Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Toby had been told all his life that being in love means never having to say you’re sorry. But no, it was actually being divorced that meant never having to say you’re sorry.

Back when I had a job, no one ever said to me, “Having an actual job and being a mother is the hardest job there is.” We had to not say those things so that we could tiptoe around all the feelings of inadequacy that we projected onto the stay-at-home mothers;

Now that I have worked and stayed at home, I can confirm all of this. Now that I stay at home, I can say it out loud. But now that I don’t work, no one is listening. No one listens to stay-at-home mothers, which, I guess, is why we were so careful about their feelings in the first place.

You can only desire something you don’t have—that’s how desire works. And we had each other. Resolutely. Neither of us with a stray glance at another. After Adam and I were married, when I’d go out into the world, I’d see that the men I found myself drawn to were almost replicas of Adam, just like that guy in Lisbon. I wanted nothing different. I just missed the longing.

“I don’t want to live a month of my life in apology for the thing I do the rest of the year,” he said. “I want to live a good life every day.”

Can you imagine what it’s like to have arrived where you want to be at such a young age? That was what she never understood: that ambition didn’t always run uphill. Sometimes, when you were happy, it jogged in place.

Life is a process in which you collect people and prune them when they stop working for you.

“But Adam loves you,” Toby said. “He doesn’t weigh you down.” “He does. He doesn’t mean to, but he does. It’s not him in particular. The kids do, too. All of it does. It’s hard to feel like this when you still remember what it felt like to be nimble and light again.”

She would bump into one of the teachers from school and the teacher would say, “It’s so amazing the way your husband drops them off every morning.” She wanted to say, “Isn’t it amazing how I pay the fucking mortgage? Isn’t it amazing how my children have schedules that are more complex than the president’s and that they’ll graduate from elementary school prepared for three or four careers that you need a graduate degree for? Isn’t it amazing the role model I am for my children?”

Rachel and I, we’d been raised to do what we wanted to do, and we had; we’d been successful, and we’d shown everyone. We didn’t need to wear apocryphal T-shirts because we already knew the secret, which was this: that when you did succeed, when you did outearn and outpace, when you did exceed all expectations, nothing around you really shifted. You still had to tiptoe around the fragility of a man, which was okay for the women who got to shop and drink martinis all day—this was their compensation; they had done their own negotiations—but was absolutely intolerable for anyone who was out there working and getting respect and becoming the person that others had to tiptoe around.

How could we not impugn marriage, then? It becomes so intertwined with your quality of life, as one of the only institutions operating constantly throughout every other moment of your existence, that the person you are married to doesn’t stand a chance. You hold hands while you’re walking down the street when you’re happy, you turn away icily to stare out the window as the car goes over the bridge when you’re not, and exactly none of this has anything to do with that person’s behavior. It has to do with how you feel about yourself, and the person closest to you gets mistaken for the circumstance and you think, Maybe if I excised this thing, I’d be me again. But you’re not you anymore. That hasn’t been you in a long time. It’s not his fault. It just happened. It was always going to just happen.

if you believe his version, she was a vile kind of ex-wife (all ex-wives are vile, to hear it),

I would wonder, globally, how you could be so desperately unhappy when you were so essentially happy.