Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage (24 page)

Foremost among these were issues relating to women's bodies and women's sexual health, and the hypocrisies intertwined therein. Back in her small Minnesota farming community, my mother had grown up witnessing a particularly unpleasant drama unfold year after year, in household after household, when inevitably a young girl would find herself pregnant and would "have to get married." In fact, this was how most marriages came to pass. But every time it happened--
every single time--
it would be treated as a full-on scandal for the girl's family and a crisis of public humiliation for the girl herself. Every single time, the community behaved as though such a shocking event had never before occurred, much less five times a year, in families from every possible background.

Yet somehow the young man in question--the impregnator--was spared disgrace. He was generally allowed to be seen as an innocent, or sometimes even as the victim of seduction or entrapment. If he married the girl, she was deemed lucky. It was an act of charity, almost. If he didn't marry her, the girl would be sent away for the duration of the pregnancy, while the boy remained in school, or on the farm, carrying on as if nothing had happened. It was as though, in the community's mind, the boy had not even been present in the room when the original sexual act had occurred. His role in the conception was strangely, almost biblically, immaculate.

My mother had observed this drama throughout her formative years and at a young age arrived at a rather sophisticated conclusion: If you have a society in which female sexual morality means
everything
, and male sexual morality means
nothing
, then you have a very warped and unethical society. She'd never attached such specific words to these feelings before, but when women began to speak up in the early 1970s, she heard these ideas vocalized at last. Amid all the other issues on the feminist agenda--equal employment opportunity, equal access to education, equal rights under the law, more parity between husbands and wives--what really spoke to my mother's heart was this one question of societal sexual fairness.

Empowered by her convictions, she got a job working at Planned Parenthood in Torrington, Connecticut. She took this job back when my sister and I were still quite young. Her nursing skills got her the job, but it was her innate managerial ability that made her such a vital part of the team. Soon my mother was coordinating the whole Planned Parenthood office, which had started out in a residential living room but quickly grew into a proper health clinic. Those were heady days. This was back when it was still considered renegade to openly discuss contraception or--heaven forbid--abortion. Condoms were still illegal in Connecticut back when I'd been conceived, and a local bishop had recently testified before the state legislature that if restrictions on contraceptives were removed, the state would "be a mass of smoldering ruin" within twenty-five years.

My mother loved her job. She was on the front lines of an actual health-care revolution, breaking all the rules by talking openly about human sexuality, trying to get a Planned Parenthood clinic launched in every county across the state, empowering young women to make their own choices about their bodies, debunking myths and rumors about pregnancy and venereal disease, fighting prudish laws, and--most of all--offering options to tired mothers (and to tired fathers, for that matter) that had never before been available. It was as though through her work she found a way to pay back all those cousins and aunts and female friends and neighbors who had suffered in the past for their absence of choices. My mom had been a hard worker her whole life, but this job--this
career
--became an expression of her very being, and she loved every minute of it.

But then, in 1976, she quit.

Her decision was sealed the week that she had an important conference to attend in Hartford, and my sister and I both fell sick with the chicken pox. We were ten and seven years old at the time, and of course we had to stay home from school. My mom asked my father if he would take off two days from work to stay home with us so she could attend the conference. He wouldn't do it.

Listen, I don't want to chastise my father here. I love that man with all my heart, and I must say in his defense:
Regrets have since been expressed
. But just as my mother had been a 1950s bride, my father was a 1950s groom. He had never asked for, nor had he ever expected, a wife who would work outside the home. He didn't ask for the feminist movement to arrive on his watch, and he wasn't particularly passionate about women's sexual health issues. He wasn't all that excited about my mother's job, when it all came down to it. What she saw as a career, he saw as a hobby. He didn't object to her having this hobby--just as long as it didn't interfere with his life in any measure. She could have her job, then, as long as she still took care of everything else at home. And there was a lot to be taken care of at our home, too, because my parents were not just raising a family but also running a small farm. Somehow though, until the chicken pox incident, my mother had managed to do everything. She had been working full-time, keeping the garden going, tending to the housework, making the meals, raising the children, milking the goats, and still being fully available to my father when he got home every night at five-thirty. But when the chicken pox hit and my dad would not give up two days of his life to help out with his kids, suddenly it was too much.

My mother made her choice that week. She quit her job and decided to stay home with my sister and me. It wasn't like she would never work outside the home again (she would always have some part-time job or another while we were growing up), but as for her
career
? That was finished. As she explained to me later, she came to feel she had a choice: She could either have a family or she could have a calling, but she couldn't figure how to do both without support and encouragement from her husband. So she quit.

Needless to say, it was a low point in her marriage. In the hands of a different woman, this incident could have spelled out the end of the marriage altogether. Certainly a lot of other women in my mother's circle seemed to be getting divorced around 1976, and for similar sorts of reasons. But my mother is not one for rash decisions. She carefully and quietly studied the working mothers who were getting divorces, and tried to gauge whether their lives were any better off. She didn't always see tremendous improvement, to be honest. These women had been tired and conflicted when they were married, and now, divorced, they still seemed tired and conflicted. It appeared to my mother that they had maybe only replaced their old troubles with a whole new set of troubles--including new boyfriends and new husbands who perhaps weren't such a big trade-up anyhow. Beyond all this, though, my mother was (and is) at her core a conservative person. She believed in the sanctity of marriage. What's more, she still happened to love my dad, even though she was angry at him and even though he had disappointed her deeply.

So she made her decision, stuck with her vows, and this is how she framed it: "I chose my family."

Am I making far too obvious a point here if I say that many, many women have also faced this kind of choice? For some reason, Johnny Cash's wife comes to mind: "I could've made more records," June said, later in her life, "but I wanted to have a marriage." There are endless stories like this. I call it the "New England Cemetery Syndrome." Visit any New England graveyard filled with two or three centuries of history and you will find clusters of family gravestones--often lined up in a neat row--of one infant after another, one winter after another, sometimes for years on end. Babies died. They died in droves. And the mothers did what they had to do: They buried what they had lost, grieved, and somehow moved on to survive another winter.

Modern women, of course, don't have to deal with such bitter losses--at least not routinely, at least not literally, or at least not
yearly
, as so many of our ancestors had to. This is a blessing. But don't necessarily be fooled into thinking that modern life is therefore easy, or that modern life carries no grieving and loss for women anymore
.
I believe that many modern women, my mother included, carry within them a whole secret New England cemetery, wherein they have quietly buried--in neat little rows--the personal dreams they have given up for their families. June Carter Cash's never-recorded songs rest in that silent graveyard, for instance, alongside my mother's modest but eminently worthy career.

And so these women adapt to their new reality. They grieve in their own ways--often invisibly--and move on. The women in my family, anyhow, are very good at swallowing disappointment and moving on. They have, it has always seemed to me, a sort of talent for changing form, enabling them to dissolve and then flow around the needs of their partners, or the needs of their children, or the needs of mere quotidian reality. They adjust, adapt, glide, accept. They are mighty in their malleability, almost to the point of a superhuman power. I grew up watching a mother who became with every new day whatever that day required of her. She produced gills when she needed gills, grew wings when the gills became obsolete, manifested ferocious speed when speed was required, and demonstrated epic patience in other more subtle circumstances.

My father had none of that elasticity. He was a man, an engineer, fixed and steady. He was always the same. He was
Dad.
He was the rock in the stream. We all moved around him, but my mother most of all. She was mercury, the tide. Due to this supreme adaptability, she created the best possible world for us within her home. She made the decision to quit her job and stay home because she believed this choice would most benefit her family, and, I must say, it did benefit us. When Mom quit her job, all of our lives (except hers, I mean) became much nicer. My dad had a full-time wife again, and Catherine and I had a full-time mom. My sister and I, to be honest, hadn't loved the days when Mom worked at Planned Parenthood. There were no quality day-care options in our hometown back then, so we'd often find ourselves having to go to the houses of various neighbors after school. Aside from happy access to our neighborhood televisions (we didn't have the stupendous luxury of TV in our own house), Catherine and I always hated these patched-together babysitting arrangements. Frankly, we were delighted when our mother gave up her dreams and came home to take care of us.

Most of all, though, I believe that my sister and I benefited incalculably from Mom's decision to stay married to our father. Divorce sucks for kids, and it can leave lingering psychological scars. We were spared all that. We had an attentive mom at home who met us at the door every day after school, who supervised our daily lives, and who had dinner on the table when our dad got home from work. Unlike so many of my friends from broken homes, I never had to meet my father's icky new girlfriend; Christmases were always in the same place; a sense of constancy in the household allowed me to focus on my homework rather than on my family's heartache . . . and therefore I prospered.

But I just want to say here--to lock it forever in print, if only to honor my mother--that an awful lot of my advantages as a child were built on the ashes of her personal sacrifice. The fact remains that while our family as a whole profited immensely from my mother's quitting her career, her life as an individual did not necessarily benefit so immensely. In the end, she did just what her female predecessors had always done: She sewed winter coats for her children from the leftover material of her heart's more quiet desires.

And this is my beef, by the way, with social conservatives who are always harping about how the most nourishing home for a child is a two-parent household with a mother in the kitchen. If I--as a beneficiary of that exact formula--will concede that my own life was indeed enriched by that precise familial structure, will the social conservatives please (for once!) concede that this arrangement has always put a disproportionately cumbersome burden on women? Such a system demands that mothers become selfless to the point of near invisibility in order to construct these exemplary environments for their families. And might those same social conservatives--instead of just praising mothers as "sacred" and "noble"--be willing to someday join a larger conversation about how we might work together as a society to construct a world where healthy children can be raised and healthy families can prosper without women having to scrape bare the walls of their own souls to do it?

Excuse me for the rant.

This is just a really, really big issue of mine.

Maybe it is precisely because I have seen the cost of motherhood in the lives of women I love and admire that I stand here, nearly forty years old, feeling no desire whatsoever for a baby of my own.

Of course this is a rather important question to discuss on the brink of marriage, and so I must address it here--if only because child rearing and marriage are so inherently linked in our culture and in our minds. We all know the refrain, right? First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage? Even the very word "matrimony" comes to us from the Latin word for mother
.
We don't call marriage "patrimony." Matrimony carries an intrinsic assumption of motherhood, as though it is the babies themselves who make the marriage. Actually, often it
is
the babies themselves who make the marriage: Not only have many couples throughout history been forced into marriage thanks to an unplanned pregnancy, but sometimes couples waited until a successful pregnancy occurred before sealing the deal with matrimony in order to ensure that fertility would not later be a problem. How else could you find out whether your prospective bride or groom was a productive breeder except by giving the engine a test run? This was often the case in early American colonial society, in which--as the historian Nancy Cott has discovered--many small communities considered pregnancy to be a stigma-free, socially accepted signal that it was now time for a young couple to tie the knot.