How to be a Husband (14 page)

Coming to Grief

T
hree weeks after my mother-in-law's funeral, the phone rings. People are still calling every day to see how my wife is coping. It has been a long and terrible year of ambulances in the middle of the night, of hospitals, of bad news and worse news, of repeated, frightening dress rehearsals for mourning, brief reprieves, and finally, the grim business of day-to-day existence in grief's long shadow. Through all this I am repeatedly surprised by how little I have to offer. I had always imagined reserves of strength and maturity that I could dredge up for genuine emergencies. They're not there.

My wife is more than bereaved; she is posttraumatic. We have life-changing decisions to make—about the house, about the future—that we both seem incapable of thinking clearly about. The demands of a two-year-old are a welcome distraction, but child care takes everything out of us. Without quite saying so, we've more or less agreed to wait out this part of our
lives, until such time as the knack for looking forward to things returns.

My wife has stopped talking on the phone; she is holding it out to me. “It's your sister,” she says.

There is a faint hiss with a rackety pulse to it on the line, which I first mistake for the hollow whoosh of long distance. Only when I press my ear closer to the receiver do I realize that it's the breathing of someone who has been—who still is—crying.

“Mom's sick,” says my sister.

Our mother, she tells me, has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I listen, waiting for the good news at the end, but there is no good news. Although she's scheduled for surgery, the long-term treatment she's been offered is largely palliative. She's been given between a year and eighteen months to live.

I ring my mother, who is being unbearably upbeat for my sake. Or maybe she really is upbeat; I can't tell. The conversation is unprecedented.

A couple of weeks later I learn that despite the bad news my family is pressing ahead with a trip to the US Senior Olympics in Arizona, where my father has qualified to compete. I make plans to join them; it's about the soonest I can get away anyway. It's not a good time to leave my wife, bereaved and in charge of a small child and, as she keeps mentioning, pregnant again. It's not a good time for anything.

I have to check that old passport—the index to my life—to remember how I actually spent that year. Apart from the trip to Arizona at the end of May, when I flew out to LA and drove
to Tucson with my brother, it's clear that I visited home for two weeks in July and—that's it. My mother also came to London once some time before the middle one was born in January.

On all these occasions she seemed impossibly well to me. This impression probably contributed to my decision not to make any decisions. My brother left California to move closer to home, but packing up was not an option for me. I had a wife and two small children. A decade before, when I was twenty-seven, it didn't seem to matter where on the planet I chose to pitch my tent. I wasn't abandoning anyone, or giving anything up. I was just getting on with it. I didn't think about any eventualities that might make having two families—each with its own, competing priorities—on two continents awkward.

Just a year after the trip to Arizona, I am called back to Connecticut. My mother has taken a turn for the worse, and is at home recovering from a second operation. Only she's not really recovering. Come now, everyone is saying. I know what it means.

I fly over immediately, feeling like the Angel of Death. I imagine my mother taking one look at me and thinking, If he's here, I must really be in trouble.

This moment, in fact, happens twice. The second morning after my arrival I am unable to wake my mother, and we have to ring an ambulance. She's in hypoglycemic shock—an injection brings her round immediately—but when I see her in hospital later on that day she has no memory of my previous arrival. I show her the pictures of the baby—already five months old—all over again.

In the drifting days that follow, a halting routine develops: visiting times divided into overlapping chunks, arranged rendezvous outside the hospital to pass all-day parking permits through car windows, swapping crossword clues in the long hours when my mother is asleep. When she's awake she's chatty and perfectly lucid, but seems only dimly aware of the passage of time. Every day might be the same day. And why not? Everything looks the same, and nobody's going anywhere.

Off the schedule there are appointments with nuns about church services, and grim trips to view available cemetery plots. In between, I work, getting up before dawn to file to British deadlines. Everything is last-minute and rushed, and yet this period has in my memory a languorous, dreamlike quality, as if it went on for months.

The parish priest drops in on his round of hospital visits, and offers to perform the last rites while he's at hand. It seems an awkward proposition to put to my mother: “We didn't call in a priest, honestly; he just happened to be in the area.”

Fortunately, she is asleep. Under the circumstances none of us can offer any objection, although that's before we realize our participation will be required. I'd always assumed that everybody else left the room when extreme unction was administered, like when you have an X-ray done.

In spite of our reluctance the priest soon has us all joining hands around the bed with him. He begins with some informal opening remarks. Although I'm trying not to, I eventually catch my sister's eye, and I know we are both thinking the same thing: come on, Father—let's get it done.

Finally the priest starts intoning some actual prayer words. This is the moment my mother chooses to wake up—while her children are staring down at her, heads lowered, hand in hand, with a priest up the far end. I have a strong desire to pretend we're doing something else—playing a fun parlor game, or rehearsing a scene from
Godspell
—but alas, my mother has never been stupid.

“Thank you for the last rites, Father,” she says.

I tell my wife the story when I call her later, although I don't think she finds it as morbidly amusing as I'm trying to make it sound. I guess you had to be there, I say. Then I take her through the latest round of difficulties. My mother isn't dying fast enough, as far as the hospital is concerned—either their admissions policy or my mother's insurance won't cover an open-ended leave-taking in an expensive hospital room. They're talking about putting her in a hospice two hours' drive from home, I say, possibly in a matter of days.

There is a silence on the other end of the line. My wife faced a similar dilemma when her mother refused to expire in accordance with the NHS's timetable. I imagine she's thinking about that.

“They're being very nice about it,” I say. “But still.”

“I need you to come back,” my wife says.

It's one of those occasions when a correct response does not immediately present itself. She's right in one sense—she's on her own with two tiny children—but I am not in a position to get on a plane. I'm not even in a position to predict when I might be in a position to get on a plane. There is no right thing
to do, just events, decisions, and their attendant consequences. If there is a delicate way to summarize the complex tangle of priorities I'm facing, I can't think of it.

“It's not like I'm on vacation here,” I say. I have just been for a swim, though, which suddenly feels a bit disloyal.

“I know,” my wife says. “I just need to be able to say it.”

It was not, in the end, nearly as drawn out as I remember. My mother died on June 9, just four days after my birthday, when I modeled her present—a dark blue suit I would wear to her funeral—for her in her hospital room.

It's too late to ring home that night, so I call the next day.

“I'm sorry,” my wife says. I look out the window; it's bright, almost cloudless—a reminder that the worst things happen on the nicest of summer days. Somewhere nearby, a lawn is being professionally cut. It's a Wednesday. You have to take tragedy as it comes—as part of the weft of the world's business—or not at all.

I don't remember much of the rest of our conversation. When I think about it now I usually recall another morning, a little over a year before—the morning my mother-in-law died. I was casting about for some way to offer comfort to my shell-shocked wife, and getting nowhere. After a long silence, she spoke up from the depths of her grief.

“You might as well go and get the car inspected,” she said.

“Really?”

“Go on. We'll never get another appointment.”

Sometimes, as a husband, you can offer no better help than to do as you are asked.

To my unending surprise, my passport shows I landed at
Heathrow on the morning of June 19, my mother's funeral already behind me, less than three weeks after I'd left. Like the June nine years before, when I turned up with my bags having quit my job in New York, I arrive with a nagging sense that I am running away from something. This time, at least, that feeling is accompanied by the hope of coming
home.

Staying Together—for Better and Worse

Y
ou may have recited traditional marriage vows, or slightly reformed ones with the most blatantly sexist language removed. You may have written your own from scratch or, like me, you might have done little more than state your full name and admit no lawful impediment. In any case there will probably come a point in your marriage when you'll wish you'd made your requirements a bit clearer and your demands a bit more specific.

People often speak of unconditional love—the kind your dog has for you—as the very height of emotional experience, but marriage is meant to be the biggest relationship of your life, and it has nothing do with unconditional love. “For better, for worse” isn't something you feel; it's something you promise. Marital love is, in fact, bounded on all sides by conditions: pull your weight, understand me, be faithful, bear in mind that you said you liked cats, tolerate my character flaws, agree with me
about the state of this carpet, school our children in accordance with my principles, allow me to keep mustard in the fridge once it's been opened. Often these conditions are unspoken, but it doesn't mean they aren't there.

Unconditional love is something you can't help—ask your dog. Conditional love, on the other hand, is maintained only with effort, patience, kindness, and unstinting compromise. Am I saying that my wife's love for me wanes a tiny bit every time I am slow to take out the recycling? Yes, that is what I am saying.

Staying together has got very little to do with the vague promises you made on your wedding day, and a lot to do with adapting to conditions on the ground.

FOR POORER

As the twentieth century draws to a close, I find myself the father of three boys under five.

The youngest is born under circumstances that seem positively routine compared with our first outing. When I return to hospital six hours after the birth, my wife is dressed and ready to go, the baby packed up like hand luggage.

Initially, at least, there are few additional costs associated with the new baby. We already have all the stuff. Back at home I dig out our old baby monitor, only to find that it's made up of several mismatched components—parts accidentally swapped during group holidays and weekends away. After some experimentation I come up with a configuration of speakers and charging units that seems to work.

It's not much use as a baby monitor anyway, because the baby is in our bedroom with my wife, and most nights I'm dispatched to the spare room, where I am better situated to serve the nocturnal needs of the other two. This arrangement was not my idea. I don't object—I get marginally more sleep most nights—but I don't like the way it makes me seem. Having opted out of the ritual of exhaustion, I'm banned from grousing, or from conducting my life on an emergency timetable. And I'm still exhausted.

We mostly use the baby monitor during the day, when I sit in the kitchen making lists while my wife breastfeeds in bed and issues commands through the transmitter on her nightstand, next to the Moses basket, where the baby never sleeps. It is effectively a one-way intercom, allowing me to give free voice to unattractive thoughts. In the kitchen, no one can hear me complain.

“Nappies,” says the baby monitor. Every list starts with nappies.

“The thing is, I'm tired too,” I say, to no one. “I can't read this list, or feel my face.”

“Onions,” says the baby monitor. In the background I hear
The Jerry Springer Show
blaring from the bedroom TV.

“I've forgotten how to write ‘onions,'” I say. “I'm going to have to draw a picture.”

“Okay, let's bring out Brad,” says the baby monitor, in Jerry Springer's voice. Brad's fiancée, it transpires, has a surprise for Brad. From where I'm sitting, it doesn't sound like a happy surprise.

“I wonder what it is that's made Brad so angry,” I say,
listening to the audience whoop for a while, forgetting who I am and how I came to be on Earth.

“Bin liners,” says the baby monitor. I let out a long, theatrical yawn and write “bni larnz.”

“Anything else?” I say. “I should go while I still remember how to drive.”

“If you're just sitting there,” says the baby monitor, “you could bring me some Twiglets.”

“Yes, of course.”

“We'll be right back after this,” says the baby monitor.

There can be no paternity leave for the stay-at-home dad, because I have nowhere not to go to. Instead I just slack off for a few weeks, dodging phone calls, filing late copy, and writing with severely impaired concentration. Few of the publications I write for notice the difference. It is clearly possible to carry on working under these conditions indefinitely, so I do.

I have a small office in the attic, but I often have to come down and work wherever in the house I'm needed to provide minimal parental cover. My biggest skill as a stay-at-home dad is not child-rearing; it's being able to type while everyone around me is screaming. I'm hardly the primary carer (we have an au pair called Kate, so technically I'm the tertiary carer or, if you like, the parent of last resort), but I am such a domestic fixture that my oldest son actively disapproves of my going anywhere, as if it were a liberty fathers simply didn't take. He spends a fair amount of time away from home himself—at nursery, or swimming—but when he gets back he likes having me available for a lengthy chat about How Chickens Get Dead.

In spite of my stay-at-home status, I am occasionally
required to leave the house. At the end of a rare three-day stint commuting to someone else's office, I come home to find the oldest one looking very disappointed indeed. He says he never wants me to go to work again, and I promise I won't. A few months later, when I tell him I have to go away for two days on an assignment (to Scotland, if I recall, to visit the set of a TV program), he starts rolling around on his bed, his little fists clenched in fury.

“Why can't you just write about this family?” he hisses.

There's a lesson there: be careful what you wish for, children.

The millennium arrives on the tenth anniversary of the night I first convinced my wife to kiss me. I forget to remind her of this when I kiss her again at midnight, at a big party in a big tent. It is not unlike that first New Year's Eve a decade before, in that we are both very drunk.

As a child I had once calculated the age I would be on January 1, 2000: thirty-six and a half. An immense sense of disappointment instantly swept through me as I realized I would be too old, decrepit, and joyless to appreciate the significance of such a huge event. My life would basically be over by then. Would I even notice the millennium?

To be honest, my prediction wasn't that far off. On a typical Wednesday afternoon in the year 2000, the Apocalypse could get under way without my noticing. I am pleased, for the moment, to be considered the primary breadwinner, because it gives me an excuse to stay in my office on the day that Music & Movement takes place.

When the local toddlers' music class got canceled, my wife
decided to move the fixture to our house, arguing that it required no more than a CD player and a box of cheap rhythm instruments. It's still called Music & Movement, even though it's mostly Shouting & Crying, plus somebody's au pair hitting a tambourine. Even with my office door shut, I can feel it through my shoes.

At some point my wife also decides we need a dog. I disagree—it's my job to disagree—but I am not obstructive. I like dogs and I don't really see how more noise or mess will make a difference at this stage. I have adapted to the chaos; it's my normal working environment. Theoretically, I can carry on like this indefinitely.

Except that 2000 is also the year the money runs out.

My career strategy until this point had relied entirely on the regular promotion of commissioning editors who like me. Several have moved from magazines into newspapers, then from one newspaper to another. The year before I'd started to write for the deeply understaffed
Independent
on Sunday, where I've since been made to feel indispensable. I write profiles and TV reviews and magazine features. I regularly get rung up to fill in for AWOL columnists at short notice, and I have two regular slots of my own. I barely have time to write for anyone else, which means I don't have to do the one part of my job I'm really bad at: casting around for more work. I wake up, change a nappy, drink a coffee, and spend the rest of my day with my nose pressed to the computer screen, making money.

Then there's a surprise change of editor, and I'm history, just like that. It's not a sacking, because I'm not on staff. I don't
even have a contract. All I had was a lot of eggs in a single basket, and now I don't have that anymore. It's the sort of setback that all freelance writers face on occasion, but this is the first time it's happened to me. From one tax year to the next, my earnings halve.

At this point, my wife is not working at all. Our youngest child is still not a year old. For some years we have been living our lives at the very edge of our overdraft facility, and the sudden absence of a regular income tips us into dangerous territory immediately. For a while our marriage, which has stayed buoyant through repeated bouts of birth and death, looks as if it might founder over money.

Fighting about money is the worst kind of fighting. Money is freighted with associations—notions of power, control, success, status, dependence—so that when you fight about money, you're always fighting about something else as well. For this reason arguments over money are particularly unpleasant. They also last longer, and they're the most difficult to resolve: at the end of the fight, you still don't have any money. Studies have shown that financial disagreements between couples are a huge predictor of divorce, bigger than disagreements about chores or sex.

Before we ran out of it, I hadn't realized how rarely my wife and I disagreed about money. We never fought about spending or earning. We weren't extravagant. Money came, money went. Our financial affairs were managed calmly, if haphazardly. That was fine; neither of us aspired to be in charge. We lived, as many people do, a short distance beyond our means. But the
mortgage was covered every month, and it seemed we'd learned to manage the perpetual juggling act. If we were pilfering small sums from the future, that was the future's problem.

However, in the time since I'd accidentally assumed the role of primary breadwinner, much has changed. Our division of labor has become, shall we say, a bit gendered. Because I can plausibly claim to be too busy earning, I'm excused a certain amount of parenting and general household bother. I never have to sit in a room with eighteen toddlers dinging a triangle and mouthing the words to “Nellie the Elephant.” In my bid to prioritize work, I have begun to ignore the cat sick on the stairs.

By the time the money stops coming in I've begun keeping regular office hours, staying put at my desk, busy or not, until at least five p.m., so that I can arrive downstairs when my children are having supper, in a rough approximation of my own father's nightly return, when he would come in from the car and place his cold hands on the backs of our necks and we would squeal with delight.

“Get off, Daddy,” says the middle one. I remove my warm, clammy hand from his collar.

“Look who it is,” says my wife. “Your absentee father.” She hands me a bowl of mush to post into the baby.

“How was school?” I say to the oldest one.

“Not fine,” he says.

There are bills left out for me to see, bills with red stripes across the top. I know we don't have the funds to pay them, and I'm not exactly making a killing by pretending to be busy. I'm not fooling anyone, not even myself.

For two months I make the terrible mistake of waiting to
see what happens. Nothing happens. Work does not magically come my way; my sudden disappearance from the world of freelance journalism has not caused a ripple. No one is saying, “Hey, whatever happened to that guy who used to write that thing sometimes?”

Discussions about what to do next are tinged with rancor.

“This is not about whose fault it is,” says my wife, which to me sounds a lot like: this is your fault. My self-esteem plummets. I'm surprised how bound up my earning power and my self-worth have become; it's only been a few years since they'd been—out of necessity—completely decoupled. Now I'm starting to wonder how we ended up in the precarious position of relying on an idiot like me for financial support. Can I get away with blaming my wife for that?

My efforts to reestablish contact with former editors are answered by e-mails with vague promises in them. Nothing, I can see, is going to go right soon, certainly not soon enough to get us out of our growing financial hole. I begin to wonder if I can get my old day job back, which might well mean the end of freelance writing, which might well be for the best.

Fortunately my wife, who is weird about many things, is not remotely weird about money. One of her greatest assets is her ability to separate financial issues from emotional ones, and to deal with the former with a certain brisk disdain. After several psychologically traumatic (for me) arguments about money, my wife decides that my complete failure as the primary breadwinner is, as far as she's concerned, an issue to be revisited later, at leisure, when I least expect it.

“Stop freaking out about your career,” she says. “It's a bad
patch, that's all. We just need to get some money from somewhere.”

It is, she insists, a simple matter of a loan. Her readiness to incur more debt is, in an odd way, a tremendous vote of confidence; it demonstrates a willingness to gamble on future success. Unable to share her confidence, I settle for keeping my mouth shut.

So we go to the bank and borrow against our home for what I hope will be the last time (not even the second to last, as it turns out), and then I set about slowly rebuilding my tepid freelance career from scratch. In the meantime, I find myself available for a shitload of parenting.