why I never wanted to be a wife.

Many thanks to Judy Brady’s satirical essay “Why I Want a Wife” for the inspiration.

I never wanted to be a wife. I didn’t believe in the feminist housewife bullshit; the whole idea of being a stay-at-home mom appalled me. Why my husband married me I don’t think I’ll ever truly understand. Why I married him is probably to blame for why I had often considered if I should (and when I finally would) leave him.

To our friends and family, we seemed like the perfect couple. We had the same interests, we enjoyed doing the same things and doing them together, we were the life of a party (usually, the ones we were throwing). We talked about things openly and frankly, no matter how tricky they were: his desire to go off the grid and live a simpler life, my attraction to women, our desire to keep our marriage open and to be able to explore intimacy outside of our relationship. When we had children, we raised them to be the kind of kids everyone wanted: funny, fun, kind, polite, intelligent, curious, and so beautiful to look at, it sometimes hurt.

And all those things were true. It wasn’t a facade, but it was only half the reality. Despite the fact that my honesty and openness with friends shined spotlights on all of the skeletons in our closets, I think my frankness and objectivity in relating the challenges underemphasized the toll they were taking on our relationship and on our personal lives. Although we had the same interests, it was because I had cultivated an interest in my husband’s interests, as I thought a good wife should. We did things together because we had moved away from friends and family and I was lousy at making friends, lacked the confidence it took to find “my people,” and felt lonely whenever I was alone. We were the life of the party because we mingled with our guests separately, crossing paths rarely. We talked about many things that other couples couldn’t, but we also failed to discuss the things that every couple should: finances, planning for the future, our vision for our lives in five, ten, or twenty years. We were so busy making the most of every day that we left no time for thinking of tomorrow.

So we talked, but because of the things we didn’t talk about, we fought. Before we had gotten married, I paid off his credit card debt with my savings. After we were married, we rode a roller coaster of accruing and paying off credit card debt, never pausing to figure out how to control our spending and make saving a priority. It was feast or famine: we would tighten the strings, put ourselves on a cash budget, pay off the debt, then go on a spending spree to celebrate. At the time of our lives when we should have begun investing our excess income in retirement accounts, we were drawing on those accounts to pay for things we should have been able to afford. It seemed so hard to live within our means, even though I’d been taught the importance of doing so by my father and was naturally inclined to save instead of spend. I had been so consumed by keeping up with my husband, who operated at 200% all of the time, that I didn’t make time to reflect on why things were so difficult. I passed it off as the price I had agreed to pay for an interesting life, never stopping to think that the price would bankrupt me in the end.

Because I dwelled on the past and he focused on the present, nobody was ever planning for the future.

Before kids, I’d been the worst kind of wife: complaining when he stayed out too late, nagging when he forgot to do a chore, and hardly ever in the mood for sex. When I was pregnant, we screamed at each other regularly, I cried often, and considered whether it would be easier to be a single mother than be the wife of a child with another on the way.

To my husband’s credit, he was an amazing support parent: he got up with the baby when she cried, changing diapers and refastening swaddles before bringing her to me, a neatly wrapped baby burrito who would nurse and fall back to sleep quickly. He was in his element as caretaker: that was always his strongest quality. He wanted to be useful, he shined when doing something concrete for someone else, whether it was making a perfect latte or a gourmet Tuesday night meal.

As I embraced motherhood, I further resented my role as wife. It was difficult for me to meet my children’s needs and my own, much less my husband’s. Eventually, he grew tired of feeling like everyone’s caretaker and not ever being taken care of by anyone (namely, me). As our kids became more self-sufficient, and we began to find some room to catch our breath, I found myself needing space while my husband needed to reconnect. I wanted to pursue my own interests; he was interested in creating memorable family experiences. While he yearned to return to our old way of life, doing everything together, there was little I wanted to do with him.

I had never been much of a wife, even though he’d been a better husband than many could boast. In fact, I wanted a wife as much as he did; I wanted someone to take care of the bills, keep the house clean, keep track of our dentist and doctor and other appointments; I wanted someone to rub my feet after a long day at work, to rub my neck after a late night of grading papers, to cook me dinner and breakfast and clear the table when it was done.

Looking back now, I realize I’d had a wife all along; the problem was, he had also been looking for one–and I was never going to be it.