Ad copy

My mother told me when I was four years old that a woman's job is to make a husband's life easier. She used the word "submit." She underlined it in her Bible. She circled it in mine when she gave me my first one for my eighth birthday. She has been telling me to submit for forty-three years. I have been a wife to three different men. I am 47 years old. I am writing this on a Sunday afternoon in our kitchen, alone, because my third husband is fishing with his friends and the house is quiet for the first time in I do not know how many weekends. I have been sitting at this table for about an hour. I have made one cup of tea. I have not opened a book. I have not turned on a podcast. I have just been sitting in my own kitchen alone, which I am realizing as I write this is something I have not done since I moved out of my mother's house at 22. I am going to write about my husbands, because I have not written about them in this order before, and because I think when you write three of them down on the same page you find out something you did not know. The first one was Brian. I married him at 22. He was the boy my mother approved of from college. He had a finance job. He went to my mother's church. He told me, on our second date, that he expected his wife to keep a calm home. I nodded. I thought "calm home" meant something like "happy." It meant I was not allowed to disagree with him in front of other people. It meant I had to be home when he got home. It meant I quit my job at the library three months after we married because he said it was beneath me. It meant by year three I had stopped having opinions about restaurants. By year five I had stopped having opinions about most things. He was sleeping with someone at his office by year four. I found out by accident when I went to drop off his lunch. The divorce took eight months. I was 28. My mother said: "You did not submit hard enough." The second one was Greg. I married him at 30. He drank. I did not know how much he drank when I married him because I had been raised to not investigate the man you were going to marry, only to support him. I learned how much he drank around month four. By year two I was hiding bottles. By year four I was the one calling his work to make excuses. By year six he was passing out in our living room with our two children watching cartoons in the next room. I left him at 38. I did not tell my mother for nine months because I knew what she was going to say. When I told her she said: "Did you try praying with him more?" The third one is Tom. I am still married to Tom. We have been married for six years. Tom is a good man. Tom is not Brian. Tom is not Greg. Tom does not drink. Tom does not sleep with people at his office. Tom is patient and kind and he does the dishes most nights and he makes our daughter from my second marriage feel like his actual daughter and he has been, by every available measure, the husband I should have married first. I do not know how to be married to him. I want to write what I mean by that. Tom asks me what I want for dinner. I say: "Whatever you want." Tom asks me where I want to go on vacation. I say: "Wherever you want to go." Tom asks me what I want for my birthday. I say: "I do not need anything." Tom has been asking me variations of these questions for six years and I have been giving him variations of the same answer. The answer is the answer my mother taught me to give. The answer is correct in my mother's framework. The answer is making my husband, who does not want a wife who defers, slowly stop asking. He stopped asking me about restaurants about a year ago. He started just picking. He stopped asking me about vacations about eight months ago. He started planning them and telling me where we were going. He has not stopped asking me about my birthday but I think he is going to. He is too kind to say it but I can see him learning to live with a woman who does not have a position, and I can see what that learning is costing him, and I am the one who is costing him that, and I have not been able to stop. I am 47 years old. I have been someone's wife for twenty-five years. I have not picked a restaurant in twenty-five years. I have not picked a vacation. I have not picked the color of my own bedroom. I have a master's degree from before I met Brian. I cannot tell you what my favorite poem is right now without thinking first about which poem my husband would think was a smart answer. My mother is 78. She lives forty minutes from me. She calls me on Sunday afternoons. She is going to call me in about an hour. She is going to ask how Tom's week is. She is not going to ask how my week is, because she does not believe I should have a week separate from his. She called me last Sunday and said: "Honey. You should iron his shirts ahead on Sundays. It will save him time during the week." I said: "Mom. I am tired." She said: "Tired is not an excuse. Tired is when you submit harder." I hung up. I cried for a few minutes. Then I made dinner. I started a thing two months ago. Five minutes a day. I am not going to explain it. It helps me feel where my own body is. I had not known where my own body was. Last Saturday I drove myself somewhere. I did not have a destination. I just drove. I ended up at a lake about an hour from our house that I had not been to since I was 19, before I met Brian. I sat on a bench by the water for ninety minutes. I had not sat alone in a public place as an adult woman without a man's permission to be there in twenty-five years. That sentence is true. I want it written down because if I do not write it down I am going to talk myself out of it. When I got home Tom was making dinner. He asked me where I had been. I told him the truth. I told him I had driven to the lake by myself. He stopped chopping the onion. He looked at me. He said: "I am glad." That was all he said. I am writing this part because I think it might be the most important sentence anyone has said to me in twenty-five years. He did not ask why. He did not ask if I was okay. He did not ask what was wrong. He just said he was glad. I do not know what I am going to do with the next twenty-five years. I do not know who I am yet outside of being a wife. I have a list I started on Monday. The list says: I think I might like coffee black. I think I might like a different kind of bedsheet. I think I might want to see the ocean by myself one Saturday. I think I might be a person who has a position about poems. I do not know if any of those are true. The list is four lines long. I have to start somewhere. I am 47. I am going to find out.