Not for Everyday Use by Elizabeth Nunez

Author:Elizabeth Nunez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic
Published: 2014-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

15

Still I continue to blame the church. I hold the church responsible too for constraining our emotional lives. The constant fear of pregnancy robbed my mother of much of the pleasure she could have had in sex, so it must have been difficult for her to find the space and calm in the center of her being to attend to our emotional needs when hers were wanting. Was it the threat of damnation that kept her tethered to her husband when he strayed?

“Women today aren’t willing, like you were, to stay the course, to stick with the ups and downs in their marriage,” David said to our mother.

But would she have been willing to stick with the downs in her marriage, her husband’s infidelity, if she’d had the opportunities women have today, and her daughters have had, for advanced education and professional careers? I think she would have; I believe she would have stayed with her husband.

Yet my mother did not accept my father’s infidelities passively. On more than one occasion I saw her get so angry with him that in the midst of a quarrel, her accusations getting louder and more strident, she snatched the tablecloth from the table while we were eating, sending plates, cups, saucers, cutlery, food flying across the room. Once when my father had not come home from one of his “meetings,” though it was well past midnight, she waited for him behind the door with a pot in her hand. She was always remorseful afterward, ashamed of herself for her outbursts, but I think she must have felt trapped, hemmed in with no possibility of escape. I think she must have felt she had no other way of fighting back.

My father was always remorseful too. He never admitted any wrongdoing, but he also never retaliated. He let my mother rail at him, shatter plates on the floor, throw pots at him, call him names, and he kept his mouth shut. In the morning he was charming: “Una, why don’t you make a pot of pelau, and we’ll take the children to the beach?”

Why did my mother stay? The obvious answer is that she had no other means of supporting herself and her children. But she also loved her husband and I think because she loved him, she was willing to make this tacit agreement with him: so long as he did not embarrass her, she would do her best to look the other way. My father kept his side of the bargain. When he was in public with her, he was the soul of discretion, making it clear she was the only woman in his life. If there were whispers about his trysts, he denied them vehemently. This arrangement was by no means exceptional. Many marriages in my parents’ day survived this way, and though I thought women were trapped by the restrictions imposed on them in the name of gentility and concern for their “fragile” sensibilities, it seemed to me that men were trapped too.

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