Happy Wife, Happy Life
Reference: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/22/happy-wife-happy-life_n_5843596.html
This is an expression I’ve heard from at least one of my friends or neighbors. Naturally, spoken by a man, but I suppose it could also come from the lips of a gay woman.
My own wife gets agitated by this expression, feeling it places too much burden of responsibility for a man’s happiness on someone other than himself, even if that other someone is arguably the person of most significance in his life. I’m pondering this at the moment.
I can attest that it is not impossible for me to be in a happy space even when she is not, but, I can also say with equal conviction that there are many times when unhappy wife really does translate—more or less directly—into not-so-happy life.
The pursuit of happiness is our life theme, for most of us, but its definition is broad. For some it is inner sanctum. For others, the accumulation of wealth they can only borrow for a few short decades. For others still, it is trying to make sense of a world so very far outside of our control. We mustn’t kid ourselves.
For me, I’ve learned how much my happiness—right or wrong—is affected by, if not tied to, how close I feel to this person I married. Now this word ‘close’ is itself a vague reference without definition provided. For me that one’s easy. Close means touch.
I am a bit embarrassed to confess that at 50 years old, I now know I have some pretty serious, lingering mommy issues from childhood. Writing those words makes me feel like a cliché for all of human psychologydom, but as with other things, sometimes the simplest answer really is the correct one. And for me, having an alcoholic mother with (I know now) borderline personality disorder translated into a volatile home devoid of touch. This isn’t to say I was never touched as a child, but touch depended on what mood mom was in, and the touching mood was among her rarest.
I’m not going Freudian here, but a boy’s first experience with feminine love is unarguably with his mother. Even if it ceases in early toddlerhood, even the worst of mothers certainly has had some physical contact with her infant son or daughter. When my own children were born as super preemie babies, the nursing staff in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit, where critical newborns go to fight for their own survival) told my wife that studies showed how vital skin-to-skin contact between mother and child was to the child’s survival. Point is, moms and babies are where it all begins, and for baby boys, that’s our first-ever touch by the hands of a woman.
If I drive by an elementary or pre- school and see a mom dropping off her son, leaning down and kissing him goodbye, I pause. I’m pretty sure my mom would have done this for me, too, but I truly cannot recall it with any certainty. I just hope it’s back there somewhere in our shared history timeline.
My most certain favorable touch memory was on the handful of occasions when I was very little that I’d find my mom tucked into her corner of the couch, reading a book. This was a frequent posture for her, as she loved to read. I would approach cautiously, and if her body signals didn’t say ‘keep your distance’, I would lay my head in her lap. I fight back tears as I recall this, because with an unstable alcoholic person, you never really know for sure what reception you will have when you make your own move. For the few times I recall this, I recall dozens if not hundreds where her glass of scotch on the end table sat poised like a rattlesnake’s tail, forewarning any who approach that venom lies within, and any false or unwelcomed move could cause you to be struck with an injury you’d not soon forget.
Later in life, when I was 15, my parents were each in their own midlife crises. My mother was on the verge of her 50th birthday that year, and she and my father realized their lives were empty. My father fell very ill and nearly died in the hospital. When he survived that close call, he returned to his own childhood roots, and began to consider returning to church attendance. Having been raised the son of a Baptist minister, my dad got the hell out of Dodge as soon as he graduated high school, and the life he led during the 35-year span from that day until his hospital stay in 1981 was, for the most part, nothing short of full-blown hedonism. There’re sayings about being ‘scared straight’, or something or someone ‘putting the fear of God into you’. For my dad, his brush with death did the latter. He decided he was the textbook Prodigal Son, and this is what drove him to begin searching the Sunday paper’s religion section for a new church to visit.
Church attendance was not a part of my upbringing. By the time I came around—the baby of four sibs—mom and dad were less than enamored by all things religious, and they simply worked too much to have space for church time. So, I grew up nonreligious. This isn’t to say I didn’t believe in God, per se, but I had no formal ‘training’—and I hate everything about that expression.
The essay on my family’s religious journey is one for another time, and will possibly take me years to complete. For the purpose of this paper, it will suffice to say despite the many horrible outcomes of this fork in our family road, there was some undeniable good, namely, for the first time in recorded history, my mother and father actually began making an effort to get along better. In the final outcome, it would turn out that they exchanged one set of addictions for another, but beginning to follow a set of Biblical values did translate, among other things, to treating each other like Jesus would. “Do unto others…” To speak more kindly. To listen better. To calm down. To “Trust in God.” And…to touch more.
My dad soon began to see the fruits of his labor. Mom would continue to have many, many demons of her own to contend with, but, she too made a reciprocal effort, and began to respond somewhat more gently towards him. Happy wife, happy life.
I, on the other hand, hold the inverse timeline. I joined the crowd and embraced fundamentalist Christianity at age 15, and my own honeymoon experience with it was genuinely awesome at that age and stage in my young life; a major upgrade from parents who previously screamed at each other at the top of their lungs, intoxicated on strong liquor. But, my own next 35 years would gradually unravel what I once held true about God, the Bible, life, death, and the pursuit of happiness.
Similar to the Religion Chapter, the origin story of my marriage will have to come at another time. But you do need to know that it began when I was 19, and she was the ripe old age of 16. I know, I know. It IS crazy, but let that topic sit for another lesson. My only intent in establishing a chronology around this is that if you do the math, it means we’ve been married for 31 years now. It is nearly the entirety of our lives, thus far.
When we began, I *think* things were happy between us. She seemed a happy wife; it seemed a happy life. We were young, poor, and very screwed up with kooky religion, but, we had each other, and that meant the best semblance of stability either of us had ever known. She too had a tumultuous childhood with a different variety of neglect and abuse, but it’s not my place to trace her narrative for you. She’s done that. She’s still doing that.
So how’d we get here?
Burnout?
Love waxed cold?
Loss of our religious footing?
Other?
I fear it may be a combination of all the above.
All I know is I have a very, very unhappy wife.
And…