war and love

It's difficult to focus on personal interactions between couples these days when everywhere one turns war is separating families, marriages, sweethearts. Yet what is a war except a succession of individual tragedies. I am thinking of the thousands of solidiers who have said goodbye to wives or girlfriends, not knowing whether they will come home alive, and not only the wives or girlfriends who are already grief-stricken with loss. Was the man who was struck by a rocket while riding his bicycle home planning to cucumber salad when he got home that night? Did the fruit truck loader who died with his apricots and dates make love to his wife that last morning?
And what about the woman carried her newborn from the hospital directly to the bomb shelter, feeding him as the rockets fell? She'd had a ceasarian and was not allowed to climb the steps out of the shelter once the danger was past; she stayed there for days, the others bringing her food and water. So many of the bridges that once existed between people no longer exist. So many ties severed or permanently strained. So many children too frightened to sleep, unable to play without concern.
It feels, to me, irrelevant, a luxury, to think about who does the dishes in a time of war, when the strife and conflict outside the family is so great. And yet it's that very strife and conflict that put even more pressure on individual marriages.

Relative Fidelity

At the Q & A following our reading, the first questions is often “What do your husbands think of you writing about them?” It’s at this point we wish our husbands would walk single-file into the room, preferably to musical accompaniment, and then, in the spirit of a game show, the audience have to guess which man belonged to which woman.
Frequently commented is “the open marriage essay,” in which Hannah Pine defends her and her husband’s right to have sex with partners outside their conjugal commmittment. Despite her defense, audience comments often insinuate that Pine’s marriage is somehow tainted or unreal. People tend to have trouble with this essay. In the anthology, hers is the minority view. But recent news testifies that the Pines are not alone.
A new trove of Albert Einstein’s letters were unsealed at Hebrew University, in some of which Einstein writes openly about his affairs with other women to his wife, Elsa. In fact, Elsa was herself the result of an affair Einstein had while married to his first wife, Mileva. What’s not yet known is whether Elsa and Mileva also entertained extra-marital partners while the great scientist was away on his travels.
Maybe it’s something about scientists. Are they providing new research about the human species and our capacity for love and our immunity to jealousy? Annalee Newitz profiles a household of paramours in an article in New Scientist. Although you need a diagram to follow the intracies of who exactly is sleeping with whom and when (as well as who are the biological parents of each child) the point is that these middle-aged couples profess to be perfectly content with their arrangements. Are they a breed apart from the rest of us? An anomaly? Infidelity dressed up to be respectable and on display? Perhaps more data is required.

Packed in the Berkshires

Last Saturday afternoon, about eighty residents of Berkshire county made their way to the spacious function room in the Bushnell-Sage Public Library in Sheffield, where they poured themselves a Dixie cup of cool lemonade from a glass pitcher before finding a seat in a folding chair. Susan Dworkin, celebrated local author, and the co-editors of WISM were introduced by Eugenie Sills of The Women’s Times (where an article about the anthology appeared the previous week), Rick Kowarek of The Bookloft in Great Barrington, and librarian Nancy Hahn.

The writers read from their essays and then opened up for questions and discussion. A man in the third row was first to raise his hand. “Could each of you name the qualities of an ideal husband?”

Susie Dworkin was quick to respond. To have an ideal of what a husband should be is dangerous for both the man and the woman, she said. In her generation, the ideal husband was the provider, the bread winner, and nothing much else mattered about him. What an enormous pressure that is on husband and wife if the man is valued only for his earning power and the woman is kept sequestered at home. Dworkin said she raised her three children not to believe the husband alone bears the burden of breadwinning.

"How did that turn out?" asked an audience member.

"Just fine," said Dworkin.

Karen Propp spoke about her generation’s expectation that an ideal husband is being someone with whom intimacy and romantic love will magically persist over the long haul of decades, and how she had to kill that ideal in order to see what was real in marriage.

Jean Trousntine said that before she met the man who has been her husband for the past eighteen years she decided that the most important thing for her in a mate was a good communicator. “And did I get a communicater!” she joked, and the audience laughed. “He communicates so often and so intensely that sometimes I want to ask him to please stop!”

Discussion then touched upon the honesty of using a pseudonym when writing about an open marriage, how the essays were chosen for the anthology, the husbands' response to being written about, what's at stake in publishing work that's clearly intimate, the importance of clear boundaries for a good relationship. Afterwards, in the book signing queue, a man recounted the story of a woman in the south who ran a battered women's shelter from her beauty parlor chair. Not only did she counsel women who wanted to leave their husbands but she dyed the victims' hair and disguised their appearance so they could not be recognized on their way out of town.

A woman named Estelle, whom Jean was sure she had once seen in the dressing room of Loehmans, said, “I never get to talk about these kind of things. Even with my closest friends.”

Side by Side

Maureen Dowd, in her Times column this week, responding to Amy Sutherland's article about training her husband using animal training techniques ("The Samu Maneuver") quotes Helen Fisher, a Rutgers anthropologist and the author of "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love." Helen Fischer says:

"Men and women tend to get intimacy differently. Women get intimacy from face-to-face contact. We do what we call the anchoring gaze. It comes from millions of years of holding your baby in front of your face. Men tend to get intimacy by doing things side by side, because for millions of years they faced their enemy but sat side by side with their friends."

Perhaps that explains why my most intimate talks with my dad, when I was girl, took place in the car where we were not only side by side but temporarily trapped inside a moving vehicle. Even better if we were driving at night, the dark making talk safe. He kept a package of Lifesavers below the dashboard, which I peeled open and handed out. I usually got the coveted red lifesaver, my dad willing to take the green ones. The lifesavers were supposed to help him stay awake at the wheel, but even more helpful, he said, was when we talked. I don't remember what we talked about, but we, or he, were forced then to search for topics we might have in common. School was probably one topic. That would have been obvious. I was an excellent student and he a high school teacher. The drive we talked about, I'm sure--how many more miles lay ahead, and the geography of the trip, which was usually from Boston to New York when my maternal grandparents were still alive, or from Boston to Maine, where we camped every summer near the ocean. What do you want to do when you grow up? was the kind of open-ended, probing question he might come up with. I didn't know, or I did know, but was too shy to admit. We logged the miles. Side by side. We ran out of things to say to one another and shared another lifesaver, both of us tasting the sweetness. We were friends.

The Shamu Maneuver redeux

It's overdetermined. First, I read Amy Sutherland's column in the Modern Love column of the New York Times and thought to myself: Mmmm, perfect for the blog. An hour later, an email from my husband (who was upstairs) pinged into my in box. Monday, an old friend emailed me the same article. Tuesday, a new friend. And today, my co-editor, alerting me to Dr. Tammi Lenski's website, where Lenski blogged Why I'm Still Married back in May, and now has a post about her husband e-mailing Sutherland's article to her. No wonder Sutherland is at the top of the 'most e-mailed' list.
For anyone who has not read the article, the "Shamu maneuver," is a behavioral technique borrowed from animal trainers that Sutherland used on her American husband. Basically, it's a matter of rewarding good behavior--no matter how small--with immediate, positive feedback, and ignoring bad behavior. Note: this may also sound familiar to anyone with a toddler in the house.
How has it worked in my house? We both have been shamelessly using the maneuver on one another. For example. Last night, my husband brought in the empty garbage cans from the curb and put them away in the garage. I rewarded him with a kiss, a smile, and "Great! You put away the garbage cans!" This morning, I got up first and made the pot of coffee. For this I was rewarded with a smile, a shoulder stroke, and "Oh honey, you made the coffee! How wonderful!" You get the idea. We make sure to throw a healthy dose of self-mockery into our delivery. We giggle a little to think we have taken up such silly, desperate measures. But you know what? Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday--it's working. This evening, I came home and the first thing my husband did was to show me the square on the calendar marked August 10 where he'd written, "Audiologist, 2 p.m." Those of you who have read my recent posts will understand what a major breakthrough it is that my appointment-phobic, hard of hearing spouse had taken it up on himself to do what I have been begging him to do for the past six months: get his hearing tested. Perhaps because I was so taken aback by this move, I forgot to throw my arms around him, jump and up down with joy, and say, "I'm so proud of you!" Instead, I reverted to my old ways, and said, "Not until August?" But it was okay. He didn't need my affirmation just then. He was proud of himself.

Get To Work link

I got to read Linda Hirschman's potent Get To Work: A Manifesto for Women of The World. That's right, after insulting a lot of people by her militant article in The American Prospect, in which Hirschman formed the dangerous argument that well-educated women should use their well-educated minds and bodies for activities other than shaping play-dough or pushing PLAY for the Baby Einstein CD, this mother, lawyer, and professor emeritus has gone and published her thoughts in a book. Like, last week. Deep maroon and about the size of a toddler's board book, it's just the right size to tuck into either a diaper bag or your already bulging briefcase.

What do I think? I'm behind Hirschman's message, and thank her for putting it out there. I wish I had the book to read about twenty years ago, to have someone tell me it was not only okay but necessary to take work (my work) seriously. That would have cut through a lot of my hemming and hawing over the years, and more easily solved my ongoing internal conflicts about work and family. So count me a "yeah" vote on Get To Work.
But even so, I kept waiting for Hirschman to at least acknowledge that it's not always an either/or situation, emotionally speaking, for most women, and that children do need time with their mothers, to differing extents at different ages. In the book, Hirshman ridicules a reader who wrote how much she enjoys climbing trees with her children instead of going out to work. Right there I wanted a bit less ridicule on Hirschman's part and even one sentence acknowledging that at little bit of climbing trees is one of the pleasures of parenting, childhood goes by so fast, etc. etc.
A bit of personal commentary. Yesterday, I took the day off from my freelance jobs and went on my eight year old's annual class trip to the beach. The day was exquisite--sun, surf, wind, gazelle footed children diverse enough to challenge a crayola maker's definition of "skin color." I went because of a promise I'd made my son a year ago, when he'd come home from last year's beach trip and asked please, please, would I go. Ordinarily, I relegate field trips to the stay-at-home moms, feeling both grateful that they are willing to enrich the school and relieved that I--the freelancer with a pile of projects I can do "whenever I want"-- have been let off the hook. So yesterday, I looked around at the other moms who'd also come on the beach trip. And I counted: 1 physician, 1 fundraiser for a major organization, 1 financial planner, 1 woman going back to work as a headhunter, 3 women at home with their kids, and using some of their time for useful volunteer work. And the teacher, a working mother who'd brought along her ten year old daughter. Including me, 6 out of 9 mothers on the beach were educated women doing work in the world for which we'd been trained. Which just goes to show--what? That some of us can have it all some of the time. That flex-time is de rigeur in the professional class. That my son was ecstatic. That it's time for me to get to work.

Hearing Test

My husband is hard of hearing. He has a genetic kind of hearing loss, one that makes it nearly impossible for him to follow a quiet conversation in a noisy restaurant. Just one of those things we've learned to accommodate over the years. For example: "No, I don't want the fish. I said pass the knishes!"
Not too long ago, he handed our son a slim silver dime.
"Thanks, Dad."
"What do you need the dime for?"
"I don't need a dime. You just gave me one."
"I know you don't need a dime. That's because I just gave you one. You asked and I gave. You don't know how lucky you are to have such a generous father. In my day..."
"Dad--"
"If I ever asked my father for a dime, he would--
"Dad!"
"--make me clean out the garage."
"Dad!! I--did--not-- ask-- you--for-- a-- dime."
"You didn't? That's what I heard."
"Dime?" Dawning awareness on my son's part. "Time, Dad! Not dime, time! I said it's time to let me use your computer."
Conversations like these are not atypical in our house. So when a flyer arrived in the mail offering a free hearing test on such and such a date in such and such a place, you can bet that I called and made my husband an appointment. “The spouse is required to come, too,” said the receptionist over the phone.
When we got there I found out why. My husband was to turn his back to me, so he could not read my lips, while I was to reach aloud a list of words, which he was then to repeat. I said, “shock,” he said, “socks,” I said, “forensic,” he said, “presence” I said, “stove,” and he said, “ovum,” and so on. From a list of twenty words, my husband correctly repeated three. In other words, I had been misheard seventeen times! I had been heard only three times and misheard seventeen. I was stunned. Flabbergasted. Speechless. All these years I’d focussed on our ability to communicate from a psychological/emotional viewpoint and now I’m learning that it’s all physiological?
The audiologist did some more tests, and went on to explain that my husband's hearing loss was such that the most difficult frequency for him to hear were those made by women and children. In other words, the two people with whom my husband lives and loves are the ones that are the most difficult for him to hear.
After the audiologist's results we were ushered into another room where a hearing aid salesman tried to sell us his company's brand. That's when we realized it was a bit of a scam. "No thanks, we have to think about it."
That's as far as we've gotten. I have urged my husband to make an appointment, this time with a real audiologist, for another hearing test. So far he has not done so. I'm not sure he hears me.