Conceived Without Sin (26 page)

"Just give it to me straight," Mark commanded, edginess in his voice.

Joe Kemp took a deep breath.

"Men have always used their
tempers to control women. I see it with my workers all the time. The Rolling Stones had a song called Under My Thumb. I hate that song now. The true test of most married men is not how they communicate with their wives, or how much money they make, or what kind of house his family lives in. The true test of a man is how he controls his temper, his will, his very self.

"At our lowest point, it
seemed like every time Mary and I sat down to talk, I would lose my temper, or in the least, talk to her in such a way as to make her feel miserable. Tone of voice was the real clue, as well as if I interrupted her, cut her off, didn't let her make her point, or belittled her side of things. I was more interested in winning the argument, as if I was playing one-on-one with her, than really, truly,
trying to see her side of things.

"Here was the pattern, and I'm sure this same pattern could be found all over the United States, in just about every home. Mary would call me on the job and ask when I was coming home. I would tell her six. Well, you know how it is, six o'clock rolls around and something happens at the site. I might come home at six-fifteen, or six-thirty. Meanwhile, Mary has
been battling the kids all day, and getting dinner ready. She's holding off for me, waiting. Getting disappointed.

"I get home and the first thing I do is say 'Hi honey,' and I can tell by the look on her face that she's not happy. Instead of saying I'm sorry, or even if I do say I'm sorry, the first thing I go to do is check the mail. I do that every day when I get home. From my point of view,
this is totally justified, but it aggravates Mary. She wants me to sit right down and start dinner. The kids feel the tension, even if they can't put it into words.

"Mary is stuck. If she asks me to skip the mail, I say, hey, I do this every day. I'll be just a minute. But I take five minutes, or ten. Now I've been late for two things. If she ignores my opening the mail, she has to wait anyway.
Maybe she's not steaming mad at me, yet, but she's irritated.

"Finally, I sit down to eat. We say prayers. We talk about the day with the kids. Dinner at our house is Couch Time for the kids. Maybe after dinner, if I don't turn on the television, and start helping her clear the table, Mary complains about this and that regarding the kids' behavior. You know, Annie was acting spoiled with her dolls,
Steve talked back to her after school– that kind of thing. I think, hey, I don't complain about
my
job. She's the one who wanted the kids. You see, I don't see it as her getting it off her chest, I see it as her being a whiner. Note the two different perceptions. I think she's a whiner; she thinks she's trying to share a problem.

"After dinner, I play with the kids. We usually prayed the family
Rosary, but we were losing discipline at the time. Sometimes we skipped it if it was late and there was a lot of work piling up. Maybe do a few chores. Before you know it, it's after ten, and the kids are late to bed–again–late. It's not my fault, I tell myself. That's Mary's job. I'm a little miffed, because she's asking me for help, but doesn't realize that I'm worn out from work, and need to
let my mind and body take a rest. I turn on the television, and zone out while she does all the work. There's something on ESPN. I get into it. Mary's thinking that she'd love to have time to zonk out watching television, and maybe she could if I would just give her a hand. She asks for help again. I say, yeah, yeah, at halftime. But the halftime show has an interview with a running back I like, so
I put her off. Eleven o'clock rolls around.

"It's been a week since we've, uh, been together as man and wife–"

"Just say
made love,
darling. There are no kids around," Mary suggested kindly, looking furtively at Bill and Mark.

"Yeah. We haven't made love in a week," Joe continued. "We've both been too busy. You know, there's a lot of talk about women and PMS and their emotional and physical cycles
nowadays, but there's no talk about the male cycle. It's not as pronounced, but it's there. Men have cycles. Every married guy I know would agree with me. Our cycle is three or four days, especially when we're in our twenties, thirties, and forties. I don't know about fifty-year-olds. Anyway, about three or four days after your average man has made love, he starts to feel the urge again. I believe
God made us that way.

"On this hypothetical night, I've got the urge. After prayers with the kids, I give Mary the signal. Either I tell her, or look at her just so. Every couple probably has their own signals after a few years.

"Well, I don't realize it, but Mary is dreading the signal. She's not in the mood. I've been draining her tank since the phone call at work. Making love when she's not
in the mood would drain it further. I can't speak for you, Mark, and Bill, you're not married, but I can say that Mary is a good Catholic wife. She took a vow. She'll keep that vow, and part of it was that she would give herself to me.

"So let's say
she does
give herself to me," Joe paused. He was on a roll. He looked at his wife. There was an old hurt in her eyes.

"Keep talking, Joseph," she
said, playing nervously with his hand. She looked up to Mark.

Mark didn't say a word. He and Maggie had not been good with each other in bed for the last two years, except for a few scattered occasions. That had led to arguments. Mark wanted Joe to continue, despite all their discomfort.

Joe took the silence as consent.

"So Mary does what I want. But she doesn't enjoy a second of it. Maybe she
tells me, maybe she doesn't. Either way, her tank might be completely empty when it's over. We both fall off to sleep unfulfilled, knowing, compared to the way it used to be, when we were first married, that what we have just done together was nothing to be proud of. After a while, I guess, we throw ourselves into our kids, or our jobs, or our season tickets to the Browns, and that part of our marriage
dries up. If we're good Catholics, we console ourselves by saying that we're open to having kids. We even have a strong desire for more kids. At least I do.

"If we're not good Catholics, the child that may result is a source of fear. You all know what I'm talking about. How many people have more than one or two kids these days? You go to the playground and the first thing other parents tell you
about is their vasectomies and tubals.

"Either way, month after month of days more or less like that turn into year after year. By our third child, and our sixth year, there was a pattern. There were good times in between, of course. We were still friends. We might have even described ourselves as happily married. At least our friends thought we were.

"Maybe I am speaking out of place. Mary knew
all was not right. She tried to tell me. But I took it personally, like it was an attack on me. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. But I didn't want to admit to myself that I was failing at something. I loved Mary. I really did. She was and is my best friend in the whole world…"

Joe's voice started to crack. He cleared his throat. He took a sip of wine, then another.

"But our marriage was in trouble.
I had a couple of bad years with my contracting company. I got sued over an easement–I won't get into the details–and lost the suit. We almost lost the business and the house. We had to take out a second and third mortgage. We drove beat-up cars and ate macaroni and cheese for dinner for two years. I had to lay off some good men, good carpenters. I got behind on my bills at work and at home. That
didn't help. Our credit cards started carrying bigger and bigger balances.

"I read somewhere once that when they poll women and men about how well they are relating to each other, almost twice as many women than men say that something is wrong with the relationship. That tells you something about men. At least half the husbands think their marriages are healthy while their wives think their marriages
aren't.

"It's just my opinion, but I believe that men are either out of touch with their wives' outlooks, or, they are unwilling to admit to themselves that they're not doing their best at being a father. When I was in that boat, I thought that being a good provider, just showing up, was enough–but that's not why God gave Mary to me.

"God gave Mary to me so I could be the best
father
I could possibly
be, and to help her be a mom with as much peace, and joy, and holiness as possible. That's how I should judge my life: how well am I fulfilling my responsibility to my wife
as the mother of my children.

"I wasn't doing my best at that, six years into our marriage, and I didn't see a solution. We would talk about it; we would argue; I would lose my temper; I would apologize, promise to be better,
because I was a good guy with a sincere heart; but it just kept staying on the same dismal plane.

"I've never told anybody this before, but I started to have this fantasy about getting in my truck in the morning, and driving away, never coming back. Going to California and starting over. This scared the living crap out of me.

"In desperation, I went on a retreat for men, with Father Rocky, and
began to figure it out. I saw a flyer in the bulletin at church. The retreat wasn't about how to save your marriage. The retreat was standard stuff. The real key was that I forced myself to tell Father Rocky about my problems. I talked to him a lot, after hours. He helped me see the real problem."

Joe stopped to take a sip of wine. Bill was amazed at how well-spoken Joe was. Bill had always taken
the contractor to be a man of few words. In reality, Joe was well read. His father had been a professor. Most of Joe's brothers were professionals. Joe had received a degree in English, with honors, from Ohio State.

"What
was
the real problem?" Mark asked.

"Before I get to that, and I'm not trying to be melodramatic, I have to say something that's been on my mind for years. It used to be that
all this marriage stuff was automatic. You did what your parents did and things worked out."

Bill instantly thought of his own parents. If they had any marriage problems, he sure didn't know about them.

"But our society hates fatherhood. Just look at the divorce laws. Just look at the welfare system, which pays teenage girls to have children just as long
as they aren't married.
Look at the way
corporations treat fathers. If you have a big family, and show an interest in putting your children before your career, you're taken off the fast track. Most companies reward not just the hardest workers, but the guys who put in the longest hours. Who gets the raises? The guys who are willing to travel the most. The guys who are willing to uproot their families and move away from friends and relatives.
How many friends do you have who work sixty, seventy, eighty, even one hundred hours a week? My brothers took that route, and they're practically slaves to the law firms and companies they work for. That's why I went into my own business, so I wouldn't have to put up with that.

"Plus, men have to compete with women in most jobs nowadays. I won't get into women's rights or anything like that, but
it's got to keep salaries down, especially when it counts, in those first crucial years when most guys are just married, and trying to get on their feet.

"Even the income tax system punishes marriage. There's another contractor in town who got divorced and lives with his former wife to save a few thousand bucks a year on his 1040!

"Culturally, the family is being attacked from all sides. From
values clarification courses hidden in 'health classes' in public schools, to social workers who can have a father taken out of his home without any due process, on hearsay from an irate neighbor. We don't know what kind of sick pornography might be in the video case at the neighbor's house down the street where our kids want to go for a slumber party. And children are having sex in grammar school
now. There was a big scandal about that last year in one of the Cleveland suburbs. It was all over the Plain Dealer.

"Then there are drugs, satanic rock music, occult messages in movies, and a world filled with kids whose values are completely without religion because that's the way their parents are. These are the kids who might make friends with your kids.

"Fathers are the point men, leading
their families through a minefield. It's scary.

"And if we want to bail out, there are plenty of unhappy, screwed-up women willing to jump into the sack with us at just about every bar down in the Flats. It happens all the time, and it's very sad.

"If we really wanted to get into that truck and drive to California, well, that's no problem, because legally, the marriage contract is one of the few
legal contracts that can be broken by either party. Divorce is ugly, but easier than ever.

"Right now, my wife could get pregnant with our child, my child, and decide to snuff out its life at the local abortion mill, and there's nothing I can do to stop her. It breaks my heart just to think about it.

"That's what we got in exchange for the sexual revolution."

Joe closed his eyes.

"Geeze, Joe,
what's gotten into you?" Mary asked.

"I guess I'm wound up, that's all. I was just trying to tell Mark that being a good husband and father is perhaps the greatest challenge in any man's life, and the deck is stacked against him. It's not surprising that some of us fall short. I always thought that I was a good guy, and coming this close to losing everything almost overwhelmed me."

Bill cleared
his throat. "Joe, you were going to tell us what Father Rocky told you that changed everything. What was it?"

"Oh, I forgot," Joe said with a sheepish grin. "I'm sorry. It's so simple, but not obvious. I don't know why. I was in Confession with Father Rocky, pouring out my tale of woe, telling him what a rat husband I was, confessing to losing my temper for what seemed like the hundredth time,
when he told me these words, which changed my life forever–"

"Okay, Joe," Mary interrupted. "You've built it all up."