glass in a 2003
Psychology Today
interview. “In my original 1980 study, there was a high proportion of men who had intercourse with almost no emotional involvement at all—nonrelational sex. Today,
more men are getting emotionally involved.” Historically, the strictly sexual tryst didn’t have any effect on men’s marital satisfaction. “You could be in a good marriage and still cheat,” explained Glass. But the new adultery, she found, was not just disruptive but more likely catastrophic, ending in divorce. The betrayal is simply so profound that it destroys everything. Moreover, what was fascinating from an anthropological point of view was that this new pattern constituted a major hit to a long-standing male code. “The double standard for adultery is disappearing,” declared Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, Ph.D., in the same
Psychology Today
article. “It’s been around for 5,000 years and it’s changing in our lifetime. It’s quite striking. Men used to feel that they had the right. They don’t feel that anymore.”

One can only wonder if this change has been brought about by X’s fundamentally different view of romantic relationships. That is, it seems clear that we don’t have the old-school sense of “Oh, well—men will be men” or “Coo-coo-ka-choo, Mrs. Robinson,” but rather:
You’re my best friend, my It—how could you even have thought about doing this to me?
So, is it any surprise that 94 percent of Generation Xers expect to marry our soulmates? Given that, how could we stand to think that our relationships with our partners are temporal, potentially dissoluble? I couldn’t—any more than I can grasp the mortality of our own solar system.

But after observing Cal’s parents, I wanted something else. I wanted what they had. I wanted to be transformed. Within a few months of our getting married, I stopped drinking. Drinking had made me a self-revolving twister, and I realized that if I continued I would never be able to approach having a real marriage but would persist in ripping everything up and heaving it around the countryside. People say that you should make such epic changes for yourself, not for others, but I was, frankly, tired of myself. I wanted Cal to have
his
turn having problems, if he wanted to have some, and I wanted to be there to help him with them. I wanted him to have
his
turn at a career to which he could devote himself. He had already
gotten seed money to launch an online investment advising company and was working passionately, for the first time in his life, to get it off the ground. I was excited for him, I was proud of him. I wanted him to know that I was actually there, as his wife, not as a messy, rebellious child. I wanted to be a
wife
.

F
or our wedding, my stepsister had given Cal and me a curious gift: a joint astrological chart. She was a student of a big-deal astrologer in Boulder and had contracted with him to record on audiocassette his interpretations of our celestial intersection. It was easily the most awesome wedding present we got. Cal and I had elected to listen to these interpretations via the tape player of my father-in-law’s midlife-crisis red Porsche, screaming down I-95 to a friend’s wedding in Virginia. On the tape, the guy told us that our chart said that I liked to talk a lot (really?) and that after a long period of stagnation, Cal’s career was revving up. But what our joint stars had highlighted in yellow marker, he said, was not only that we were going to have children, but that we would feel that being parents
together fulfilled our potential as human beings. Moreover, being parents together was
the
big cosmic purpose of our relationship.

The big cosmic purpose! This was great news, to me, anyway. There had never been any question in my mind that in spite of everything, I would have children. Certainly very little about my background and behavior indicated that I would be well suited to raising them; indeed, nothing did. I can’t say that I ever had fantasies about being The Mom, but for as long as I could remember, I had always feelings of rightness—of happy inevitability—whenever I thought about having children of my own. Had I been called on to articulate these impulses at the time, however, my answer would have been that I knew that Cal would be a perfect father—and that together, we would be able to right the karmic injustices of my own childhood. We would make other mistakes, for sure. But we would not do what my parents did.

Cal, however, wasn’t so sure—not about whether we would do a good job, but whether he wanted to have kids at all. His chief concern, sweetly, was that he and I would drift apart, that our connection would erode consequent to the calcifying effects of daily domestic life. We didn’t know it then, but it was just before I got pregnant that Cal and I had a moment that I can still feel embedded in my gut like a little shard of shrapnel. We were on a walk in Prospect Park near our Park Slope, Brooklyn, apartment, and after a while of contented, silent strolling, Cal stopped. “This is what I mean,” he said, looking at me. “I don’t want everything to be so different that we lose
this.
” I took his hand. “It will be
better
,” I said. “It will be
more
than this.”

Not long after listening to the astrological wedding tape, I was pregnant. And the planning began. Like most people who have never had children, I had pretty firm ideas about how to raise them. The plan was that I would take the standard American maternity leave of six weeks, Cal and I would find a good nanny or day-care center, and I would then resume my regular twelve-hour workday as a journalist.
Why wouldn’t I? Why wouldn’t anyone? My temperament is such that I emerged from the womb a feminist, hardly a rebellious genetic mutation in my clan. While all the women in my family would wish to be, and would be, described as “ladies”—with their unimpeachable style and manners—my mother always worked, as did her mother, and their mothers and aunties, all academics. I had always felt proud of them for it, felt that I had been given excellent examples of how work could not just support a woman but enrich her, too. Plus, not only did I like my work, I was also not sure that hanging out with a baby all day long would be my thing. Kids, yes; babies, don’t know. My mother had warned me that babies were mind-numbingly boring for anyone with a handful of brains; she urged me to line up a baby nurse at once. Finally, and ashamedly, during my pregnancy, I harbored the secret fear that Cal might love our baby more than he loved me. I ruminated on Cal’s and my walk in the park. Maybe he’d been fearful because he sensed that a switch would flip inside him on the baby’s arrival. I felt the constant pulse of a low-level dread, wondering what I would do if that turned out to be the case. He wouldn’t have to tell me. I would know. I would know the same way I knew when I first sniffed him out.

I was, again, wrong. When they lifted my daughter over my head (an emergency C-section after twenty-two hours of labor—don’t ask), she looked down at me with her globelike eyes, and I breathed:
This is the person I have been waiting my entire life to meet
. The
exact
person. It was an instant, molecular transformation. I’d been agnostic my whole life, but in the moment of my daughter’s birth, I understood Mary. After they took little Zanny out of sight to weigh her under the warming lamp, Cal looked at me, panicked: Should he stay with me? Should he go to the baby?
Go to her!
I pleaded.
Go talk to her—make sure she knows she’s not alone!
He did. The fear that Cal might love the babies more than me vanished. Neither of us would ever love anyone more than we loved our babies.