were made of cold, hard cement that always seemed slightly moist with despair.
So, at the end of a day at school where the police had come, yet again, for locker searches—the dogs so loaded down with loot the officers would high-five each other in the halls—I would come home, exhausted, to our overstuffed house. The cat had peed in the corner again. He hadn’t liked moving any more than I had, it seemed. My dog was joyous to see me; so joyous, in fact, he had chewed up the front curtains on the door for a better view. I could hardly blame him; with no fence in the backyard, he was cooped up all day in our dollhouse and was just about ready to lose his dog mind.
But once I trudged through the front door, taking the three steps into the kitchen, and cracked open a beer, something in me would crack open, too. I would feel better. A lot better. Because really, I deserved a beer. Police dogs were involved. My life seemed to be falling on top of me. A beer or two were completely understandable.
I hated my job. Which made me wonder—if being a teacher was all I had ever wanted in life, was all I was about, and now it wasn’t, then who was I? And if being back home had been so much more comfortable and happy, with a great job and faculty who actually knew my name and frequently gave me awards lauding my fabulousness, was it just a teensy bit possible I had made a mistake?
What was more important? The job? Or the husband?
And if I was thinking about all this stuff, did it mean, maybe, just maybe, that I should not have gotten married at all? Should I have stayed put and invested all that wedding money in a good therapist?
What if I didn’t really love him? And what if my cat continued to pee in this house? Would we ever get the deposit back?
I drank more beer. It made me worry less about the deposit.
Brian came home. There’s this scene in Apollo 13 where all the engineers are faced with the dire emergency of getting the spacecraft safely home, and the only things they have to work with are some paperclips, shiny tubing, and a few sticks of gum. I was pretty sure Brian’s job was like that on a daily basis. Only his face that night told me that the astronauts at his job didn’t make it that day.
I opened another beer and handed it to him. Then I said, “Today at school they found bats in the doorway to my class. I have bats in my classroom.”
“Huh,” Brian said.
I continued, “Yep. Bats. Crazed flying attack bats. Mice with wings flinging themselves at the children. It’s appropriate, really. Fitting. That building is about as cavernous and pleasant as Vlad’s castle. The bats simply add to the ambiance.”
That was Brian’s cue. I waited for him to respond something like this:
“I am so sorry honey. That must be really hard. I know you miss your home and your friends. I realize, too, that today you came to the startling realization that you are questioning everything about your teaching future and your new gig as a wife and all. And yes, you had to clean up cat pee on top of it all? It’s simply awful. I have ripped you away from your home and family and put you in a town where the schools are not bat free. And, to top it all off, we probably won’t get back our deposit. We are doomed.”
Instead, he said, “Well, at least they eat the mosquitos.”
Did I mention my husband is an engineer? Always practical. I wanted to kill him.
So, we fought. And we made up. I tried to keep the honeymoon going to give me something to celebrate after the gloomy job I faced. But I got increasingly angry at Brian’s late nights and workaholic tendencies. And he got increasingly tired of my bickering and nagging. And so we fought some more.
We really did love each other. But we were so broken.
Brian had lost his mother to cancer in his early thirties. He had a lot of pain left from that, which he channeled directly into anger. Brian would lose it over forgetting to call someone back or misplacing a wrench in the backyard, so I would go in the bedroom and shut the door. While lying on the floor, I would cry and pray, completely lost as how to deal with a husband who was so loud and fearsome at times. When the storm would end, I had arsenal. My husband was just terrible. He yelled. He shook the windows of the house with his stomping. He was a tyrant, and it was simply inexcusable. True, the house was the kind that when you sneezed it leaned over a bit, but that wasn’t important.
We started therapy with our church pastor. This is always a great option, and it helped me realize something that’s essential for newlyweds to grasp: We are stuck with each other forever.
Forever is a long time. Especially when your husband uploads Quicken on your ancient laptop at 1:00 a.m., and it doesn’t go well because it’s technology, so he becomes unhinged. The computer stood up to the yelling with stubborn pride. I, however, found myself filled with rage, and I screamed right back at him. I knew I couldn’t change it. I couldn’t go out there and soothe or yell or show up naked and insist on sex to change it. He was mad at our computer, and himself, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to help.
Later, when I told him about my frustration with all this, he sighed and said, “I am really sorry. I am working on it. And I think the showing up naked thing is an excellent idea. Let’s try it.”
The thing was, all of his anger was directed at himself. Not a bit of it was directed toward me. Not the yelling, the message, or any of it. He simply loathed himself. And then, when he found that darkness welling up inside of him, he loathed himself even more and would collapse under the pressure of needing to be perfect, a big implosion of impossible expectations. And all the while I watched with simmering resentment. I had a loud and easily identifiable reason for my misery, living right here next to me in our Habitrail. The problem was easy to spot: it was the loud, yelling one over there! In the other room! Freaking out about something he had done wrong. And here I was, the quiet one, praying. Faultless. Burdened. Very spiritual, too.
Therapy with our pastor did help; he was brilliant and caring and worked hard with us to find a solution to the outbreaks of anger and to all the communication problems. He had quite a job ahead of him. Brian was a mess. There was tons of work to do—on him. I was just the long-suffering wife.
“Do you think you should leave him?” My pastor asked me. I stared at him, then at Brian, and gulped. Why was this on me? Why couldn’t we establish that this was intolerable, and Brian had to stop it right now? I mean I had done my time. I had waited and waited and then married a man who loved Jesus as much as I did. So, therefore, didn’t that mean somehow everything from here should be a bit easier? Singlehood in my late thirties had been about as fun as a long walk through Chuck E. Cheese’s with someone else’s kid; a lot of squealing and noise, and a couple of balloons—a lot of suffering and counting the clock. I deserved a happy marriage after all that. Brian stared down at his hands. I looked from him to my pastor, and back again. “No . . .” I said. My voice was so small it sounded like the air leaking from a tire. “I am not going to leave him. But . . . I just don’t know how to live like this.” Brian turned to me, his face full of pain, as if to say, “I have always lived like this. I don’t know how not to live like this.”
And then I realized it. This is how I dealt with the world: smooth it all over, like frosting on a cake, and insist on happiness and sprinkles for all. Be very quiet and nice and don’t ever, ever upset anyone. Walk very softly and simmer on low, like a crockpot of resentment.
Brian dealt with things differently. Blow up to let off steam, stomp around, and then proceed. Be loud. Upset people. Get over it.
How charming. I had married the complete opposite of myself. I am sure this has never happened before
