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Rose

Dear Diary,

Last night, after putting Nicole to bed, I told Rob that I was on edge, that I felt cooped up being home with her all the time.

His response: “Take her out more! She’d love that!

” He keeps saying, “It will get better,” but I’m not sure if it is motherhood or it is my attitude.

I presume he thinks it’s me that’s the problem, not motherhood itself.

Maybe he’s right.

He wanted to have sex this morning before leaving for work.

He was abuzz with excited energy at the prospect of putting the final coats of paint on the walls of his practice.

He expected me to be abuzz by proxy. I was not abuzz.

I was exhausted. Nicole called for me at two o’clock in the morning.

She has these nightmares sometimes. Or that’s what she says.

Sometimes I think she just inherited my insomnia and wants company.

In any case, it took me an hour to get her back to sleep.

Then it took an hour after that for me to get back to sleep.

Then it was an hour after that when Rob started kissing my neck.

In The Sexual Responsibility of Women , published in 1957, Maxine Davis encouraged wives to shoulder the burden of “sexual adaptation.”

In The Total Woman , published in 1974, Marabel Morgan advised wives to greet their husbands at the front door naked, Saran Wrapped like leftover meatloaf.

Wives are not supposed to rebuff their husbands.

And rebuff is exactly what I did.

I love that word, rebuff . To check, repel, refuse, drive away.

He was frustrated. He said he wished I could join him in his enthusiasm about “the future.” The future meaning his practice. He has assumed that his future is my future. Society calls this kind of merging beautiful. I find it unjust at best, suffocating at worst.

“I know you’re having a hard time lately,” he said. “Things will get better.”

That tired promise, as familiar as it is vague.

He just left for the day, and Nicole is not yet awake (a minor miracle).

I should stop writing, take this time to do the dishes.

The dishwasher is broken (again), so I’m back to wearing rubber gloves and handwashing like a 1950s housewife.

Rob has left his clothes on the floor (again), so I must decide whether to just leave them there or pick them up (as he must assume I will and as I usually do).

In 1889, a magazine offered a prize to the spinster who could provide the best answer to this question: Why are you still single? The magazine never picked a winner, but this one’s my favorite:

“I find it more delightful to tread on the verge of freedom and captivity, than to allow the snarer to cast around me the matrimonial lasso.”

Ah yes, the matrimonial lasso.

I will leave the clothes where they are. A small rebellion.

When Nicole wakes up, we’ll go to the library.

Rob is right—I need to get out of the house more or I’ll go insane.

I was thinking the other day about Sylvia Plath, about how she taped herself shut into her kitchen, sealing all the cracks, then rested her head on the drop-down door of her oven, turned on the gas, and went to eternal sleep while her children were waking from their nightly slumber upstairs.

It is not so hard for me to understand her choice now. She went over the brink. That is all.

I do what I can to avoid the brink.

At the library, I can do research for my little project, my faux dissertation.

There’s a children’s area with toy blocks and books and whatnot.

It’ll entertain Nicole for a half hour, max, but I’ll take it.

Oh, how I long for the days of eight-hour stretches of time to be with my thoughts.

I have not come to terms with the fact that those stretches will not happen again.

Or not any time soon, anyway. By the time those kinds of hours are available to me, when Nicole is older, it’s likely I will have lost the attention span and brain cells necessary to work.

I don’t have a title for my project yet.

It’s about the history of marriage and motherhood.

I have always found comfort in history, in the way it enables us to contextualize our own lives, to understand ourselves in a grander picture.

Nothing about the present is that surprising when you consider the past.

If you look at the historical record, the most culturally preferred form of marriage—and the type of marriage referred to most often in the first five books of the Old Testament—was actually of one man to several women. Some societies also practiced polyandry, where one woman married several men.

Modern marriage, with one man and one woman pledging their lives to each other, is quite strange, historically speaking.

The original purpose of this type of marriage was not to ensure that children had a dedicated mother and father but to acquire advantageous in-laws and expand the family labor force.

Women were deemed property, passed from one male caretaker to another—father to husband—as a business arrangement between families.

A quote from Sir William Blackstone’s eighteenth-century Commentaries on the Laws of England :

“By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything.”

The woman is suspended.

She performs everything, but controls nothing.

Seems about right.

Just a handful of years ago, most states had “head and master” laws giving special decision-making rights to husbands.

In these laws, rape was defined as a man having forcible intercourse with a woman other than his wife.

In other words, forcible intercourse with his wife was just fine in the eyes of the law.

Before 1973, a woman couldn’t serve on a jury.

Before 1974—just a decade ago—a woman couldn’t apply for a credit card (and before the 1960s, she couldn’t open a bank account).

Before 1978, she could be legally fired for being pregnant.

Considering history, it’s hard to blame today’s men for their sense of entitlement. It has been passed down through generations, imprinted on their DNA. And it’s hard to blame women for their subservience, also ingrained.

I cannot hate Rob. I hate The System. I hate the unspoken rules. Rob and I have never had an actual conversation about who takes care of Nicole, who cooks, who cleans. It’s assumed to be me. I am not faultless. I have done nothing to counter the assumption. I am in The System as well.

In The Second Sex , published in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir wrote that equality between the sexes could only be achieved if the institution of marriage was eradicated.

She described marriage as slavery for half of humankind.

In The Feminine Mystique , published in 1963, Betty Friedan expressed similar thoughts, comparing the life of an American housewife to being trapped in cage.

Why did I get married?

I see why Rob wanted to marry. The role of husband is a grand one.

A husband is the king of the household. He is doted on by a self-sacrificing wife.

Marriage is like an ongoing ego stroke for men.

What is in it for women? A sense of security?

The satisfaction of fulfilling one’s prescribed life’s purpose?

I fear I fell for a marketing ploy. The institution of female subjugation was repackaged as a fairy tale, and I fell for it.

I love Rob. I do. I just feel ... stuck. Trapped in a squirrel cage.

I hope things are different for Nicole. I hope her generation sees through the marketing ploy.

Anyway, all this is going into my dissertation.

I suppose the best dissertations attempt to clarify or articulate something for the betterment of academic society (or, if one is ambitious or arrogant enough, society at large).

Perhaps all I’m doing is clarifying and articulating something for myself.

I can accept that. I have done so little for myself in the past three years.

Also in The Feminine Mystique , Friedan writes of the daily grind of a wife and mother who is afraid to ask herself a single haunting question: Is this all?

I am not afraid to ask the question. I ask it all the time.

Is this all?

Is this all?

Is this all?

I have been having this fantasy lately about attending a PhD program.

The other night, I dared to mention it to Rob.

“It would just be four or five years. We can have a nanny to help with Nicole. It’ll be good for her to see her mother do this.”

His eyes bugged out as I was talking. I could see the entirety of the irises, surrounded by white. He wasn’t angry. He was flummoxed. He had no idea what to do with this desire of mine.

“Sweetheart, I want you to be happy, but I don’t think it’s the right time. Maybe we can discuss it again when Nikki’s older, when the practice is more established?”

I couldn’t muster up a response, but the disappointment on my face must have been obvious.

“You could start back part time when Nikki goes to elementary school,” he added.

Elementary school felt like a hundred years away.

The thing is, I could apply. Just to see. Rob doesn’t have to know. I’ve always kept some cash from Mother in an envelope, my just-in-case fund. I can pay any application fees from that fund.

Princeton.

Yale.

Harvard.

Brown.

Cornell.

University of Pennsylvania.

I was at the top of my class in undergrad. I have the grades.

Of course, what if I get in?

I wouldn’t go. Couldn’t go. Rob spelled out the reasons why.

But maybe the high of an acceptance letter would sustain me for months to come. Years, even. Maybe I just need to know what’s possible, even if I remain in my usual life.

It makes me happy to think about.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in a letter to a male cousin in 1855: “Did it ever enter into the mind of man that woman too had an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of her individual happiness?”

No. I do not think this ever has entered into the mind of man.

It would be fun to do this just for me. It would infuse me with pride and confidence. It would remind me of my separateness.

I might just do it.

Another small rebellion.