Liars

by Sarah Manguso

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.

He thought it was a hilarious personal quirk that I could only shit at night by then, after the child was in bed and the chores were done. He didn’t realize that I didn’t have time to shit during the day. He still shitted like a bachelor, whenever and for however long he liked.

John sulked all evening and I realized I didn’t care what he thought of me or even how he treated me, as long as the child didn’t see or know. Fourteen more years until college. But even until then, I was free.

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.

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 thought about all the wives who had lived before birth control, before legal abortion, before the recognition of marital rape and domestic abuse, before women could buy a house or open a bank account or vote or drive or leave the house. I wanted to apologize to all the forgotten and unseen women who had allowed me to exist, all the women I’d sworn not to emulate because I’d wanted to be human—I wanted to be like a man, capable and beloved for my service to the world.

But I also knew that the most intimate relationship is not mutual. It is one-way: the mother’s relationship to the child.

I hadn’t experienced uncontaminated time—time unoccupied by vigilance to the child’s health, feeding, elimination, education, safety, entertainment, development, socialization, and mood, and the care of the house, including food shopping, meal planning, cleaning, cooking, tossing old food, scrubbing bathrooms, making doctors’ appointments, labeling toys for show-and-tell, planning play dates, maintaining contact with grandparents, planning holidays, paying bills, dealing with two tax audits and an identity theft (all John’s), and usually most of these things at once—outside an airplane in years. This meant absurdly little of the sort of time needed to write books. My time, which is to say the time that was mine, for me alone, had disappeared. And at once I understood why I hadn’t felt like myself in years. My own time—my own life—had disappeared, been overtaken. Which might have been the reason I was so angry, I thought.

Sometimes I thought that if I weren’t writing and publishing and traveling so much, I wouldn’t be so frazzled, but then I remembered that those were the things that gave me energy. What sapped my energy was running the house and being a wife.

I told him a bit about my life, said we’d moved five times in six years and that John had gotten fired three times. He asked, Why are you still with him?

That’s what most people would ask if I told the story to them like that, in one sentence.

I read a book by a woman who had never married or had children. I didn’t think I’d ever have become such a good writer—so, I said to myself, it was all right that the past two days of my life had been nothing but submission to my husband and child. I wouldn’t have amounted to much anyway.

After another in a series of fights, I realized that the child was the only reason I stayed with John. Had I started the clock even before kindergarten? Thirteen more years. Perhaps dealing with this much condescension would make me into a saint. A furious one.

The purpose of marriage was to get stuck, I thought, so that one was forced to fix the ma...

We’d also moved five times in less than six years for “his” job—again, a complicated term because it was his job that got us health insurance and more money than I could get in my field at my level. That said, I’d never gone a year without earning at least enough for child care and preschool, even when I had only fifteen hours a week to work.

only way to get the job is to be ten times better than the best man and likable, which means willing to absorb any amount of misogyny in any form from anyone with a smile on your face, forever. You must be attractive but not too attractive; men don’t want to look at an unattractive woman all day long, but they won’t feel comfortable working with a woman much more attractive than their own wives. If you marry a man or have children you will automatically be perceived as not committed enough to the job, while married men with children will be perceived as even more committed, with the assumption that their wives will manage all domestic responsibilities, including child-rearing. Finally, assume no allies, since the other women are competing with you for the few token positions available, and once you get the job, men will be free to harass and assault you with no risk of reprisal. Living on this knife edge will ruin your health, and once that happens they’ll be able to fire you and hire a man to do the job you couldn’t quite manage.

wrote to Hannah, Even a decent marriage drains the life out of a woman. During our worst fights I refer to our divorce as a sure thing, impending. Yet I don’t know anyone with a better marriage. It really is absolute shit, being a man’s wife. I swear up and down that if I outlive this marriage, I will never be with a man again.

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

And I was a woman who had tied her wagon to this man. I’d been persuaded to live off the fruits of his late-stage capitalist privilege. I’d chosen to have a child with him, and then I’d chosen to stay because I’d thought we were a team. Because I’d wished we were a team.

Science bless this boy, the organism into which I would empty every last living breath of me.

John and I both caught the child’s cold. John stayed in bed for two days; I took the new kitten to the vet and bought groceries and did dishes and laundry and planned all the meals and took the child to school and so on. I took one nap but otherwise kept everything up. And that is a mother’s cold.

John laid into me for getting, as he saw it, too angry about things. He wouldn’t accept that the root of my anger was that he dismissed and ignored me.

Then he seethed, spitting mad, accusing me of screaming at him and the child every day, all the time, though he could give zero examples of the latter, and I told him that his condescension and dismissive attitude made me angry, and then he said he couldn’t have sex with me if I was angry. I’m scared, he said.

He sounded as if he’d do anything to save our marriage—anything but curtailing his arrogance or going to a single session of individual or marital therapy or apologizing for anything ever.

Apparently he didn’t want the child to think that he hated me. That was the secret he didn’t want anyone but our friends to know.

I was doing a great job making sure the child was connecting with his friends, John was doing a great job taking care of John, and I felt abandoned and taken for granted and ignored.

Not one of my married friends had a spouse who wasn’t impossible most of the time.

So at his worst, my husband was an arrogant, insecure, workaholic, narcissistic bully with middlebrow taste, who maintained power over me by making major decisions without my input or consent. It could still be worse, I thought.

Dishes. Laundry. Cooking. I planned the day and mapped routes to a café, a beach hike, and seals. I made a grocery list, went shopping, drove home, and put everything away. I was a mother on vacation.

The mornings were the worst. All I felt was fear. I took tranquilizers and cared for myself and the child and the grieving, vomitous cat. It was a good thing I already knew how to do everything.

Inflicting abuse isn’t the hard part. Controlling the narrative is the main job.

Maybe I’d made it too clear to John that I didn’t need him anymore, if in fact I ever had.

Maybe his real love affair had been with my financial dependence, and then I took it from him.

Something had indeed changed, but it wasn’t him. It was me. I finally saw that he was capable of deceit.

He thought he could talk me out of things I remembered. He thought he could stand there, his stupid dick still dripping, and open his mouth and convince me he hadn’t done a thing.

I wrote down the story again: I was proud of our family and of John’s career, so when he played video games all night, spent weekends painting, or stayed out bodysurfing in deep water while the child and I waited, shivering, on the beach, I didn’t push back. I multitasked and made my own needs as small as possible because, I thought, I was just more capable than he was. I assumed that made me valuable.

The man doesn’t owe anyone an explanation. The rest of the family wonder privately why he has upended their lives. When the children complain, they are scolded. The mother looks distraught, but she never challenges her husband. If the children are in the room, she smiles and tries to hide her feelings.

Back then I’d thought that John was working ten hours a day. After we separated, he was suddenly available to fetch the child from school and do all the errands and chores for his own new house that he’d never had time to do when we lived together. Surprise.

For years John complained that I fell asleep too early for sex because of my psych meds, but I was always up first, made the coffee, got our son ready for school, packed his lunch, fed the cat, and so on. John thought he’d convinced me that it was my fault that I needed to sleep at all, and that that was the reason we never had sex.

Despite my early resistance to marriage, despite my condescension to women who’d had bridesmaids and changed their names and used the word hubby, by staying with John I’d folded just as they had. The difference between me and those women was one of degree. For fourteen years I’d pretended that I wasn’t really a wife, and that my rage must be coming from some unknowable source.

I’d married John because I’d thought a better man might leave me. Does every wife make that dark calculation before her wedding day?

When I picked the child up the next day, I saw that John’s house was freshly swept. A neat little package sat by the door, ready to be mailed. John wouldn’t have swept a floor or returned a package if I’d asked him to, but if he’d improved, he’d gone from the emotional age of three to four. Look, Mama! I can do it myself! I asked him who’d been cleaning his house. —I have! —Oh, so you do know how. —Yeah. I just didn’t clean before because you didn’t like the way I did it. As if he were the first man ever to think of that.