I can think of all the right things to say, all the kind, compassionate ways to acknowledge, “Yes, Darling, I know you’re in pain.” I can be open to feedback and receptive to his points of view, which are galaxies away from mine. I can grant that these points of view are valid. I am generous with my time, with my compliments, with my appreciation. I think about sex and the ways in which his hands, his lips, his tongue, his . . . yes, that, too . . . bring me the kind of pleasure he alone can bring me.
Oh yes, I’m exactly the kind of wife he wants and deserves.
Until I see him. In our home, filled with chores and bills and trash and recyclables and laundry and meals, endless meals, to be planned, shopped for, prepped, cooked, eaten, leftovers portioned into plastic containers. Until I hear his sighs of fatigue and stress. Until I feel his hurried and purposeful pace, moving back and forth from office to kitchen like a target in a state fair carnival game, minus the audible “bing” when the metal duck reaches the end. Until I encounter the actuality of his thoughts and emotions and moods and desires which don’t align with anything that I am – or ever could be – thinking, feeling or wishing.
I’m not sure what to do about this. There’s much of our lives we spend in different places – different work environments, different gyms, different friend circles. But at the end of the night, we are under the same roof. Night after night. Sometimes the differences between the wife I want to be and the wife I am are slight, barely noticeable, and I think, “Well, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” in a tone channeling the 1970’s parenting mantra to encourage girls to enter the male fray, go ahead and take their rightful place in the masculine world of success and ambition and education and, by the 1980’s, athletics.
But women can’t enter the masculine world of wives, because there is no masculine world of wives. Men don’t want wives in any way a woman can be a wife. Because many times the wife is also someone’s mother. Someone’s boss or employee. Someone’s daughter. Someone’s sister. Someone’s church committee member. Someone who has to scoop the cat box or pick up dog poop from the yard. She can be loving and supportive, but it turns out she gives love and support like a girl; you can put the girl on the playfield, but she’ll still throw like a girl. Oh, and the wife has – at least at one point in her life – been run through with estrogen and oxytocin and, yes, tiny little dabs of testosterone, but not enough to give her any clue about life as a male, just like the tiny amounts of estrogen flowing through a male body go mostly unnoticed as testosterone propels them from conquest to action to achievement to orgasm to battle.
Sometimes, when I get lost in one of these gendered/planetary difference explanations of why I’ll never be the wife I ought to be, it doesn’t matter if my husband is in the next room, watching Sons of Anarchy, or in another state. I am in an orbit that imperfectly winds around him. Sometimes I get close, feel the magnetic pull into his trajectory, and our planets share a sweet arc of space warmed by the equidistant sun. Then I continue on, heading toward the longer end of the ellipse, the dark side of his moon.