Liars

by Sarah Manguso

Tonight I learned why my mother always squealed and shrank away when my father tried to touch her: She was a fortress. And inside that fortress was rage, and in the center of that rage was the pain of the insult of being treated like a stupid maid. My fortress is the same, with smaller hips, surrounded by a corona of migraine.

I fell asleep, my body weary from fetal assembly.

All the mothers I knew were in awe of how little we were able to do, after all our education, after having been told that we’d be able to do anything, after having children in America. We’d all assumed we’d continue our lives as before, and that the only difference would be a child or children silently napping in bassinets or playing with toys while we worked. We hadn’t known we’d be holding grimly on to screaming, incontinent, vomitous creatures twenty hours a day.

The trouble with spending the day with a small child is that at the end of it you’re physically exhausted, mentally emptied, and you have nothing to show for it but a filthy house, filthy clothes, raw and peeling hands, and the inability to see beyond babyhood.

I wished I could just email everyone I knew: I’m isolating myself because it’s exhausting to pretend my marriage is fine.

Before I had a child I hadn’t valued what people call quality of life, and even afterward I probably wouldn’t have been able to explain to a bachelor friend why it was valuable. My main objective was to maximize my child’s quality of life and our time spent together as a family, but to unattached people it probably sounded like a consolation prize.

John didn’t just need to win the fight; he needed me to agree that it was my responsibility never to say anything that might make him feel as if he’d ever done anything wrong. Feeling that he’d done something wrong really threatened his sense of entitlement.

People without children asked me if I was happy there, in the suburbs, whether I missed living in a city, and I didn’t know how to answer because the very premise of that question depended on an ability to conceive of my personal happiness as independent from the need for health insurance, John’s income, a good school district, and the other needs of my family, which was logically impossible.

I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.