
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Viewing the Helmers Marriage
Last night my husband and I went to a performance of a modern version of Ibsen's "Doll's House," stripped down for twenty first century taste (eliminating the complications of the children, for one thing, which as any veteran of marriage will tell you, so radically changes the chemistry of husband and wife that this is basically no longer Ibsen's play). As is always the case when the tensions of the power struggle between husband and wife are played out, and there is ample evidence of the acculturation which keeps women enslaved to the family, and obedient to her husband's outside power struggles, I grow guilty in recollecting my own twenty year marriage to the mother of our four children. She was a trained architect, just out of school, and ready for her first job, when we married, I was in my second year as an instructor of ancient languages in a four year college commuting an hour three days a week from Cambridge where we lived. In the second year of our marriage she bore a baby boy, quite unplanned, as those things could be back in the days before The Pill. Three more were to follow. We both assumed that she would stay home and mother the child, and then again with the later arrivals. I was frantic at the disruption of my routines; I had to prepare classes, read papers, write some damn book or another to ensure my future. She was stunned at the loss of her personal life as the babies dominated her ever waking moment. I didn't know what to do. Yes, I could cook and did so, could diaper a baby, did that far less so; babies were breast fed, so that let me off that hook. But me cooking and shopping made us both tense. It was "time away from my career." We both felt it, both uneasy, but she also angry because of the underlying perception unspoken that hers didn't matter. For ten years she felt bitter and I felt guilty. The children were the most adorable, beautiful, sweet human beings, we were so proud of them, so pleased to laugh and play with them, for me true to this day when they are all in their late fifties and visiting me in Florida (their mother alas having died in 2005). But as youngsters they were always that burden and responsibility, that "other" thing, not what we were trained to do, supposed to do, which was working on our careers. After ten years the children were all in school and the responsibility of other adults for long stretches of weekday time. I was successful enough to arrange my teaching and research duties so that generally I could operate from my office at home in their off school hours, and she went back to work full-time. She had lost ten years as her classmates were gaining a foothold in the profession. She was a woman in a man's world. I was reminded of that by the article in this morning's New York Times about women architects and the formidable challenges they face in a man's profession. My wife and I understood that when she returned to work nothing must stand in her way. And nothing did; she worked her way up to associate, the co- designer of major buildings around Boston, even from time to time out in the field as the site architect with her hard hat and boots. I took over the cooking, a cleaning woman came for the cleaning, the children made their beds and oversaw the laundry. It was an interesting role reversal as my children remarked on how in their friends' families it was the father who often had to work late at the office and the mother cooked dinner. I became to all intents and purposes the main homemaker. I suppose that anyone viewing this arrangement would say it all evolved naturally and comfortably from my being more gay than straight, even if this were an item unknown to not many more than my wife and myself. We grew apart, my wife and I, for a variety of reasons, not the least because she liked being out in the world, giving architecture all her attention, hanging out with the boys, and I wanted to take sabbatical years in Europe with the family, and finally did so without her. It was a divergence of interests, the sexual one becoming more pronounced as we developed in different directions. Nobody slammed the door, like Nora Helmer, the marriage ended not with a bang but a kind of yawn.
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