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Racing
toward love Strapped! Mommy
Diarist The
Guilty Bride Introducing
… IndieEtiquette Bride,
Unhinged When
Wedding Dresses Attack! Book
Review: The Artful Bride The
B-word My
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Mythology of Marriage A
Marriage of My Own Why
I Popped the Question My
Wedding, My Way Happily
Ever After Am
I Really That Single? -----------
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A marriage of my own Thirty years after the women's movement, I treasure the choices my mother never had.
Winter 2001 | "For we think back through our mothers if we are women," said Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own, of the woman writer. My marriage is like a book; it's a creative venture and a collaboration. As a young wife, I think back to my mother. * * * April 2, 1967. My mother's wedding. The bride wore a short, white dress. Her cropped hair was longer on top, accentuating a slim neck. The slender groom wore a dark suit. His thick-rimmed glasses defined his face. The photographs show a string of people oddly grouped, with no sign of the clean lines of most wedding photographs. It was the '60s, and being too conventional was bourgeois. I think my mother was already a feminist at heart, and, hence suspicious of the traditions. * * * August 3, 1997. I wore a wedding gown of silk organza, simple and unadorned. A band of silk made a V at my waist and ended in two roses at the small of my back. A white veil hung down my back. The skirt stood out in a slender bell over my petticoat. When I moved the fabric fell softly, like snowflakes. The train swept the floor. Ethan wore a dark suit and red tie. His mass of long, curly hair formed a dark cloud behind him. That day he moved his engagement ring to his right hand to make room for the wedding band, as did I. It was his idea for both of us to get engagement rings. "If I just buy you a ring, it's like me making you mine," he explained. Matching pieces of jade peek out through the gold in our set of engagement rings. Thirty years after my parents' wedding, the second wave of feminism is bedrock to us. Wedding traditions carry the vestiges of male dominance, but they also have beauty and power that I feel entitled to. Two rings are better than none. The white dress signifies new life, not virginity. Sexual commitment enriches our pleasure in each other. We both kept our names. Two glasses broke under two heels at the ceremony's conclusion, claiming our cultural tradition but discarding the asymmetry. We took what we wanted from tradition and left the rest. * * * My parents got engaged because Dad was moving across the country, and my mother laid down the law: marriage or I see other people. Dad felt bullied, but he didn't want to be alone. This is how I got engaged: Soon after my college graduation, I stayed up until dawn with my roommate the night before her wedding. The sky outside was beginning to gray when I realized why Cathy's wedding the next day was making me so anxious I couldn't sleep. I wanted to get married. I wasn't sure I was old enough to be married. I had vowed not to marry young because of my parents' example-- they were 21 and 22. But I've always looked to my friends to see what I'm old enough to do: date, wear a bra, shave. Cathy's wedding was like a push. She stood on the other side of the gap, holding her hand out, as I watched the sun rise on the morning she'd be a bride. My heart was poised for a leap, and it was dragging my mind along. I suppose that everyone, in part, marries for the same reason my father did: to avoid being alone. Ethan and I loved each other, and were happy together. No matter how old you are when you marry, you'll change. Independence doesn't require loneliness. The remaining gap between doubt and certainty was pretty small, and I could feel my heart stretching to bridge it. In four months we were officially engaged. We would celebrate the bridging of the gap. In the early '70s, soon after my mother joined a Feminist consciousness-raising group, my father reported a strange nocturnal event. "I have the impression I peed in the oven last night," he said, unsure if it was a dream or reality. My mother turned the oven on. It was not a dream. "No matter how much I cleaned that oven, I couldn't get the smell out. We had to move away," Mom reports. He says he was confused, and it was an accident. She says he was responding to her joining the women's movement. Perhaps it is because I am attuned to the quiet anger that festered, then erupted, in my mother, that I believe her. Or maybe it's because my father didn't clean the oven himself. * * * Once when we were dating I asked Ethan if he was a feminist. He said he wasn't sure. Well, I said, what's a feminist? He said that if feminism was supporting the equality of women, "I'm definitely a feminist." I adored him for the whole conversation. I even liked his initial hesitation. If he was just saying what he thought I wanted to hear, he wouldn't have hesitated. There would be no urine in our oven. * * * "I would expect you to do more if you worked from home," Ethan said. I wasn't sure I wanted to work an office job indefinitely." Oh, well, yeah," I said. "Of course... I'd miss cooking," he mused. Several weeks later, I came back with a different tune. "I don't see why I should do all the housework if I work at home someday." We'd never related his sometimes-fluctuating graduate student income to housework. At first, I'd been modeling after my mother, who did all the housework until she got a job. Or I'd thought of staying home as a guilty pleasure that I should pay for with extra housework. Or I just liked the idea of the grout being clean if I did more housework. I have conflicting feelings about staying at home. I know I might want to one day. But who does the dishes can set the tone for a whole marriage. We've agreed to take it all as it comes, revising our division of labor until it seems right, if and when I decide to work at home. We'll remain vigilant. Because who makes the money can set the tone of a whole marriage, too. * * * "I didn't even know divorce was an option until I got a job," my mother told me. It's when I learned divorce was an option, too, because they were fighting all the time. Mom's paycheck had opened a door that in 19 years of marriage she hadn't known was there. Within two years she walked through it. In the aftermath, she emphasized financial independence. I agreed completely. "I never want to confuse financial dependence for love," I was known to explain. "Nothing's pure if you do it for money," Mom said. It was all so obvious. Marital happiness must come from the continual knowledge that happiness, not money, kept you together. But Ethan could barely live on the money he earned as a graduate student. Similarly, I could never be a full-time writer and/or mother without relying on his income. Women need access to equal paychecks, but that doesn't mean that each woman must individually exercise that freedom. I am truest to feminism when I understand my own priorities and make decisions accordingly. I worry, of course, that writers and mothers are overworked and underpaid. But the key is a partner that shares. When it comes time to decide about childcare, it won't be the choice between me or a professional; it'll be, how do we split the time we take from the work he loves, the work I love, and balance that with our feelings about (and budget for) professional care? Inside my house of cards there's a hidden support: not financial dependence, but love. I have a tendency to reach inside and nudge the support. Do you really love me? Is this what we want? Is this working? Are we communicating? Divorce, I intone, reacting to two silent years before my parents' divorce, when no one could say the word. "Yeah, well, divorce me," I say, and then take it back. It's too bad it took Mom so long to realize her marriage was unhappy. The door that swung open when she got a job had been there all along. I hope that having seen her do it ensures that I'll always remember. Hope seems to be the key. * * * December 24, 1992. My mother's second wedding. The bride wore blue, the groom wore a black suit. The minister's study was intimate. I wore red. I was given the floor at one point in the ceremony. I rambled. Though I'd had the opportunity to prepare, I hadn't. I said nice things about my stepfather, who I love. Then I told them both, "You've made me maybe-kinda-sorta believe in marriage again." It was true. My stepfather exhibits unwavering devotion to one woman after decades of unrelieved flirting. And my mother has become a much kinder, more open person, in that warmth. The years have ticked by without their love ever flagging. My mother embraced hope, and that influenced my marriage more than anything else she's ever done. In the five years between their ceremony and ours, my mother and stepfather got me to believe in marriage. "Maybe-kinda-sorta" dropped out of the sentence. ----------- A condensed version of this essay appears in Young Wives Tales (SealPress). Kate Epstein is a regular contributor to Boobtoob: Well Endowed Television. ----------- What have you learned from your mother about marriage? Share your tips in Kvetch |
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