Marriage and Other Fantasies

“The definition of eternity is two people and a ham.” –Dorothy Parker

My parents’ marriage was hard to categorize. They were madly in love, but they also were awful to one another, including my father being violent when drunk and my mother finding ways to punish him through guilt and shame. Still, they were married at twenty, met on the steps of the Widener Library at Harvard, brilliant, beautiful, and well, who knows, they were my parents; their marriage was a mystery except for one thing: I never wanted that.

What did I want? James Bond, The Phantom, maybe a nice terrorist, Dracula, and Illya Kuryakin, the brooding Russian spy who invariably falls in love with a doomed woman. I liked them sad, intense, and obsessed with me. Honestly, despite my childhood trauma, I was also attracted to anger. No one called me healthy before ten years of therapy and thirty-nine years of twelve step recovery. I had no fantasies of marriage. Having a baby, yes, being incredibly successful and irresistible, but I didn’t want to be anyone’s wife. My favorite lyric was from Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat:

“And you treated my woman to a flake of your life. And when she came back, she was nobody’s wife.”

photo by Nikki Gibson

Meanwhile, I have been married three times. The first was a disaster. When he proposed, I was about a year sober but deep into anti-anxiety drugs prescribed to me by doctors who felt I should be committed based on the seriousness of my depression, inability to sleep or eat, and extreme grief caused by the sudden death of my oldest sister who was run over by a drunk driver. I had a terrible job at a giant department store in Brooklyn, working first as an assistant buyer to the cosmetics buyer who flew into rages because of my lack of interest in makeup, I never wore any, and second as the assistant buyer in small electronics for a boss who would eventually be found to be in cahoots with Crazy Eddie who was sent to jail for fraud in the amount of millions of dollars. I signed every piece of paper handed to me, bills of lading, inventory, everything lies and fraud, but when the FBI finally raided his office, they recognized I was clueless. I met this first husband in the electronics department. We were both severely depressed and hated our jobs. I was having panic attacks on the way to work so severe I passed out a few times on the floor of the World Trade Center, where I was changing trains for Brooklyn. Someone dragged my lifeless body to a safe place, and when I woke up, I continued to work.

How depressed was I? I hoped this man might be driven to kill me. I wanted to die but had a strong instinct to avoid suicide because my parents had just lost a beloved daughter. In my delusional brain, it seemed better to be murdered. He didn’t murder me, but he did beat me. When he proposed, I ordered a drink, and when he questioned my decision to drink, I said I wouldn’t marry him unless I could drink. I drank. We fought. He hit me. The day of our wedding, I was in my Betsey Johnson wedding dress, think “sexy milkmaid,” sitting on the lowered toilet seat lid downing a bottle of champagne when my sister, in a rare moment of sisterly concern, said: “You don’t have to do this.” I replied, “If I climbed to the top of the high dive and the pool was empty, I would still jump,” or some such nonsense.

The then mayor of Princeton married us the day after Hurricane Gloria. I spent our wedding night telling a bartender in the hotel that I didn’t like my new husband. That husband tried to strangle me on our honeymoon, but we returned to live in a Hassid Jewish neighborhood in a building his father owned and acted out a minor version of Sid and Nancy. Without the music or the drugs or the stabbing. Just a bunch of bruises and broken things, including me. Eventually, a friend caught him hitting me, and the secret was out. I divorced him after obtaining an Order of Protection. The judge looked at me, relatively whole, and told me to look around. I saw a room full of battered women.

“Don’t ever let anyone do this again,” he said.

My divorce cost seventy-five dollars and was notarized by a legal team called Jacoby and Meyers that advertised that price in the NYC subway. He threw all my stuff onto the street. After a brief stint with my parents, I started AA and therapy, moved to NYC, and found a new job. Eight years later, I met my son’s father.

This was a whirlwind, glamorous, sober, and love-infused courtship. We had a wedding at city hall and a reception at my parents’ apartment in Chelsea. I could not stop giggling during the ceremony because our officiant looked exactly like Fred Flintstone. A few months later, I gave up my rent controlled apartment on Sixth and Broadway, my first good job in academia, and moved to London six months pregnant. It was love, but it required many sacrifices, which I will never regret but may have contributed to the reasons for the marriage’s failure. Having the love of our lives in a high chair between us at our year anniversary may also have contributed to the rift, but moving from London to Dallas probably sealed our fate.

In Dallas, I turned blonde, grew fingernails, and frequently imagined driving the new Neon into a brick wall. I was lonely, chubby, angry, and bewildered by my life, which had once seemed magical, living in NYC, publishing novels, being poor but happy. Now I lived in a weird suburb, in a weird house with a swimming pool, with a weird neighbor my father labeled “Boo Radley” as he stood across the street on his porch for hours, waving. The only brightness was this person who seemed to absorb all the light in the room, this boy who adored me and could not be happier as he had his confused and besotted mother twenty-four hours a day. The husband? He worked constantly running a news bureau, and when not at work, he was a devoted father, so we dropped the ball on us.

When husband number two accepted a job in Chicago, I asked for a brief reprieve after receiving a letter from a writing colony in Taos, New Mexico, that said the award would be canceled if I didn’t use it within the year. Baby could go to husband’s brother and wife, the house needed to be sold, and the corporate movers would take the worst of the packing out of our hands. I would go for several weeks. 

He was unhappy, but when I implied potential self-harm, he conceded it would be better to have a missing wife than a dead one. I made tapes of myself singing terrible songs, terribly, since 1995 was pre-internet, and drove to Taos filled with guilt exacerbated by my husband’s accusation of bad mothering and bad team playing. But I knew, without a doubt, that my son would be so much better off with a mother who was not profoundly depressed, and the fact was when my sister was killed in 1984, leaving behind her wonderful three-year-old, I swore I would, unlike my favorite poets, remain alive.

New Mexico changed everything. Suddenly, I was a writer again, not just a trailing spouse or someone’s mommy. The distance revealed my unhappiness despite my passion for my son. I did not, however, feel the same way about my spouse. Several things had occurred, including him asking me when I planned to lose “the baby weight” and a sense that while he was enchanted by skinny, successful me in Manhattan, the fat Texas housewife held little charm. At first, I was desperate to write and leave to get my baby back but being alone for the first time in ages made it possible to rise early and run and then come back to coffee and write. 

Motherhood and wifedom had obliterated me. And then I met someone ridiculously handsome, a painter who loved my work and thought I was sexy. We talked about art, writing, and music, and I fell in love. I knew this was not a choice I could make. My son’s father deserved another chance. We did not sleep together, but that made little difference.

Driving from New Mexico to Kansas took seventeen hours, and during that time, I listened to the mixed tape he had given me filled with songs about doomed love, love, longing, and passion. I sobbed across several states on this ridiculously long drive. When I arrived in Kansas, I crawled into bed with my son, and when I woke up, he was staring at me, the look on his baby boy’s face one of wonder, joy, and rage. He told me he had dreamed about a mommy who was outside and went away and stayed away, and I said, “I will never leave you.” And I didn’t.

We could not make it work. I longed for the painter while trying to find a way back to what had made us stand before that cartoon character and become husband and wife. This divorce was protracted because, despite everything, we still loved one another, and we both loved the miracle that had changed us forever and helped us heal from deep childhood wounds. After it was final, we went to breakfast and parted on a Chicago street. I got a manicure; I could not bear to return to an empty house and wept while the manicurist tutted about the state of my nails.

And then I was alone. I planned to remain alone until I saw my son was starting to think he should take care of me, so I gritted my teeth and dated several men, each date more comic and terrible than the next. Until I met number three. We had absolutely nothing in common. Our values, politics, and belief systems were opposite, but they were also perfectly matched in many ways. My parents loved him because he loved me and saw no hint of the cruelty that I had once found so attractive.

I didn’t plan on a third marriage. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Bracknell says: “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” Twice married and divorced seemed reasonable, but a third marriage was a bit much. It was a Buddhist wedding at an Italian restaurant. Rice was thrown, and my mother had to be evicted from the bride’s chair. The food was so good people focused on eating instead of me. I pouted. It was wonderful.

Eighteen years have passed. In that time, my husband lost his father and brother, and I lost my parents, a very close friend, and my fear of losing who I am. I broke my leg, shoulder, elbow, and hand, and he was always there to help me heal. I don’t know what makes for a good marriage, but we are still together, and while we spend an inordinate amount of time discussing our cat, we are happy.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach