Staying On

In "The Madrid" Edie Falco plays a wife and mother, so disaffected that she has left her family and moved to a small, cheap and bleak apartment in The Madrid without leaving the slightest indication of her whereabouts for husband, daughter, aging mother, and neighborhood friend.  The play is a rather dismal affair, and one could sympathize with Ms. Falco's character for wanting to get away from that bunch, but that is not the point, of course, but rather an investigation of the nature of suffocation in the family, or perhaps I should say, from the family.  It's all in the  perspective.  The  play brought back so many memories, first and foremost of a young couple, friends of ours, also with four children, husband working at his teaching career, wife at home with the kids until one day, when they were hitting middle school age, one night after dinner, she took off her apron, handed it to her husband and announced that she was out of there.  To everyone's astonishment she went to a distant city and enrolled in law school, and that was that.  In my forties I went about the country lecturing a lot, and suffered through many a faculty dinner party hosted for me, the speaker, and true to the custom of the time, sat between two women, usually faculty wives, often drunk, sarcastically commenting on the fruits of their elaborate educations which they had set aside for motherhood.  My own wife confessed to the children that she would have decamped herself if she had had the money, and later on and she had gone back to work as an architect, when I took another sabbatical year in Rome with the children, she stayed behind for work, and upon our return, she just could not face going back into that straightjacket of life as housewife.  Even if I had taken over so much of the housekeeping, there is something about the acculturation of women that lets them surrender to an enslavement unless they make the kind of dramatic move shown in "The Madrid."  I did not like being a father and househusband much, but I guess I always knew it was voluntary in a way it never is for women, and I had  taken on the role, not been born into it.  A dear friend of mine always quotes her mother's saying "A clean house is a wasted life."  The problem is that nowadays the escape routes are all too available, but as the play demonstrates at the end, they are ultimately foreclosed even for the adventurous by the powerful lure of the visible needs of children and parents.  Even the strongest will surrender to those bonds and go back home.  Years ago after a drunken row whilst visiting friends on the Cape I angrily got into the car to go away only to be advised by the many times married mother of our hostess who was also visiting that one relationship was pretty much the same as the next, and changing beds wasn't really worth the effort in the long term.  I turned off the engine and went back into the house.