marriage issues

A Revolutionary Road


We spent most of Saturday scouring Edmonton for cross-country skiing gear. After a particularly fruitless stretch (it’s very late in the season and stores are picked thin), we stopped at the Chapters across from Camper’s Village on Whitemud to use the washroom and grab tea and snacks. As I waited for the barista to finish up, I caught sight of a middle-aged couple sitting at a nearby table. He read the paper and she thumbed through a book, reading sections of it out loud to him. They didn’t make eye contact and if I hadn’t been sure she was reading to him, I would have wondered why two strangers were sitting together in a coffee shop.

The book? The Idiots Guide to Surviving Divorce.

Rob and I watched two dvd’s this past week. Revolutionary Road with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and a French-Canadian film from 1986 titled The Decline of the American Empire. On the surface, they have nothing in common. The first found its base in a 1961 book of the same name. It’s considered to be one of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th Century. Written several years before Betty Freidan’s feminist treatise, it clearly calls out the hollow existence of suburban 1950’s American. While I don’t think the author intended for it to be a feminist novel, the movie clearly sees it that way. The second movie supposedly derives from a book of the same name that one of the main characters wrote. All the characters save two teach at an unidentified university. The film spends most of its time going back and forth between the four men and the four women who have been acquainted, intimately, with each other for a long time. The decline in question concerns male/female relationships and the discussions are driven by sex. Sexual infidelity to be more precise.

Interestingly, both films deal with couples who don’t know their partners, make wildly inaccurate assumptions about each other and feel incredibly entitled to put their own needs ahead of the success of their relationships.

The French film, though billed as a comedy, makes a viewer feel embarrassed for the characters more than anything else. Revolutionary Road, however, made me cry.

Winslet’s character commits suicide in the last fifteen minutes or so of the movie. She performs an early second trimester abortion on herself in the master bath using what appeared to be a douchebag and a pointy piece of hard rubber. She does this with full knowledge of the danger, and the film makes it clear she expects to die. Though she is portrayed as a bit flighty and prone to hysterics, all I saw was a woman who’d made choices for her life thinking they would turn out differently in spite of the fact that her choices really only lead in the direction of where she ends up.  I understood her frustration. I just couldn’t fathom such a willful denial of the obvious – she had options. Options that would have been socially ostracizing for her given the time period, but she had them. She wanted life to be different without sacrifice or great effort on her part.

I felt sorry for DiCaprio’s character. Rob didn’t. The character floated through life on charm and half-assing, rising to challenges on whims really only to see those brief moments of effort be rewarded out of proportion. None of that is off the mark, and the film doesn’t give much background for the couple. We don’t know how they got from A to B, just that they did. It seemed to me though that his apathy was driven by her need for them to be more special than the suburban crowd.

They viewed suburbia as a trap. The people around them as complacent and willing accomplices to their enslavement. They saw the hopelessness and the pointlessness. They were wise and better than that.

Maybe. But perception is all. We live primarily in a moment that changes with every moment that passes. The impermanence should liberate us. Inspire. Instead these two look back constantly at a moment in time when anything was supposedly possible and they choose to walk the road that led them to where they were. It didn’t occur to either that they might be “trapped” because they were too lazy or frightened or both to take the roads. Or that one life is really as good as another if you decide to make it so.

Anyway, it made me cry. I understand her longing for freedom. To be just her and to answer to no one’s dreams but her own. I remembered me in my little house in Valley Junction before Rob and before Will. Just me. Sometimes I do miss that house. But, it was lonely. Loneliness so deep that I can still feel the echo. Even in widowhood I was not so profoundly alone, and I am grateful that I will never experience that again in my life. I can’t imagine someone longing for that.

Cutesy Feminism


Sandra Tsing Loh annoys me even more than Caitlin Flangan.

I wrote a post about her over the summer or maybe it was earlier fall. She is the writer who got tired of her marriage but instead of working on her issues, she had an affair which precipitated her divorce. She has a live in relationship now – and I won’t go into why I think those types of set-ups are usually doomed from the onset – and she finds herself, again, the breadwinner.

Her recent piece in The New York Times (read it while you can, they are putting the pay wall back up soon) is on needing a wife. Because every good feminist needs a wife to offset the uselessness of her husband, the stuck in the 1950’s Reagan-era nostalgic Neanderthal caricature  sperm donor her biological clock blinded her into breeding with.

I get tired of hearing this worn out bit of nonsense.

Oh, it’s not nonsense that while women have gained full-time employment outside their homes in near parity numbers with men over the last three decades, men have not picked up the home-making or child care slack at the same rates. In fact it’s not even a decent comparison when one looks at the numbers.

What is tiresome is the whining.

I hate to quote Dr. Phil here, but the man made a valid point when he said. and repeatedly,

“You teach people how to treat you.”

If your mate is not shopping, cooking, cleaning or caring for offspring in a share and share alike way, say something about it. Tell him/her what you expect. Why you expect it. Work out a compromise that is agreeable to you both.

But men can’t be reasoned with, women argue. And they should just see that work that needs doing and that I can’t do it all. What is wrong with them?

Nothing. Just as there is nothing wrong with women who don’t seem able to get their minds around the fact that men, despite evolution, still can’t read our minds or make the correlation between housework and foreplay.

I was the breadwinner in my first marriage and my late husband did the cooking. In fact, he insisted that grocery shopping be a bonding experience for us – something that made me crazy because he had to go up and down every single aisle in the store whether we needed to or not. Shopping took less time when I was a single mother wrangling a toddler who refused to sit in the cart than it did with her father.

He would have done the laundry too but his indifference to sorting my colors and materials would have totaled my wardrobe.

He got mad at me when I did yard work. I had summers off, being a teacher, and time to do it that he lacked. But he found yard work soothing and exercised his gender veto.

Our motto from the beginning was that nothing be stewed over. If someone had an issue, discussions needed to happen.

“I can’t read minds,” he told me.

Now I stay home. It’s just the way things worked out. Rob would be just as happy – happier really – if I was bringing home the bread instead of shopping for it.

If the majority of the cooking, baking, cleaning, shopping etc. falls on me, it’s because I have the time. Rob willingly chips in, and even more often, simply does things without my having to mention it at all. Laundry, cleaning (he does the bathrooms because my allergies don’t mix with harsh cleaning products).

And mind-reading is off limits, though we are so alike that sometimes I bet we could do it if we just practiced a bit.

You trained your husbands well, women will marvel. But truthfully I did nothing aside from open my mouth and express my thoughts on how a marriage should work. I did it more often with Will than I do with Rob, but I was Will’s first wife and Rob had 27 years of partnering tucked away in his resumé when I met him.

There are no abbreviations. Like children, spouses assess the lay of the land and act accordingly. Men and women. Dr.Phil’s hackneyed home spun advice is valid.

The whole “needing a wife” thing is cliché. What women need is to speak up, and probably screen men a bit more in the beginning to ward off that buyer’s remorse some many end up with.

Ghosts of Our Lives Past


Wednesday morning I was waked by a finger poke to my side. It wasn’t painful but meant to get attention. I was startled but thought it was Dee, even though she wouldn’t come into our bedroom at such an early hour. We trained her long ago to treat our bedroom as off-limits. I had an open bedroom policy for her when she was little and it was just her and I, but once Rob and I coupled, I decided it was time to go old school like my folks. We kids weren’t allowed in their bedroom under pain of pain. I can remember standing at the door in the middle of the night, sick as a dog and still not daring to put so much as my big toe in their room without permission.

Dee knocks, a very soft rapping, or if she is unwell, she calls from her room.

I half sat up and found no one.

They’re back, I thought.

The house has been quiet and empty of spirits for a while. That feeling of being watched had disappeared after the cat incident on Rob’s birthday. But that poke in the side woke more than just me.

I didn’t mention it to Rob. It was just a poke. There was nothing behind it other than a call to attention, and I figured I would know what I was supposed to be paying attention to so enough. Ghosts, I have come to discover, are resourceful.

The next morning was 6AM Ashtanga. Yeah, I get up at five and drag my sleepy self out into the cold, drive into town and pretzelize myself with a vigorous yoga workout for an hour. Rob, sweetheart that he is, sets his alarm to wake me because my alarm is alarming and lost since May when we ripped up the hardwood in the bedrooms to prepare for new, smoothly delicious looking hardware (which is down now and gorgeous in case your mind was inquiring).

Shortly before five, I hear the soft knocking on the door that I associate with Dee. I am instantly awake and waiting for her voice, but I hear nothing. I sat up and looked toward the door, thinking that I would see light. The doors are back up but the trim isn’t and if Dee’s light is on, I can see it.

It was dark.

I laid back, thinking that the alarm should be going off soon and pondering when I heard the stairs creak. Our stairs are in needing of a good screwing down and make quite a distinctive sound when anyone comes up or goes down. This time, the creaks were descending and as Rob’s alarm went off, I found I was not in a hurry to follow.

Now I have never seen a spirit/ghost/whatever your preferred pc term is in the time I have been living here. Heard a voice. Being shoved and poked and watched, but haven’t seen anything.

“What is that overhead?” Rob asked.

I looked straight up and there was a white light twirling just about our pillows. It reminded me of  similar experience Rob had in the early morning hours last year when we were in the midst of dying fathers through the fall and end of the year. The light swirled like dust caught in a sunbeam.

“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t tell him about the knock on the door. Mostly because I didn’t think the sign was for him at the time.

Reluctantly I crawled out of bed and headed downstairs. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d seen someone in the living room or office at that point but saw nothing but dark. I put on my yoga togs, had some tea and toast and headed into town with a bit of trepidation because the early morning traffic that races by our hamlet on the way to the plants is careless and will someday kill someone. I crawled through the intersection and drove in no great hurry to town.

The street where the yoga studio is located is deserted at just before six in the morning. The building is right next to a bar/flophouse where the clientage run mostly to people who flirt with homelessness on a monthly basis. I have been heckled and ogled and generally creeped out by the inhabitants to the point that I avoid walking directly past it, so I park right in front of the studio.

Yoga passed and I did not fall over from exhaustion but I was tired. I’d lost a lot of sleep with Dee’s being ill. She had been up in the night and I was running on not quite six hours. In days of yore, I could do 4 or 5 hours of sleep a night for weeks on end but these days my body will not stand for the abuse. It literally punishes me with all manner of threat of collapse.

After yoga, I climbed into the truck, wondering still about what I was supposed to be paying attention to. The radio was set to the XM 70’s station and the song that came up first was Cheap Trick’s I Want You to Want Me. I first heard that song the summer before high school. The next door neighbor’s had a grand-daughter visiting from California who was my age. She attached herself to me without my permission and I was forced to entertain her for the month she was there. She was vapid, willfully illiterate and thought poking sticks at the local in crowd was a fun pastime. Her only redeeming quality was a collection of the latest hits on cassette tape. She had a Cheap Trick cassette that she let me borrow and copy which is where I first heard this song. Decades later, I marry Rob and come to discover that this same song was “their song”. That love song that all couples have. The one that played when they first met or danced or kissed or had sex or simply dogged them through their first weeks/months together.

Now I am confused. Why would I get a song sign from my husband’s late wife?

Later in the morning during one of the several phone conversations Rob and I have during the day (we used to email back and forth all day when I was in Iowa and he was here – now we call each other), I told him about the poke and the knock on the door. He had no explanation, but later called me back to say that perhaps our house was s conduit for recently departed spirits. An older gentleman down the alley had died recently and maybe it was him.

Loathing that idea very much, I told Rob about the Cheap Trick song.

“Well, that shoots my theory to hell, ” he said.

Which was fine with me because I do not want to live in a conduit for the recently deceased.

That evening as he was going through his blog reader, he happened upon the posting of The Zoo for the day and what was their song video du jour? Yeah, Cheap Trick.

There has been nothing since. I don’t know if we were just getting Christmas greetings or if it was a heads up. And you might wonder why Shelley would contact me first instead of Rob but it’s not much different from Rob getting dream visits from my late husband as opposed to Will showing up in my dreams. Our passed on spouses appear to be quite comfortable with our choices in second mates.

It’s all very fitting for the season I suppose. Very Dickens. We haven’t neglected Christmas here this year but it has been rather lackadaisical and low-key in terms of preparation. I believe this is an outgrowth of our discomfort with the materialism though.

If I should discover deep meaning in the visitations and signs, however, I will let you know.