Working Through the Constipations of Marriage

I was constipated. Utterly, miserably constipated, and pregnant. I stood across the bed from my husband Jason as he dressed for work and begged him to stay home. The sleeve of fiber cereal I’d diligently consumed, the Colace pills, a week of putting stuff into my body had not yielded anything out. I imagined all the chewed-up meals piled atop my unborn baby’s head, adorning it like a fruit-topped hat or suffocating it like a blanket.

The clock read 7 a.m. I knew I’d already reached the limit of what I could handle that day. Two exuberant beings waited just outside the door, needing exactly all the things that little creatures need from their mother. I usually prided myself on staring down those hours, the ones that yawned wide and deep, trapped in a small Hoboken apartment with little children on a cold day. But not today. The absurd pain in my belly announced itself with every step, taking me out before I even got going.

Jason’s frustration at my request hung in the air. “Cora, I cannot miss work because you’re constipated.”

We’d assumed very delineated roles in the four years since we’d become parents, when I’d left my career to stay home. I knew he loved delivering that line. To Jason, my predicament fell solidly in Mom Territory, a land I slogged through alone. How dare I even float the idea of him missing work, the very work that paid our rent, because I couldn’t move my bowels?

Defeated, I trailed Jason through the apartment like a puppy, hoping he would look back and see me clamoring at his heels, that some well of last-minute empathy might bubble forth.

“Weren’t you the one who wanted the third baby?” he called, as his pant legs moved him away and the door banged shut.

I hated my husband then. I stared at the door, that metal boundary he’d placed between us, and fought the urge to run to the elevator, grab him by the shoulders and scream, “We’ve tied our lives together yet you can’t appreciate how badly I’m hurting?” The feeling unnerved me. How many moments of visceral loathing, if fleeting, is one allowed for a spouse before it grows into something more sinister?

*

My father tells me how lucky I am to have a “good marriage,” like it’s a foil-wrapped gift simply dropped into my lap. He and my mother divorced when I was nine and I spend more time than I should comparing my so-far intact marriage to their failed one. If I can simply pinpoint the thing that wrecked them, I think, then perhaps I can avoid it myself. The problem is that my parents’ divorce refuses to offer up a singular culprit.

The year leading up to their split is a generalized scene. I remember pool balls flying through the air once and I remember hiding with my sister under her bed. The usual sing-song of my mother’s voice became throaty and broken. It seemed like my mother was always asking my father for things he didn’t want to give and his refusals came with laughter, like he couldn’t possibly take her seriously.

There is only one argument I vividly recall. We were off to the circus. I was seven or eight years old and buckled in next to my sister in the back of our Pontiac Parisienne station wagon. Dad drove, of course, because Mom didn’t drive on the highway, and I don’t recall what started them off. In memory, the soundtrack is a rush of silence, like when a speaker is left on but nothing’s playing. I remember watching my parents’ faces contort and reorganize, a graceful ugly ballet of expression.

They hurled hatred at each other in slow motion, mouths opening like gasping fish, teeth bared, eyes ablaze. Mom screamed with such fury that her nose began to bleed. Then Dad pulled over and got out, throwing the door closed. He charged away in huge, galloping strides that shot up gravel in streaks.

Clearly, I told myself in the backseat, he’d forgotten my sister and I were in the car. He’d forgotten Mom didn’t drive on the highway. I watched my mother watch him go, blood streaming from her nostrils, the whole expanse underneath a slick red she didn’t wipe away.

The children ran the apartment that morning as I sat on the toilet, alternately praying to whatever gods ruled over evacuation and then cursing them. Nothing happened in the bathroom, but I couldn’t leave it.

When I noticed blood in the bowl, I called my doctor. “I’m taking myself to the emergency room,” I said in a voice that pinged off the tile walls.

“Save yourself a trip,” he replied. “Do an enema at home.”

Horrified, I dialed Jason at work. Then I dropped the phone to my lap and yelled at it, “If you don’t come home right now and help me deal with this, the kids and I are leaving!”

Unintended words. I couldn’t even leave the toilet, let alone the apartment, but the threat tumbled out and sat there anyway. My marriage suddenly felt like a nest perched neatly on a ledge with a windstorm wailing about. Six words, the kids and I are leaving, had ushered in something that felt tenuous and dark.

Is it really so easy to turn a marital trajectory? With words I didn’t mean to say and a threat I now felt compelled to make good on, if only to prove a point? But then, the next time I needed my husband to take me seriously, I’d have to do it again, to what end? Is that how it began with my parents?

Maybe couples look back on a failed marriage and recognize the series of steps that took them there. Perhaps the first and the second and the tenth steps seem exploratory and reversible until one day, they’re not. You find yourself in a new landscape, look around, and realize you can’t go back. You can no longer stomach the thought.

On the line, I heard a sigh that carried the weight of our growing family, and then my husband replied through gritted teeth, “Fine. What do you need?”

Is it really so easy to turn a marital trajectory?

My father did return to the car that day. I remember watching his shape recede into the distance and then reappear, his form crisping up again, detail by detail. I remember my anger at the other motorists who zipped by rubber-necked to glimpse our drama on the side of the road. I felt ashamed of whatever stories they were concocting about my family in their minds. I’m told we went to the circus as planned, although I lose my memory somewhere along my father’s walk back. My mother must have tidied her face.

I’ve time-stamped the day in the station wagon as the beginning of the end for my parents, but I know it’s not that simple. I wish I could pinpoint the exact moment in their marriage when my father stopped trying and started biding his time. I wonder when my mother stopped caring about the quality of words that left her mouth in her escalating attempts to provoke any serious reaction from my father. For roughly a year, anger and resentment ran like an undercurrent beneath our home, always humming, every argument between my parents feeding the next.

Then one day, my father stood in our family room between two suitcases and said goodbye. He was off, headed for a new easier life filled with skiing and tennis and women who weren’t my mother. She would return from divorce court trumpeting that we had won big and my father had lost. But I knew the truth. My family, the people I needed to have under one roof, had been sacrificed. We were all losers.

*

Jason walked through the door an hour later, shaking a plastic bag, all business. “I looked at the picture,” he said. “You’re going to need help. Get down on all-fours.”

I didn’t know where we stood right then, if we still wore the morning’s ugliness like a shroud. I didn’t care. Misery outplayed it all, I just wanted to feel better. I crouched down in the bathroom, a space hardly big enough for one, let alone two with the pregnant one on her knees. I studied the image of the plastic applicator on the box and fretted over fitting another thing into my body. I clamped my eyes shut as Jason moved behind me.

Then I heard amusement in his words. “I think you are supposed to . . . present a little more.”

“Jesus Christ, Jason!” I tried to look over my shoulder, to the spot where he towered over me with the bulb of saline aimed at my rear, but I could only address the wall. “Get it over with!”

I felt pressure and then nothing, maybe an imagined sensation of cool. Jason left and I turned the lock, feeling vulnerable and weird about our newest plane of intimacy. I had a sudden gripping fear that something integral had shifted between us. A worry that Jason might look at me differently quivered in my gut alongside the baby and everything else.

Then came pounding on the door. “Cora! Don’t do anything! You’re supposed to wait five minutes!”

“Leave me alone!”

“I mean it! I’m setting a timer!”

“Get away from the door!”

Just then our daughter’s baby-voice chimed in. “Daddy, Mama okay?”

“Yes, honey,” he replied. “Mommy is full of poop.”

I used to peek at my parents in their bathroom, three decades ago, in the blue house where I grew up. My mother would sit on the lidded toilet, wearing a plastic cap on her head, while my father used a hook to pull strands of her hair through the cap’s tiny holes. Then he’d snap on rubber gloves and paint over blonde hair color, the odor harsh in my nose as I played voyeur at the door.

The light in the tiny space reflected off the gold wallpaper and gave my parents an aura. They were completely at ease together, giggling. My mother looked silly in her cap, ice cubes tinkling in her glass of rum and Coke, and my father played hairdresser between swigs of Miller Lite. Looking back, the adult in me whispers that the alcohol made them glow, that my frugal father didn’t want to pay for pricey salon highlights. The child in me wants the proof of love.

In the Hoboken bathroom, time passed and with it, mercifully, everything else. I opened the door to find the same blue eyes staring at me from three faces.

“Feel better?” Jason asked, a grin notching up his mouth.

I nodded, smiling too, abruptly struck by the realization that this argument and inconvenient rescue would not chase us into tomorrow. We were both wronged and wrong, but we could leave it alongside the wrinkled remains of an enema bag. We’d each made the decision while on opposite sides of the bathroom door.

It’s not a guarantee until death do us part. But for now, it gives me courage.

I can’t know if we’ll make it, Jason and me. Intentions don’t always equal outcomes. It turned out he bought a four-pack of enemas at the store that day, and that box followed us for four years and through two moves, always claiming a place under the bathroom cabinet. I considered the remaining enemas saline dreamcatchers, meant to ward off any evil things that might be coming for my marriage. They gave me comfort.

One day, a pregnant neighbor who knew the story and found herself in a similar predicament phoned to ask a favor.

“Take them!” I laughed as I handed over the box. “Save your marriage.”

The child in me whose parents fell apart is ever watchful. She can’t be any other way. Over the years, I’ve debated replacing the box of enemas that I gave away, lured by some implied promise like a lucky rabbit’s foot dangling on a key ring, but I haven’t. I know that if I asked, Jason would still drop everything and bound through the door, wielding enema as shining sword, just like he did years ago. I’d do the same for him. We’d laugh about it after.

It won’t stop me from jamming my marriage under a microscope and cranking the magnification to search for cracks. It’s not a guarantee until death do us part. But for now, it gives me courage, one daring to whisper that we might be alright, that time is simply a beast clutching my unknowable answer in its mitt.

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