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I could have told my daughters Portia and Margaret the truth,
which was that I was totally stressed-out by the idea that my
wife, Amie, was back at the AirBnB getting angrier and angrier
and angrier. But that would have implicated Amie, which (1) I
really try not to do, because I don't want to hurt her relationship
with the children, and (2) I didn't think I should do, because I
don't think parents should point the finger at each other, especially not parents at stepparents, and (3) I don't like blaming
other people for my feelings, since it was my feelings we were
talking about, after all, and I have to take responsibility for
those. (Reasons 1 and 2 especially are informed by the fact that I
had a stepfather who was blamed for lots of things, and I didn't
have a relationship with him for many years, and I still distrust
him, even though he's been dead for ten years, and I think this is
in no small part due to the things my father but also my mother
said about him and blamed him for.) So I lied to the girls by telling them a little part of the truth, which was that I was stressed-
out because of the slow line at Whataburger. Which was—now
that I write it down—kind of a nasty thing to say to them, since
they both knew they'd guilted me into going to the fast-food
place, and they probably also knew or at least suspected part of
the truth of why I was stressed-out. My daughters know me better than I tend to admit.
They often tell me that I look sad when I'm worrying about
some simmering fight with my wife. They probably have agendas of their own. But they are also my children, and I try to give
them the benefit of the doubt.
Recently, I read an interview in The Paris Review with
Simone de Beauvoir, who is not one of my favorite writers but is
one of my favorite people to teach. I teach her in many of my
classes, including Existentialism, Philosophy of Literature, and
the newly developed How to Be Free and Happy. In the inter-
view, de Beauvoir said, "Love is a great privilege. Real love,
which is very rare, enriches the lives of the men and women who
experience it." I agree that to love someone or to be loved is a
great privilege, and of course it enriches, complicates, and troubles your life. That's such a tautology that you wonder why the
interviewer chose to include it. But she was speaking, so she was
being casual, and it is the kind of thing one likes to hear de Beauvoir say. What troubled me was her pompous claim that real love
is rare. "Real love": What does that mean? As opposed to fake
love? Does she mean a grand passion? It seems to me that this
statement could be made only by someone who has never had
children. When I think of a statement like this about real love,
I think of Beckett and Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil. I read
that when they were married, they more than once ran a piece
of tape all the way across their apartment in Paris, dividing it in
two, and agreed that neither would come to the other person's
side. (Neither could afford to leave the other—or, at least, that
was what they told themselves. And divorce is financially difficult.) They supposedly had an incredibly violent relationship,
and were together for around fifty years. Of course, Simone de
Beauvoir was also in a strangling, merciless, but exalted lifetime relationship with the philanderer Jean-Paul Sartre, which
may have been why she made her remark about the rarity and
enriching power of love. She may have been telling herself all
those years that what she and Sartre had was extraordinary. As
for me, I'm like the narrator at the beginning of the great
Christmas movie Love Actually: I think love is all over the
place, banal and noble, always hard, always messy, always
keeping things interesting and demanding.
It makes me wonder: Would we be less distracted by life if
we were less afraid of pain? Like, what if you could stop running
away from suffering? Would that be a good thing or a bad thing?
Would life become mundane?
Lately, things have been complicated in my third marriage,
because we have an eighteen-month-old son, and it is difficult
for his sisters to have a new little brother, and it is probably also
difficult to have a new sibling from their stepmom. My wife,
Amie, is not new—we've been married seven years—but
things change once the stepmom is also a real mom, a real mom
to a brother of yours—and it must be difficult for her to be a
new mom of a son who has three big sisters who were previously only your stepchildren and not the older siblings of your
only child. I just showed this sentence to my wife, who is also a
writer, and she was annoyed. We've been fighting a lot lately.
She said, "I'm moving over here, but it's not because I'm mad."
We are working together in a coffee shop called PT's in down-
town Kansas City. In the afternoon, normally Amie's mom
watches our son for a few hours and we either go climbing at a
climbing gym or go to a coffee shop to write. (A moment ago
Amie left the coffee shop entirely, explaining: "I'm going to go
outside because I'm cold." It's summer in Kansas City and 109
degrees with the heat index. But now she's sitting out there with
her back to me.) Before she moved outside, she said, about the
sentence I showed her, the first sentence in this paragraph, "I
don't think it's right." I wrinkled my eyebrows at her. "Why
don't you just write about your own feelings rather than trying
to write about other people's feelings and getting them wrong,
just because you don't want to offend anybody?"
She was right, of course.
We were arguing the other day about stepfamily stuff
after returning from a tough family vacation in Austin—and it
was tough, if I'm honest with myself, though it started out
surprisingly well—and I said, "But I don't even know what I'm
feeling. It's like when I look at my feelings, they just kind of dis-
appear," which is true. When I'm angry, I'm genuinely angry.
But then as soon as I'm no longer angry, I don't feel as if the anger
was real—unless I think about the things that made me angry,
in order to get myself angry all over again.
But last night, as I was thinking about anger and stepfamilies,
I remembered that the few times I saw my stepfather, Blair, angry
he was terrifyingly violent. I saw him drag my stepsister, Lisa, by
her ponytail up the stairs of our two-story wooden rental house in
Calgary when she was thirteen or fourteen years old (I was six or
seven), with a toilet plunger in his other hand, with which he beat
her when he got her to the privacy of her bedroom. We could hear
his yells and her screams all through the house. I remember him
bellowing at my stepbrothers in the basement and slamming
doors. I remember how red his face was and the way his mouth
sprayed. He lost his temper with me only once or twice, and he
yelled at me and slammed a few doors, but that was when my mom
was out of the house, at the hospital after a surgery. My mother
almost never lost her temper, but, like me, when she did it was a
frightening explosion, screaming and door-slamming. So perhaps
it is to be expected that I would be afraid of anger, both of getting
angry myself and of other people getting angry with me.
Of course, I also get so tired of my wife and ex-wives treating their children or stepchildren as if they are adults. Why can't
we just recognize that okay, these are children, and take their
little tantrums as lightly as we did when they were babies?
Also, to be honest, I'm angry at everyone except the baby
right now. I'm angry that my wife can't be more loving with my
daughters, more grown-up, more like a parent and less like a
spoiled child who wants to make everything about her and her
feelings. I'm angry that my twenty-four-year-old can't let go of
not being the only child. I'm angry that my fourteen-year-old is
so angry with me but is afraid to show it, and won't let me really
be her dad. I'm angry that my twelve-year-old sulks all the time
because she's not the baby anymore. I'm not angry at the baby,
but I will be one day, of course. And I'm angry at myself because
I don't have the courage and wherewithal to create a unified family out of all these competing interests. I'm also angry at myself
because I am so afraid of the anger of my wife and my daughters:
if I could just live with their anger rather than avoiding it or trying to fix it, I feel like my own life would be better and all of their
lives would also be better.
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