Liars

by Sarah Manguso

My life became archetypal, a drag show of nuclear familyhood.

You’re smarter than I am, but I wasn’t even smart enough to remember not to get married.

had two friends whose lives seemed palatable, who had jobs befitting their intelligence and education. Both of their husbands were dying of impotent rage.

He was the main character, and I was his wife.

John asked me to call the hotel in Miami and get him a refund. It was my own fault for having been his free concierge service for so long. For having been his wife. I refused.

She was trying to tell me that passing down jewelry to daughters and daughters-in-law is one of the few small ways that women retain power in a system designed to keep them helpless.

John said that he had nothing to give me because he knew his life was harder than mine. I poured tears for a whole hour. He told me I was acting like a spoiled child, that the postpartum period was so much easier than his life, working at the bank instead of being an artist.

wanted neither a divorce nor a disdainful partner, so there I was, hoping for a third option.

She said that her husband had also failed to recognize the invisible work of nursing and caring for their child, and that they’d had the same arguments about whose life was harder and why Hannah wasn’t getting any work done.

On the first Mother’s Day I spent as a mother, John was in a daze. Flowers? A card? As far as he was concerned, the only mother in the world was his, and she was dead.

We’d fallen into a groove: John made art on the weekends because he felt entitled to, and I did errands and chores on the weekends because I felt responsible.

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.

My personality and life had been swallowed by motherhood, and every few days, my husband threw the fact that I didn’t have a full-time job in my face. The work of caring for the baby was invisible to him.

Why are you so angry? My husband frequently asked me why I was so much angrier than other women. It always made me smile. I was exactly as angry as every other woman I knew.

It wasn’t that we’d been born angry; we’d become women and ended up angry. Anger is one of the last privileges of the truly helpless.

Nothing but mothering and housewifery. I felt as if I’d let my car drift slowly off the road and into a snowbank. The airbag popped out. In big pink letters it said, Congratulations! You’re forty years old and completely financially dependent on your husband!

John still talked over me, told me my feelings were stupid, blamed our fighting on me, left the room in the middle of a conversation, and said it was a reasonable reaction to my being crazy.

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.

But qualified women aren’t likable; likable women aren’t qualified. The 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 m...

Even a decent marriage drains the life out of a woman.

knew I needed to stay alive for the child, but would it have been better for him to have a dead mom than a sad, exhausted mom incapable of loving him enough?

explained that to have an affair with a man with young children is inherently antifeminist because mothers are already financially and socially disadvantaged.

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.

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.

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.

When I was young I’d sworn I’d never marry. I’d understood, back then, that commitment was a trap that closed off otherwise accessible exit routes. Then I had therapy for ten years and learned that commitment was a gift, the ability to give your heart to another. To forsake all others.

Then, more than a decade into marriage, I had to relearn that it’s also the other thing, the trap. It’s both. I felt stupid, having to relearn something that, thirty years ago, I’d already known. Together, the two truths were heavier than they were separately. I held tight to them both.

On my side, the white concrete wall was marked by the red bricks. Each point of contact, a mark. Each mark, an artifact of a wife’s fury. A wife is an animal. The animal wanted violence. The garden was strewn with bits of brick.

felt strong, but then a wave hit my body, and I just had to sit and suffer it. It felt like labor. I sucked ginger candies. I was gestating the future.

On day three of our broken family I felt buoyed by love, so much more than I had in my marriage.

which plainly described the great poet as an abusive monster.

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

Like a good corporate HR manager, John had put me on probation without my knowing it, drumming up cause so that when he’d finally terminated me without warning, he held documentation to support my dismissal. It would have been a good joke if it weren’t true.

thought of it as a neuronal misfiring, an errant blip. But she’d known, deep in her body, that he had become her enemy.

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.

was still trying to explain to myself how I’d become this person, this discarded wife, when I’d never even wanted to be a wife in the first place. I

John gets to lie about me, forever, to anyone he wants,

Maybe the trouble was simply that men hate women.

A wedding vow is a mind game. You have to guess whether the person currently on his best behavior will someday value your physical, emotional, and financial health above the convenience of being able to just break the contract.

A wedding vow is unlike other legal declarations in that there’s no penalty for breaking it.

A husband might be nothing but a bottomless pit of entitlement. You can throw all your love and energy and attention down into it, and the hole will never fill.

He tried to make it look easy, to show me that he could do what I did without even trying, to throw in my face all fourteen years of all the invisible work I did.

Calling a woman crazy is a man’s last resort when he’s failed to control her.