Tiny Beautiful Things (28 page)

There are other reasons, usually more fleeting, that one spouse may not be earning money in any given period: if he or she is unemployed or seriously ill or attending school full-time or caring for an infirm or dying parent or working in a field in which the money comes only after an extended period of what may or may not turn out to be unpaid labor.

Neither of you appears to be in any of those circumstances. While it’s technically true that both of your spouses are unemployed, it seems clear that something more complex is at play here. Your spouse, Working for Two, has such a spotty and brief record of employment that unemployment is her customary mode rather than a temporary state of affairs. Your spouse, Responsible One, has apparently drifted into a post-unemployment funk and has given up the search for a job. You both feel overly burdened and seriously bummed out. You’re both desperate for change. You’ve both shared your feelings with your partners and been met with compassionate indifference (i.e.,
I feel terrible, sweetie, but I’m not going to do a damn thing about it
).

What a mess.

I hope it’s not going to be news to you when I say you can’t make your partners get jobs. Or at least you can’t make them
get jobs by doing what you’ve done so far—appealing to their better nature regarding what’s fair and reasonable, imploring them to act out of their concern for you and your wishes, as well as your collective financial well-being. Whatever dark angst is keeping your spouses from taking responsibility for their lives—depression, anxiety, a loss of self-confidence, a fear-based desire to maintain the status quo—it’s got a greater hold on them than any angry fits you’ve pitched about being the only one bringing in any dough.

It’s a truism of transformation that if we want things to be different we have to change ourselves. I think both of you are going to have to take this to heart the way anyone who has ever changed anything about their lives has had to take it to heart: by making it not just a nice thing we say, but a hard thing we do. Your spouses may or may not decide to get jobs in response to your changes, but that is out of your control.

The way I see it, there are two paths out of your misery. They are:

So let’s say you went with option A. Both of you express love and adoration for your partners. You don’t want to lose them. How might you accept your deadbeat darlings for who they are at this era of their lives? Is this possible? Is what they give
you worth the burden they place upon you? Are you willing to shelve your frustrations about your partner’s fiscal failings for a period of time? If so, how long? Can you imagine feeling okay with being the sole employed member of your union a year from now? Three years? Ten? Might you together agree to downsize and reduce expenses so that your single income becomes more feasible? What if you rethought the whole thing? What if instead of lamenting the fact that your partner is unemployed, the two of you embraced it as a choice you made together? Reframing it as a mutually agreed upon decision, in which you are the breadwinners and your partners are the significantly supportive, non-income-earning helpmates, would give you a sense of agency that’s lacking now.

Working for Two, you don’t mention if your partner does more than her share around the house, but Responsible One, you state that “the house is clean, the laundry is done, the dog is walked.” That’s something. In fact, it’s quite a lot. It’s not money, but your husband is positively contributing to your lives by seeing to those things. Oodles of people with jobs would be deeply pleased to return to a clean house that doesn’t contain mountains of dirty laundry and a dog demanding to go out. Many people pay people to do those things for them or they return from work only to have to work another, domestic shift. Your husband’s unpaid work benefits you. With that in mind, what other ways could your partners lighten your burden if they refuse to lighten it financially? Might you draw up a list of your household and individual needs—financial, logistical, domestic, and administrative—and divide the responsibilities in a manner that feels equitable, in terms of overall workload, that takes your job into account?

While I encourage you to sincerely consider coming to peace with your spouses’ perpetual unemployment, I’ll admit I’m presenting this option with more optimism than I feel. One thing I noted about both of your letters is that—while money is a major stress point—what worries you most deeply isn’t money. It’s how apathetic your partners are, how indifferent they are to their ambitions, whether they be income-earning or not. It would be one thing if your partners were these happy, fulfilled people who simply believed their best contribution to your coupledom would be as homemakers and personal assistants, but it seems clear that your partners have used home and the security of your relationships as a place to retreat and wallow, to sink into rather than rise out of their insecurities and doubts.

So let’s talk about option B. Working for Two, you say that you won’t give your partner an ultimatum, but I encourage you to rethink that. Perhaps it will help if you come to see what I see so clearly now: that you and Responsible One are the ones who’ve been given ultimatums, at least of an unstated, passive-aggressive sort.

Ultimatums have negative connotations for many because they’re often used by bullies and abusers, who tend to be comfortable pushing their partners’ backs against a wall, demanding that he or she choose this or that, all or nothing. But when used by emotionally healthy people with good intentions, ultimatums offer a respectful and loving way through an impasse that will sooner or later destroy a relationship on its own anyway. Besides, the two of you have been up against the wall for years now, forced by your partners to be the sole financial providers, even when you have repeatedly stated that you will not and cannot continue to be. You’ve continued. Your partners
have made their excuses and allowed you to do what you said you don’t want to do, even though they know it makes you profoundly unhappy.

Your ultimatum is simple. It’s fair. And it’s stating your own intentions, not what you hope theirs will be. It’s:
I won’t live like this anymore. I won’t carry our financial burdens beyond my desires or capabilities. I won’t enable your inertia. I won’t, even though I love you. I won’t, because I love you. Because doing so is ruining us
.

The difficult part is, of course, what to do in the wake of those words, but you don’t have to know exactly what it will be right away. Maybe it will be breaking up. Maybe it will be mapping out a course of action that will save your relationships. Maybe it will be the thing that finally forces your partners to change. Whatever it is, I strongly advise you both to seek answers to the deeper questions underlying your conflicts with your partners while you figure it out. Your joint and individual issues run deeper than someone not having a job.

You can do this. I know you can. It’s how the real work is done. We can all have a better life if we make one.

Yours,
Sugar

Dear Sugar
,

For those of us who aren’t lucky enough to “just know,” how is a person to decide if he or she wants to have a child? I’m a forty-one-year-old man and have been able thus far to postpone that decision while I got all the other pieces of my life in order. Generally speaking, I’ve enjoyed myself as a childless human. I’ve always had a hunch that as I continued on my path my feelings about parenthood would coalesce one way or the other and I would follow that where it took me. Well, my path has taken me here, to the point where all of my peers are having children and expounding on the wonders (and, of course, trials) of their new lives, while I keep enjoying the same life
.

I love my life. I love having the things that I know will be in shorter supply if I become a parent. Things like quiet, free time, spontaneous travel, pockets of nonobligation. I really value them. I’m sure that everyone does, but on the grand gradient of the human condition, I feel I sit farther to one end than most. To be blunt, I’m afraid to give that up. Afraid that if I become a parent, I will miss my “old” life
.

As a male, I know that I have a little more leeway in terms of the biological clock, but my partner, who is now forty, does not.
She is also on the fence about a child, and while the finer points of our specific concerns on the subject may differ, we are largely both grappling with the same questions. At this point, we’re trying to tease out the signal from the noise: Do we want a child because we really want a child, or are we thinking about having one because we’re afraid we will regret not having one later? We both now accept that the time for deferment is coming to a close and we need to step up and figure it out
.

When I try to imagine myself as a father, I often think back to my two wonderful cats that I had from the age of twenty-two until I buried them in the backyard almost two years ago. They were born prematurely to a mother that was too sick to care for them. I bottle-fed them, woke up in the middle of the night to wipe their bottoms, was there for every stage of their growth from kitten to cat, and basically loved the bejeezus out of them for their entire lives. I raised them to be trusting, loving creatures. And I did it consciously, even thinking at the time that it was great training for the day I had a child if that felt like the right thing. I really was their dad. And I loved it. Yet I also loved it that I could put an extra bowl of food and water on the floor and split town for a three-day weekend
.

So here I am now exploring the idea of becoming a father. Exploring it for real and deeply. Sugar, help me
.

Signed,
Undecided

Dear Undecided,

There’s a poem I love by Tomas Tranströmer called “The Blue House.” I think of it every time I consider questions such as yours about the irrevocable choices we make. The poem
is narrated by a man who is standing in the woods near his house. When he looks at his house from this vantage point, he observes that it’s as if he’d just died and he was now “seeing the house from a new angle.” It’s a wonderful image—that just-dead man among the trees—and it’s an instructive one too. There is a transformative power in seeing the familiar from a new, more distant perspective. It’s in this stance that Tranströmer’s narrator is capable of seeing his life for what it is while also acknowledging the lives he might have had. The poem strikes a chord in me because it’s so very sadly and joyfully and devastatingly true. Every life, Tranströmer writes, “has a sister ship,” one that follows “quite another route” than the one we ended up taking. We want it to be otherwise, but it cannot be: the people we might have been live a different, phantom life than the people we are.

And so the question is who do you intend to be. As you’ve stated in your letter, you believe you could be happy in either scenario—becoming a father or remaining childless. You wrote to me because you want clarity about which course to take, but perhaps you should let that go. Instead, take a figurative step into the forest like that man in the poem and simply gaze for a while at your blue house. I think if you did, you’d see what I see: that there will likely be no clarity, at least at the outset; there will only be the choice you make and the sure knowledge that either one will contain some loss.

You and I are about the same age. I have two children, whom I birthed in close succession in my mid-thirties. If a magic baby fairy had come to me when I was childless and thirty-four and promised to grant me another ten years of fertility so I could live a while longer in the serene, feline-focused, fabulously unfettered life I had, I’d have taken it in a flash. I,
too, had spent my adult years assuming that someday, when it came to becoming a mother, I’d “just know.” I, too, placed myself on the leave-me-the-hell-alone end on the “grand gradient of the human condition.” I decided to become pregnant when I did because I was nearing the final years of my fertility and because my desire to do this thing that everyone said was so profound was just barely stronger than my doubts about it were.

So I got knocked up. With a total lack of clarity. On this, Mr. Sugar and I were in complete accord. Though we were generally pleased to be having a baby, we were also deeply alarmed. We liked to have sex and ramble around foreign countries in decidedly un-baby-safe ways and spend hours reading in silence on two couches that faced each other across the living room. We liked to work for days without interruption on our respective art forms and take unscheduled naps and spend weeks backpacking in the wilderness.

We did not, throughout my pregnancy, have many conversations about how awesome it was going to be once our baby was born and doing these things would become either indisputably or close to impossible. Mostly, we had ambivalent, mildly sickening talks about how we hoped we hadn’t made a dreadful mistake.
What if we love the baby but not as much as everyone says we will?
I’d ask him every couple of weeks.
What if the baby bores us or annoys us or grosses us out? What if we want to ride our bicycles across Iceland or hike around Mongolia? Fuck. We
do
want to ride our bicycles across Iceland or hike around Mongolia!