Fall 2008 | When my sister Maud was three--a chubby girl with determined eyes and pixie bangs--she stormed over to my parents and said, "Who will be my husband? I want to meet him. I want him here right now." I made the same demand throughout my twenties. I didn't have the patience or the confidence or the cynicism--whatever it takes--to allow my fortune to unfold naturally. I wanted marriage and all the perks the institution offered: the stamp of normalcy, a second go--round on family (since the first had left me spooked), a chance to fly the noncommittal coop, finally escaping the paranoid, whispering no--man's--land of single life--and I wanted it, like the young Maud, right now.

And though, even to me, this setup sounds as if it would be guaranteed a disastrous end--something Henry James might have plotted, involving a hasty marriage to a flimsy character--I found a more generous fate instead. I met the man who would become my husband when I was 23 years old. He was a guest at my cousin's birthday party. We talked for all of 10 minutes, during which he struck me as handsome and brash, which of course sent my youthful, masochistic heart aflutter. Still, it took us another four years, spent in an exquisitely careful friendship, to confess that there was something between us, which is to say we finally decided to risk falling in love. This saintly pace, I should admit, had nothing to do with me. At the time, I was in the habit of throwing myself foolishly into relationships--Who will be my husband? I want him here right now!--with my eyes closed and my arms thrust forward like some kind of insistent sleepwalker. But my future husband, Jesse, set the slow and measured stride of our relationship, and I, taken with his cool demeanor, followed. "Thank you," I whispered when he finally kissed me at the front door of my apartment building. "Thank you," he still whispers, now seven years later, both teasing me for my dramatic gratitude and flattering himself with the purity with which I drank him up that night.

It's an unfashionable view, to love marriage. It sounds eager or naive or like a lie. Perhaps this is because it's a view that belongs mostly to the young, or the newly betrothed, whom I, for better or for worse (as they say), represent. I understand that love sometimes turns out to be more of a willful fantasy, an elaborate projection of all that you believe it should offer, which can fade away after jostling between familiarity and disappointment for too long. But I don't think that will be the case for Jesse and me. So I'll embrace marriage wholeheartedly, if only to provide a time capsule of sorts, filled with all the galloping confidence of a 34--year--old, happily married woman. Let this be a love song, then. To marriage, to my husband.

My own parents' marriage, which began as a glittering romance between two attractive, quick--witted writers from socially ambitious families, ended mostly in disaster. From what I understand, they met when my father mistook my mother for someone else at a debutante ball in Washington, DC. He placed a hand on her elbow from behind and leaned in close, only to say another woman's name. My mother laughed at the mix--up, and they struck up a conversation. This exchange led to six months of dating, which led to their living together for a year, which led, finally, to a proposal from my father, bashfully offered as if it were just a casual suggestion--"Hey, maybe we should get married. What do you think?"--as they lay in bed one morning in the house they shared in Iowa.

It's strange to consider the hopeful start of my parents' marriage when their relationship is so defined by its end in my mind. My father has always objected to my describing our family as dysfunctional, and I suppose now I can see his problem with the word. It's dismissive, ugly, and narrow, unwilling to account for the vast array of experiences shared by a family, painful and nurturing.

I try to imagine the ways that my parents once fit together: his dazzling intellect, her sharp humor; his boyish insecurities about his looks, her angular beauty; his appreciation of odd behavior, her driven unconventionality; his jitteriness in the face of intimacy, her rising to that challenge. Still, a kind of glamorous doom seems to lurk even in these pairings, so I wonder if it's possible for me to separate the beginning from the end. Knowing them as I do now, as an adult, 25 years after their divorce, I can see only the ways they so clearly don't fit: his competitive streak, her alert defensiveness; his rule--oriented sense of romance, her renegade couplings; his emotional shyness, her near--religious commitment to compassion. It's probably always unfair when a child looks back on her parents' lives, not having been there for much of it and yet still drawing such conclusions from scenes perceived through the scrim of memory.

And then there is the scrim through which my parents see their own history; they "put a little golden haze on the meadow," as my father once described it. Neither of them has ever been able to name the conflict that finally brought them down. My mother came close once when she recounted--and this story has its own glimmer about it--a fight they had early on in their marriage. Our family was living on a small island (by small I mean it was the size of a football field and we were the only people there) on Narragansett Bay. While battling over who was doing more, who was taking care of the kids more often or rowing to shore to pick up the babysitter or building the compost bin, the two of them began to make lists of grievances. These were lists of need and injury--emotional and literal. My mother included an infected blister she'd gotten when she tripped on the dock carrying groceries, claiming it was keeping her from writing her novel. My father responded with his own wound, sustained while dragging a boat in from a storm. "We were both unbending in our sense that we contributed more than the other," my mother told me. "All the work, the child care, and conflicts made me feel less important to your father--and I think him to me. Instead of a greater reconciling because we really loved each other, this war--over who was being a chauvinist or feminist pig--just began to consume us. It's a terrible way to go, but there it went."

I started to suspect that things weren't the way they were supposed to be when my parents began to retreat into the study for hours at a time. And I vividly recall the afternoon, right down to the dust motes dancing in the single beam of sunlight, when my mother sat my sister and me down to say that she and my father had decided to go to couples counseling. Was she trying to soften the inevitable blow, as she must have known by then that they were going to separate? Within the year, my mother did indeed tell us of their plans to live apart, and my only question, through deep, gasping sobs, was, "Well, why did you even give birth to me if you were going to do this?"

In the end, my mother left with another woman. She confessed to an affair with a close friend of both my parents' whom I'll call Alice, who had been, until then, engaged to Ben, another close friend. The two couples had once been a comfortable foursome, often going to movies and dinner and hanging out at our house. This sexy plot twist--one that has been mulled over quite a bit by our family, especially by my father, who finally exorcised his ghost by writing a novel about it--came to obscure the more meaningful problem of my parents' marital collapse for me. Which is not to say that my mother's lesbianism was an irrelevant event in my life. On the contrary, it made me feel, with burning adolescent shame, that our family had spiraled into a realm of unrecoverable eccentricity. But I later realized that the most important part of the story for me was the end, the end of family as I'd known it.

Post--divorce, there were many discombobulated years of joint custody ("two weeks, two weeks" as we came to describe it), dark and temporary apartments, and, from my young perspective, hideous new alliances forged between my mother and her girlfriend as well as between my father and his new, young wife. My sister and I shuttled back and forth between these two households, inventing a willy--nilly intimacy with my parents and the cast of characters they'd recently introduced, though mostly I raged against the absurdity of it all.

My stepmother and I, especially, fought often and with gusto. We clashed mainly about the mundane details of housekeeping--changing the kitty litter, cleaning my room--but honestly, we were in a turf battle. She wanted to make a home of her own, and I fought to keep her from erasing our history. In the meantime, just beginning my own teenage sexual awakening, I was horrified by my mother's drifting between the genders, leaving Alice for a time to date a man and then pairing up with her again for 20 years. Eventually, I'd develop sympathy for and even a sense of humor about the pioneering complexity of my mother's life, but at 10 and 13 and even 18 years old, I could see her behavior only as an assault on what might have been a normal life--oh, how I deeply believed normal was the answer!

We each inherit a legacy of marriage, defining ourselves with or against our parents' marriage. In this sense, children are given a chance to finish the work of an earlier generation, studying the past and then applying the lessons to their own lives. This doesn't always guarantee brighter outcomes. My own parents, for example, had been determined not to imitate their parents. My mother wanted a deeper relationship than she saw between her mother and father. Although her parents were a wonderful match physically, she didn't really feel that they knew each other. Her father would cut off her mother's attempts to talk about the world with a condescending remark. My grandmother, wounded and unruly, would roll her eyes and murmur, "Men are such tragic babies." And so my mother chose a husband who seemed more open to women. But my father, only one generation away from the man who cut off his wife, turned out to have his own limits in this regard. He never would have publicly humiliated my mother; in fact, he would have outwardly praised her wit and intelligence but later quietly chafed at her rebellion. And what was disdain for forbidding men in the '50s became an affair with a woman in the '70s. In the final analysis, I think my parents may also have been a little too in love with their own screwball story. Like some kind of emotional minotaur, they were one half self--mythologizing, one half aching to pull their marriage back to a safe place. Finally unable to contain their bursting and opposing emotions, their marriage blew apart.

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