To begin thinking about having kids I first asked myself, “Do you want kids?”
“No, not especially,” I answered. “Do you?”
“No,” I answered myself. “Me neither.”
Being in agreement, we wrapped our arms around our knees in a Thorazine squat and rocked into a state of relative calm.
But what does that mean exactly, not to want kids?? What does it feel like when I run my mind over the contour of an absence? Where is that place in the body where most people have a desire for children? I can’t describe the absence; I only know what it feels like to really want something. I only know the things that on my deathbed I might regret not doing.
The novel. The book of poetry. The songs. The playing of music. The marrying of my wife. If I had not tried to do those things, I would wonder if I had missed out. They are small things, perhaps, when weighed against having children, but they are as dear to me as my own heartbeat, my own eyesight. There was no defining moment when my wife and I decided not to have kids. In fact, we have not ruled it out completely. What is notable, though, is the absence of that storied urgency. Each time we circled around the question, poked at it, tried to see honestly what we felt, each time, and there have been many, we came up strangely empty. That might sound uncomfortably literal, but what I mean is that there does seem to be a powerful wish, a yearning, for children, that most people who have them will tell you they have felt, and we don’t have it. I know what it feels like to have a lifelong yearning for something. I have plenty of lifelong yearnings. But not for children.
We don’t know what it means about us, but we accept it as true, and we trust it to mean that we should not avidly pursue parenthood. Perhaps it’s a little like being gay: You’re just this certain way and it doesn’t feel strange to you but it’s different from the way most people are. And you might be curious to have what they have, but you’re not driven to strive for it. I can say only that it feels completely normal, except when we become small-minded and start comparing, when we weigh what we’ve got in our hearts against what they’ve got in their strollers.
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When I met her, my wife was on the pill, but her doctor told her she should discontinue it because she suffers from migraines. I came of age sexually before the advent of AIDS and had never become accustomed to using condoms. So my wife used the diaphragm, but after several years of the habitual pause in the proceedings that their use requires, we noticed that there was more going on in that moment than simply the mechanical preparation; something troubled us about our refusal to accept the possibilities nature offered; our practice of prophylaxis seemed, in a word, sterile. Although we didn’t crave kids, we weren’t terrified of the possibility either, and we began to feel that we were rather rigidly standing in the way of one of life’s natural outcomes. We had never categorically and utterly ruled out becoming parents. And there was something else, some whiff of the mystical, in our decision to stop using birth control; it wasn’t entirely rational or absolute. In a sense, it was mischievous, the way two kids will explore a vacant house, not because there’s something in it that they want, but because it’s just there and they’re curious about what it would be like to walk around inside it.
We wanted not necessarily to try to have a child but to be open to the idea, to stop foreclosing on this potential within us. We became willing, at that point, to have a baby if that should occur. We knew, if it should happen, that we would respond to it as humans have for ages. But we were not attracted to the notion of trying to have a child. It was not something that, as though running a small manufacturing concern, we wanted to produce.
Nevertheless, with a certain giddy sense of revolution we opened ourselves to possibility. It felt virtuous. It felt like facing reality. It felt like we were in tune with some larger force.
But that excitement and sense of rightness soon faded for me. In its place came a subtle kind of dread. And into the previously carefree ritual of lovemaking crept a grave discipline of acceptance of the possible consequences. I have begun to wonder how I could summon a lifetime of daily parenting to sustain a moment’s philosophical inspiration. Since deciding, in a sense, to perform without a net, we live with its lifelong consequences, even though they are as yet only hypothetical.
And this has begun to weigh on me; at least it was weighing on me until I found myself sobbing with grief and joy at the end of the film “25th Hour.”
In “25th Hour” a young man has pushed his luck too far and is about to go to prison. But the movie shows us what it might be like if he got a chance to start over. His father, who has come to drive him to prison, could instead drive him out of the city and just keep driving. It would mean exile and a secretive life; he would have to resist contacting anyone from his past for years to come. But it at least would be a chance at freedom and a chance at a life. And someday in the future, his beautiful lover would join him, and they would raise a gaggle of children, and life would be beautiful.
And there I was, sobbing in the dark, because those children represented salvation, and the father’s action represented mercy. It would be the ultimate act of fatherly devotion, of rescue and protection, for this father to rescue his son from complexity and fate and consequence, from all his sins, to put him in his car and drive him down highway after highway, past city and town, past corruption and temptation, past fate and irony and money and identity, past justice, beyond the system and the harsh hand of law, to say goodbye and good luck in a tiny anonymous town where maybe his son could get a job as a bartender and nobody would know his name. I found it deeply moving that the father, traditionally the upholder of laws, would defy his caste and side with his son against the state, that he would take him out of that world rather than see him suffer at the hands of a vengeful system. I came home shaken, thinking maybe we ought to make some kids, but my wife was asleep and the poodle was on my side of the bed.
What was it that had me sobbing in the dark? The crushing sense of so much sin, so many mistakes, so much guilt and regret, and the desire to start over, to be reborn. And who has not feared that he could not control or protect or rescue his progeny from their own foolish appetites and conceits but would have to stand mute in the convict-loud hallway of a penitentiary as the electric gate slammed shut between them?
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As I write, it is Easter morning before sunrise on the western edge of San Francisco and it is still dark outside. I awoke anxious about finishing this essay — or was it my dream that woke me, or the dog at the foot of the stairs, barking because she was out of water? I filled her water bowl and looked out the window to the east and there was that big cross on Mount Davidson all lit up, another reminder of colored eggs and pastel dresses and Christian rebirth. Much as I disavow it, on this Easter morning 14 years and three days since my last drunken binge, that old demon of Christian longing is again at war with the mind’s conceits and the body’s doggy appetites; it’s hard at work as always, tearing me apart. And as I write, the two dogs are scratching and licking, making that pornographic slurping sound. I am not filled with love for them at this moment, but annoyance. I think: If this is what it’s like with dogs, just think…
Word has reached me that my father is unhappy that none of his four genetic children has produced an heir. He has never told me this. My wife says it’s not something a parent says, that it’s just something a child knows. To hear that he might have been silently hoping all this time while saying nothing is a little unnerving and a little sad. My dad always said, Be independent, do your own thing. I took him at his word and put 3,000 miles between us. And now that he is 80 the terms of our pact of protection have been reversed. It is my turn to look after him. But from this distance I cannot look after him. That makes it all the more troubling that I may have let him down by doing what he suggested.
But absent any strong prodding from my family, I simply have not been driven to have kids. And again I find myself asking, Why is that? Why am I not drawn to become a nuclear chieftain, king of some clapboard castle, happy monarch over a freckled brood? Why can’t I picture myself as a father? Is it because the picture I have of a father is an unhappy one? Is it because of lingering resentment, a desire to refuse my own father’s most secret but deepest of wishes? Is it my own wish not to repeat the strange, unaccountable bleakness of my childhood? A self-protectiveness toward unhealed wounds? Or am I concerned that a child of mine just might treat me as badly as I have treated my own father, wavering in my fund of genuine affection, accepting his generosity with thin gratitude, abandoning him in his old age?
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In a recent e-mail exchange, a letter writer pointed out that the reason genetic paternity matters to many men is that fathering a child represents a bid for immortality. While I don’t thirst for immortality through reproduction, I do thirst for it through creative acts. Still, it’s all rather silly. Once you’re dead, you won’t care whether a curious reader fingers a volume of your poetry or a great-great-grandchild stares at your portrait and wonders who you were.
When you think about where you come from it’s really quite amazing: Some knobby fish-eating proto-Welshman sharpening a crab spear on the pebbly shore of Cardigan Bay spies a budding weaver girl cracking open clams for her father in a stone hut’s shady lee and takes her in the nearby heath. That happens a thousand times and then it’s your turn.
At any rate, it looks like the buck stops here, with me and my siblings. I have an older half-brother, who has reproduced prodigiously, but we other four, by my father, remain childless and getting on in years. So my father’s ancient line, thousands upon thousands of years of apelike Homo erectus finally getting it right as Homo sapiens, begotten in all manner of coupling both foul and sweet, in tender love and brutal rape, in the most casual of dalliances and the most devoted of lives lived together, it looks as if that whole genetic “Rashomon” movie is coming to a halt.
But do I hear a cosmic voice saying, “Accept the compliment and pay it forward”? No, all I hear is a little voice that says, Finish the novel. And for all I know, that’s my agent’s voice.
I have so much to do, so much to learn, and so little time. I am far from knowing how to live. I take comfort only in knowing that if a child should ask me, “How shall I live?” I can always reply, “I don’t know. Go ask your parents.”
Dear Cary,
My younger sister is a 21-year-old college student who is “trapped” in an abusive relationship with her ex-boyfriend, who is 35 years old. She first met him when she was 19, fell in love with him and eventually moved in with him. After they started living together, she discovered that he was emotionally and verbally abusive, to the point that after six months, she had had enough, broke it off and moved out. The problem now is that for over a year, he refuses to accept that their relationship is over. Although he has not physically abused her, he has “forced” her into his car, screamed at her in public, in front of her professors and classmates, snatched her cellphone out of her hand to see if she has been talking to/texting other guys. He stalks her, physically, following her around town, staking out her apartment, and electronically, constantly checking her cellphone, email, Facebook, Amazon accounts, etc. (During the time that they were living together, he managed to get access to these accounts, and somehow manipulate the password access such that he continues to have access, despite my sister’s attempts to change passwords, etc.)
At one point things became so bad that she went to the police to file a report. She told me that the police were very unhelpful, reluctantly took the information, and seemed very unlikely to do anything unless/until he threatened her with physical harm. She says that she feels powerless to escape. At least that’s what she claims. I say this because she is by her own admission “not 100 percent certain” that she never wants to see him again. She is certain that there is no romantic future for them, but she claims she still has enough of an emotional tie to him that she is not entirely sure she wants him entirely out of her life.
Because they both live in a small college town, she cannot avoid him. He has no problem causing scenes in public which, to avoid, causes my sister to yield to his demands to talk, which often lead to screaming, crying fights, including threats on his part to commit suicide if she does not maintain contact with him.
She has told my parents and me about his abusive behavior, but because she attends school across the country, none of us have seen or can physically confront her “ex.” We are also hindered by the fact that she seems unwilling to do whatever it takes to get this psycho out of her life. It seems like during the time they lived together, he almost brainwashed her into thinking that she will never be able to fully escape his hold over her. We cannot be entirely sure that she is doing her utmost to escape his clutches.
What can I do to convince her that she needs to do whatever it takes to get him completely out of her life? And, assuming I can get her to see the light, what practical things can she do, without jeopardizing her safety, and, as much as possible, avoiding public humiliation and drama, which he has been all too willing to turn to in his efforts to control her?
A Concerned Older Brother
Dear Older Brother,
One thing that will help is to impress upon her how dangerous her situation is.
As the group AWARE points out, “Stalking is a serious, potentially life-threatening crime. Even in its less severe forms, it permanently changes the lives of the people who are victimized by this crime, as well as affecting their friends, families, and co-workers. Law enforcement is only beginning to understand how to deal with this relatively new crime.”
Send her to the website for AWARE — “Arming Women Against Rape and Endangerment” and talk with her about what she finds there.
Also, womenslaw.org, a project of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, has a good explanation of the state-by-state variations in restraining-order law.
The fact that the police were initially unhelpful should not deter her. She will need to be persistent and thorough, and follow the often maddening and apparently senseless procedures outlined by the courts.
An understanding of how women have been historically denied their rights and mistreated by the courts will also motivate her. Perhaps it will make her angry. Anger may be what she needs. The consciousness-raising that women did in order to gain rights and public understanding took time and involved much conflict.
Perhaps I can also provide a little personal history to show how difficult it can be to disentangle the personal from the political.
When women first started talking to men about our abuses of women, many found it hard to accept that the behavior we had been taught by our older role models was in fact harmful and hateful.
It was hard to change.
Many of us men did change. Some resisted loudly. It was not easy for us to give up behaviors that we had worked hard to master in the first place. What I mean is, when you’re an adolescent boy, you turn to your dad and other older males to find out how to treat women. You ask them what women want, how to treat girls, and in my case, my elder male role models were all sexists. So they taught us, their sons and nephews, to be sexists also. They didn’t call it learning how to be sexists. They called it “becoming a man.”
And then, after practicing what they had taught us during the sexual revolution in which sexual mores were loose and women were often compliant, we suddenly had to change. Women were suddenly demanding not only equality in the workplace but in the intimate spheres of romance and social life. Suddenly we were supposed to do the dishes and cook.We had not been taught even these elementary tasks of domestic maintenance! We were taught that there would always be women to do it! How crazy is that? And yet it’s true. There were degrees, of course. Some families were less sexist and more sensible than others. But for many, many men, this much was true:
We had to throw out what our fathers and uncles had taught us about how to treat women. We had to defy our fathers and uncles in this very intimate and emotional arena. It wasn’t easy.
Nor was it easy to give up our male privilege. It was not easy to give up our power. But many of us did. We saw that the assumptions we had been taught to make about women were wrong. We saw that how women were portrayed in movies and on television was wrong. We saw how this connected to women’s real unhappiness. I saw this in my own mother and in other women of her generation. I saw it and it hit home emotionally. I saw that how husbands and fathers treated women led to lasting harm. But it was not easy to give up what my father had taught me.
It was not easy and it was painful.
For there were bonding moments between men and boys that, though injurious to women, were emotionally satisfying. Sharing in the snicker and the leer, the knowing comment about a woman’s legs or breasts — these were our initiation into our fathers’ world, and with them came longed-for gestures of acceptance. These pitiful moments served as rites of passage: I whistled at a woman. I guess I’m a man now.
The courageous work of women over the past century has enshrined many rights in law and custom. Because much seems now settled, it may be hard for younger women to grasp the ways men still use the conventions of romance to oppress them. That’s what this man did. He used the conventions of romantic love to oppress your sister. Now he is using the vestiges of romantic love to render her vulnerable to further attacks. And he has turned to tormenting her in ways that could probably be prosecuted. Yet when she goes to the police she finds herself rebuffed. Here, too, she is confronting the vestiges of a centuries-old center of male power. When a young woman approaches an older policeman to complain of emotional torment arising out of a romantic relationship, vestiges of the old patriarchal order are reenacted.
So naturally she feels rebuffed. She feels as if her complaint was meager and unimportant. She has been patronized. She has been stripped of her dignity and power. It may sound hyperbolic to say this, but it is commonplace.
Knowing the larger picture can give one courage.
If your sister will educate herself about her history as a woman, she may make connections that motivate her psychologically and emotionally. That is what pioneering feminists did. That is why they met in consciousness-raising circles: They understood that if they were to succeed, they had to motivate each other. It was not only knowledge that they were transmitting, but courage.
This courage is what your sister needs. Women’s groups in her area will gladly provide some of that courage.
As for what else you can do, it might help to actually go there and talk with her. Go to the police station with her. Help her contact a lawyer who can talk to the police and frame the situation in such a way as to get a legal stay-away order.
There was a column a while back in which I was widely viewed to have given a too-lenient view of a domestic situation in which the man displayed traits that to many indicated that he was dangerous. So perhaps I can make up for it this time by insisting that this man’s behavior be treated as dangerous.
You can help by regularly checking in with her on the situation. You can also help by aiding her in changing her passwords. I don’t know the technical situation but it’s possible he knows not only her passwords but her supposedly safe “hints” — you know, the supposedly personal information only she would have. So please consult with someone about computer security and help her change her passwords in a more foolproof way.
In general, commit to giving her regular calls and pep talks to keep her motivated and confident. Visit her if at all possible. Impress upon her the seriousness of this man’s behavior. Be there in any way you can. Help her find a lawyer who can advocate for her in the courts. Don’t be discouraged. Be there. It’s what an older brother is for.
Cary,
My dear friend is about to marry the wrong person. He is a brilliant, outgoing man, always willing to put others first, and in this case to a fault. His fiancée has pursued him since high school. He avoided her romantic advances for years, knowing he could do better, but she is a very smart and manipulative person and succeeded in landing him as a boyfriend. In the early years, he occasionally expressed a desire to break up with her, but could not build the nerve to do so. Since then, almost a decade has passed, and they are still the only partners either has ever had. I know that if he could press a button and wake up tomorrow with her happy and living in another city, and him happy and single, he would do it. However, a number of factors have kept him from leaving her. Their best friends from childhood are very close-knit (for example, his older brother is best friends with her older brother), and their families are close friends as well. Understandably, he feels like to break up with her would shatter this group of people he cares so much about, not to mention the emotional impact it would have on her.
Now, if she were as kind and selfless as he, I would give them my blessing. However, she has a devious, controlling side that she has used, in combination with his naive kindness, to secure him as her lifelong mate. On a day-to-day basis, he is constantly made to apologize to her, as she finds fault with the most harmless guffaw or, heaven forbid, a difference in opinion. Recently, she forbade him from going on his own bachelor party because she suspected he would cheat on her, costing him thousands in plane and hotel fees in the process. She has used her cunning to manipulate him over the years, to the point where he feels like he has no choice but to marry her.
How can I save my friend? I have stopped confronting him on this because his wife-to-be is so shrewd and smart that she has altered his fundamental thought process: He BELIEVES she is a great partner now, a real catch, because she has told him so time and time again. Deep down, somewhere, I know he knows that he’s settling and that he could do better; he’s made this much clear by putting off her very public and repetitive pleas to get married. Is there any hope for him? There are other close friends of his who feel the same way — what can we do?
I predict that the marriage will go one of two ways. Either he’ll snap out of it, get sick of being mistreated and break it off in a nasty divorce. Or, much more likely, his wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly benevolence will get the best of him, and his fear of hurting her will force him to spend the rest of his days with someone he does not love. He’ll swallow his romantic ambitions, as he has all of his life with her, and force himself to believe that they’re meant to be together … all simply because she told him to.
Help Me Cary!
Dear Help Me!,
What if your friend had a need to be controlled and manipulated? What if his fiancée were meeting that need? Would it be wrong of her to meet that need?
If a person locks himself in a cell because he feels safe there, is that wrong?
Do we allow our friend to lock himself in his cell? Do we blame the cell? What if the keys are right there but he prefers the cell? Do we keep running over there and opening the door? Do we insist he can’t stay in the cell, that he has to come out and walk around like the rest of us good American souls, making his own decisions, standing on his own two feet? What if he doesn’t want to stand on his own two feet?
What if a man wants a woman to run his life for him? What if he wants her to tell him what he really wants so that he doesn’t have to think about what he really wants because thinking about what he really wants would mean having to ask for what he really wants. And who the hell wants to do that? That’s scary!
What if he has a strong need to not make decisions and a strong need to avoid conflict?
Basically, relationships meet needs. That’s why we have them. There are needs for love and companionship and sex that seem pretty normal. We get that. But what about other needs?
We’re not always meeting the needs people think we should be meeting. We’re not always meeting our most admirable needs. That doesn’t mean they’re not needs. They’re just not the needs other people think we should be meeting. And, well, duh: That’s what makes them our needs and not somebody else’s. They might be perverse and pathological needs, but they’re our needs. I know it’s sad. Doesn’t it help a little bit to look at it like this?
I hope this doesn’t make it worse. I’m just trying to help.
Why not leave him alone and wish him well? Why not just say to him that if there ever comes a time when he’s ready to bust out, you’ll be there for him.
That’s one way to look at it.
The other way to look at it is that she has put him under her spell. This happens too. People become hypnotized and lost. They become dependent on others to run their lives. They get addicted to drugs. They retreat into fantasy and it’s not entirely choice; there is a malevolent force at work.
When that happens, we can say things. We can say, you’re ruining your life. We can book a hotel room and get all his friends and family to sit on chairs and couches waiting for his arrival, and then tell him, Oh, listen, I just have to drop by here at this hotel to pick up my sister, won’t you come up there with me, and then Boom! Surprise! It’s an Intervention!
Interventions are great. When else do family and friends say what they really want and what they really feel? Interventions are terrific. The tears, the choices, the driving off to rehab!
But a pre-wedding intervention would be kinda weird. Hey, dude, we really hate your fiancée. We think she’s ruining your life. We think you should dump her.
You see the problem with that?
So here’s a thought: We act as if we have repressed our desire for happiness and that’s the problem, and if we only let it out, we would be happy. But what if we actually have the reverse situation? What if what’s actually repressed in our society is not the pursuit of happiness but true tragic consciousness? What if our overwhelming social insistence on happiness has actually driven the tragic underground, so that it is the tragic that threatens to arise out of repression, so that that it is the tragic that we seek in our intimate moments, in our private moments? And what if that is why we have these problems with drugs and suicide and depression — not because we’re not happy enough, but because we have repressed the tragic?
What if not everybody wants to visit San Diego at least once in their lives?
If that were the case, if grief were the thing most repressed in society, then we would find ways to express our melancholia, our sense of the tragic, in our intimate relations.
Another way to look at your friend’s situation is to consider the possibility that he is getting ready for something but is not ready yet. Maybe his soul is getting ready. Say a fierce battle awaits the soul. We can be in a holding pattern. There is not much to do while waiting for the soul’s great challenge. So we amuse ourselves with pastimes.
Maybe she is a pastime. Maybe he is waiting.
One thing I know: We can’t change people.
I hope this helps you accept what he’s doing so it won’t be so painful to watch. Maybe if you think about it in terms of his needs, strange as they may be, you won’t feel you’re letting him down by not interfering.
Promise to be there for him if he ever decides to leave the cage.
Dear Cary,
I have a friend that cannot speak about the president of the United States without using the word “monkey” or “chimpanzee.”
There have been presidents I was not thrilled about, but certainly I would not stoop to this.
This individual is well-off, has a degree and is considerate about most other topics.
What the HELL is his problem?
Thanks Cary,
Bewildered
Dear Bewildered,
Your friend’s problem is that he is a racist.
It’s not nice to label people. A racist may be an excellent builder of miniature racing-car models. He may be a good whistler.
But he’s still a racist. Being a racist is stupid and repugnant. What’s worse, it can spread. It’s each person’s job to not be a racist.
He can stop being a racist. You can help. You can tell him that while he may have certain racist thoughts, he can stop being a racist by not voicing any of these thoughts ever under any circumstances.
Maybe that would lead to some positive personal change. Or maybe he would give you a hurt, bewildered look of confusion and self-pity that makes you want to punch him.
Don’t punch him. That won’t help.
Well, it might help a little. It might temporarily curb his outward expressions of racism. But I’m against hitting people even as a gift of enlightenment.
Just tell him that being a racist is not cool anywhere in the United States of America or in Europe or Asia or Africa or North America or South America or Australia or Antarctica. which pretty much means the whole world, all the continents, plus the open oceans and in outer space also. Racism is not cool even in outer space or on other planets. It’s not cool, period. It’s not cool anywhere, not in public or in private. It’s one of those things that you just want to get rid of completely and be done with.
Tell your friend that the next time he says some kind of racist remark like that, that you’re terminating all contact with him.
Now, everyone has a shadow self that embodies the repressed. We all have our share of unvoiced hatred and fear, irrational beliefs, strange, criminal impulses. Thoughts come into our heads that we must censor because to voice them would disturb others.
We may have sexual fantasies about our friends’ wives or husbands, or their sisters or brothers or their children; we might have taboo curiosities. We may find ourselves imagining elaborate ways to connect physically that involve hydraulics, servo motors, pulleys and latex.
Some of us have so many of these thoughts that we move to San Francisco.
But let’s not complicate the issue.
Also, there are rumored to exist tiny protected intellectual zones where people have advanced degrees in things you never heard of and special vocabularies come into use in a specialized context, where you can say things that have several layers and degrees of irony and are understood in sophisticated ways that you couldn’t explain to your friend even if you understood them yourself, which you’re not going to.
That’s different.
There is also weird humor which unless you’re Sarah Silverman, don’t try that either. It’s too advanced for you.
And don’t get on your high horse and pretend there are degrees, that racism exists on a continuum. There are no degrees. There is no continuum.
Racism is bad. It’s evil. Nobody should be voicing racist thoughts.
If your friend keeps it up, just totally, radically de-friend him. Become his special not-friend.
Be done with it. It’s that simple.
Dear Cary,
Recently my husband of 18 years has explored his sexuality with other men. He admitted having four sexual encounters with random men he solicited from Craigslist. After a week of hell, and many a shouting match, he begged me to take him back, claiming that his experimentation is not worth losing his family. As in a textbook scenario, he, somehow, convinced himself that I, being very liberal and supportive of gay community, would understand, and maybe even approve, his urges. Having two teenage daughters and being a stay-at-home mom, I have initially agreed to let him back into the family fold, after all his STD tests came back clean.
I have immediately lined up a therapist, not being able to go through the crisis by myself. I have consulted the divorce lawyer as well, but decided that I simply cannot afford to leave him before I can secure some sort of support system, income, job, anything that would assure my landing on solid ground. Now, being middle-aged and with thin résumé, getting a job will be difficult in this economy, and I am more and more inclined to pursue separation, since staying in the marriage is not really emotionally healthy for me. I do give it a try every day, and every day is an effort, but, although he did give up his “encounters,” he still maintains virtual presence in the gay community through porn and his private Flickr account(s). Although not a deal breaker, his Internet activity makes me conclude that he is not willing to make an effort toward the true reconciliation of our relationship, and that his real orientation is something he will not be able to deny for much longer. I do realize that his orientation is not a choice, but his behavior is.
My priority is our girls, who are, hopefully, oblivious to the extent of our marital crisis, but I am asking myself lately if it is time to let him go, and hope for the best for all four of us? I do not want to hurt the girls, but I do not want to carry on with this agony for much longer either. This past couple of months have been hardest in my life, just watching everything I ever believed in crumble apart. My self-esteem is still pretty high, but self-pity creeps in every now and then, hurting my ability to think straight. I want out; the question is do I wait until the girls are off to college (another couple of years), or do I seek an exit now.
Your advice is appreciated.
Str8 Spouse
Dear Str8 Spouse,
You need concrete help. For that, you have wisely chosen a therapist and a lawyer.
What I can do is help you form a narrative or map.
Because you are human you will seek meaning in what happened. We seek meaning in misfortune whether we get cancer or have an accident or are bombed out of our houses by unseen jets. It helps. It helps to make a story out of what happens.
Your story will be something like this. You fell in love and got married and had two beautiful children and had always thought there might be unexplored territory between you and your husband. But you did not go there. You may have learned a way of relating that, though intimate, allowed for certain unexplored regions. You may have termed this privacy, or given it some meaning. But you sensed that your husband was not completely transparent to you, that he had secrets or evasions. Having no clear guidelines, you let these areas, and perhaps these doubts, go unexplored. You didn’t press the issue. You made small incremental decisions that maintained the relationship and the family.
It may be that at the first you wondered if this was the way it was supposed to be. You may have talked to your friends about it, subtly suggesting that things were “good” but not “great,” that you wondered sometimes …
Maybe. Maybe not. I think it likely, if you are honest, that you had vague suspicions.
At any rate, now it has become clear that your husband has been hiding a great deal from you. So you are incensed, enraged, hurt, betrayed. You’ve had a terrible shock. Gone are the bedrock vows and beliefs on which your marriage rested. You are now in the sticky muck of uncertainty. It is hard to walk now; everything is harder.
For a while it’s going to be one day at a time, slogging through, some days better than others. You will have to decide if you can continue living with him and for how long, and under what circumstances, and for those decisions, you have help through a lawyer and a therapist. One way or another you will arrive in a future that was not the future you imagined.
What do I see for you in the future? I see a wiser woman; I see a woman who finds new strength in herself to protect her daughters and make a new life. I see a woman who now knows you never really know, who learns that when disaster happens you’re capable of more than you realized. And maybe there will be some new rules in this story — rules about hunches and doubts, a rule that says if something doesn’t feel right, it isn’t.
We are educated to be sensible and quasi-scientific in our decisions. In the conscious realm we operate on what we can see and hear. But in the unconscious realm, the animal realm, the realm of hunches and doubts, we need to listen more carefully to unformed notions we don’t fully understand and yet which persist, in their way, in their language of symbols and doubts and strange coincidence.
I wish to leave you with this: You are not alone. This has happened before. You have strength and support to call on. You can get through this and be stronger and wiser. You have help. You have people who love you and are on your side. You are going to be OK.
Dear Cary,
I don’t know how to put this any way but bluntly, so here goes. My mom let me and my brother breast-feed really, really late– until we were 4 or 5. She let us touch and play with her breasts for years after that. She never told us what sex was, and later when I found out for myself, my body changing on its own, I felt revulsion at the all-too-recent memories of how I touched, and wanted to touch, my own mother. I hated that she hadn’t stopped me.
Now I’m 18 and have a little sister. Just like with me and my older brother, Mom breast-fed her really late, and now at 9 years old, my sister still likes to feel my mother’s breasts. My sister is my mom’s last child, and so in several areas Mom persists in regarding her as a baby.
I try to understand my mom. I realize the idea of her last kid growing up must be scary and depressing. But this behavior is disgusting to watch or even to know it is going on when you’re not there. Additionally, it’s delusional and perverse to excuse, and even encourage, such behavior in a growing young woman on the grounds that she’s an infant. Who knows why I wanted, and now my sister wants, to touch my mother’s breasts at age 9? Certainly not because we wanted to breast-feed. But Mom’s so convinced of my sister’s innocence that she refuses to consider she could be encouraging inappropriate impulses that my sister is too unaware to understand.
I know those impulses are there. It happened to me. But for obvious reasons, I can’t tell my mother that.
What I do tell her? That I’m grossed out and that my sister is too old? Mom won’t listen. My sister, of course, listens to Mom over me and gets mad at me for saying anything. So I’m at a loss for what to do, and I don’t want my sister to turn out with the revulsion of her own memories and the confusion of her feelings that I suffered.
I’m so disgusted it’s keeping me up at night. I’m angry and stressed.
What should I do?
Revolted
Dear Revolted,
I want you to consult with a psychotherapist. Look for someone who has helped others with experiences similar to yours.
You could read and study about this. It wouldn’t hurt to get a basic understanding of child development and how such experiences can later affect us in troubling and unexpected ways. But knowledge alone will not be enough to avoid the later effects of this early experience.
The best thing you can do for yourself now is to find a therapist who can respond to you in a clear, responsible and nonjudgmental way and sit with you, week after week, as you tell your story. That would also be the best person to advise you on how to talk with your mom and your sister should you choose to do so at some point.
You are in a great situation right now. You know what happened, and it is still fresh. You have not distorted what happened or rationalized it or put it out of your mind. So this is the time to act.
You will meet obstacles in your search for the right psychotherapist. So consider this a quest of monumental importance. It may be the most important thing you ever do — more important than your education or your later occupation.
Feelings of guilt and self-hatred may arise. As such feelings come up, remind yourself that they are not helpful. They are, in fact, the direct result of this experience that has left you feeling troubled and conflicted.
You may also hear voices telling you that talking about it is taboo or will expose others to harm. That is why the confidential setting of a psychotherapist’s office is the ideal space in which to tell your story. You will not be “outing” your mother or have to confront her; you will not be causing family conflict. All you will be doing in therapy is resuming, as a slightly older person, the course of development that was sidetracked at an early age by these unusual experiences.
You have the chance to live a happy, productive life, unburdened by this. Moreover, once you attain some understanding of this, you can be of use to others who have had similar experiences.
Now, I believe that a rich country like ours ought to provide for its people in certain basic ways. One of these ways is in medical care. Psychotherapy is a kind of medical care. So I believe that high-quality psychotherapy and psychiatric care ought to be readily available to people of all income levels.
This is not currently the case in America. Instead, we must be creative, energetic and insistent to get the care we need. This is cruelly paradoxical, because it is precisely at moments when we are most burdened that we are called upon to be entrepreneurial and creative in our search for care.
You will need strength and resilience as you search for the right therapist. To keep on your quest you may need to repeat to yourself that this is indeed a life-or-death matter. People who have such experiences can later fall into depression, suicide and addiction. We don’t want that to happen to you.
Some people are uncomfortable with this topic, so they snicker and make childish jokes. Beware of shaming remarks. It would be great if they could just slide off your back, but the truth is that such remarks often do sting. Do not pretend that such remarks are not hurtful. Instead, feel the sting and wait for it to subside, like the sting of a bee. Accept that the world has many cruel and ignorant people in it, but you can survive and live a happy life.
Don’t listen to anyone who says to just get over it. We humans don’t often just “get over” stuff like this. Not without help. So get help.
You can find the help you need, and you deserve it. It’s not your fault what happened when you were just a kid.
(Credit: Zach Trenholm/Salon) 