The beginning of an essay

This morning I woke up with the beginning of an essay in my head, just like the old days. I'm writing it here for your amusement and because I don't yet have a proper word processor on my new computer--I'm waiting till I'm a student and can get a deep discount on software. But please note the copyright notice and the fact that I consider this work and not just internet doodling.

"You're not sleeping with him, are you?" my mother asked me. I was 35 years old and almost a decade divorced. The "him" in question was 40 and also divorced. We'd been going out for several months.

"Mom!" I drew the word out in the special tone of annoyed exasperation I never use with anyone but my mother. The sex was the only appealing thing about the relationship--without it, why bother? Though if I look at it that way, she had a point. I later regretted that affair ever made it past the second date. If I had not gotten naked with him, it surely would not have.

My mother seems unable to conceive that a woman might want sex for its own sake, might take genuine pleasure in it, that it might be anything other than the means by which a man annoys, oppresses and takes advantage of a woman. My mother has almost certainly only ever slept with my father, and though it makes me queasy to think it and uncomfortable to write it, the evidence suggests that my dad was never very good at the bedroom arts. Even if he was, I think my mother would have been a lot of work.

She came of age during the Great Pussy Drought of the 1950s (Geoffrey Wolff's phrase). But lots of women her age later got over it, loosened up by exposure to real-life sex and men and marriage.

She was always very religious, a pretty serious Catholic who later was pulled away by evangelicalism and became a born-again Christian. That might partly explain her attitude toward sex, but not all evangelical Christians, even women of her generation, seem to carry the negative tension about the idea and the act that she does.

My mother's only sister, who's about three years younger, was recently in town with her conventioneering husband. I hadn't seen them in a few years and had never been in their company with no other relatives present. We went out to dinner a few times and I spent most of one day with them.

My aunt is heavier and blowsier than my mother, but they look much alike. They sound alike, though my aunt retains more of small-town eastern Ohio in her voice. They have all sorts of subtle mannerisms in common that I would be challenged to catch accurately in description but which mark them as close siblings.

They grew up together in a different world, a different era--it might well have been the Dark Ages, but it was in a tiny coal-mining town just after the war. They were the only daughters of hard-working unhappy Eastern European immigrants who had a half-dozen sons before the girls arrived.

I took my aunt and uncle to Angelo Brocato's, where we ate blueberry and raspberry and blackberry Italian ices and watched the neighborhood families come in and get their sugar fixes and my uncle told me about how he made my aunt cry on their first date. She was an innocent small-town girl and he put the moves on her too fast. She asked him if this was what he did every night, and he jokingly said, "Yeah, pretty much." She was profoundly hurt and offended by his answer, which gives you an idea of just how sheltered she was.

But he told me how he hated to see her cry, and how he knew from the first night that he wanted to marry her. There in Brocato's, he held her hand, and when she excused herself to go the the bathroom, he told me that it was significant to her that she hadn't slept with him until right before their wedding--which was four years after they met.

"The woman had no human urges," my uncle lamented.

I can imagine my mother being similarly over-offended by some guy's flip comment, though I picture her as more angry than tearful. I can picture her stonewalling a guy until the ring was on her finger. But here's what I can't picture: thirty-odd years later, my mom and dad holding hands across a table in a public place. I can't imagine them fondly reminiscing to their niece about their courtship. I can't imagine my dad practically begging my mom to go with him on the next leg of his trip, as my uncle did to my aunt.

My aunt, like my mother, like a lot of women, is the designated disapprover in her relationship. My uncle wants a daquiri but my aunt thinks he's had too many. Not-very-secretly, he's relying on her to keep him from going too far.

Still, she lets him have a few and she'll even have a couple with him. The two of them hung out on Bourbon Street at night. She accidently wandered into the gift shop of the Hustler Club, thinking it was just another t-shirt shop, and she wasn't overly shocked or offended. She's not doing anything wild and crazy, she's just more relaxed about sex and slightly transgressive behavior than my mother ever was or will be. She's probably had more fun than her sister. She might even still be getting laid.

The point is not to idealize my aunt and uncle's marriage--they clearly have their problems--or to chastise my dad for being insufficiently loving and attentive, though I don't think my parents were in love when they got married or ever. But my dad tries in his misdirected way to be a loving husband, and he's the affectionate one in the relationship. He'll sometimes put his arm around her or call her pet names. I've never, ever seen her reciprocate.

Might she have been different if she'd been loved and pursued and cherished like her sister was? Or was there something about her that inoculated her against that kind of devotion?

Maybe it's being the older sister that makes the difference. I was more cautious and rule-abiding than my younger sister, and much more susceptible to the "just say no" propaganda. I barely rebelled until I had moved out of my parent's house, and I don't think I ever caught up with her in sum total of partying, drug-taking and petty crime. As the sensible older sister, I think that's probably a good thing.


This is not only about sex--about how my mom is uptight about sex and I am not so much, thanks to a tangled set of causes explained by nature, nurture and accident. It's about this: My sister and I are both in our mid-thirties. I was married for a few short years in my early twenties; my sister was never married at all. Neither one of us ever had a baby. My dad has four siblings, my mom has six. All of their brothers and sisters are grandparents.

"Sometimes I wonder if my mom feels bad about not being a grandmother," I said to my aunt after she got done listing her five grandchildren.

She rolled her eyes.

"I don't thinks so."

My mom thinks sex is a bad deal for women. In general I think she's wrong, but there are ways in which she's right. It's women who get knocked up, for obvious starters. Women get hurt when they try to barter sex for love and security. But that's not about sex as much as it is about how we think men and women should relate to each other. But sex? Women need sex less than men, yet have the potential to enjoy it much more. Seems like a good deal to me.

My mom also thinks relationships are a bad deal for women, and that's where I'm inclined to agree with her.

I have to admit that my father is also not very enthusiastic about the idea of his daughters having a love and sex life. It seems a pretty tricky business to be the father of daughters, for good dads who love their daughters, particularly for those who have only daughters as my father did. What seems acceptable for or accepted of women in general--even one's wife--might not seem such a good deal for a well-loved, bright, talented daughter. This is one reason fathers often would prefer their daughters remain sexless and dateless. Still, I've had a boyfriend or two that my dad actually liked. He believes in the concept of nice fellows who are good to women. My mother seems to have less faith in that ideal.

Of course, she'll never say she thinks relationships are overrated. She says I'll find the right one someday.

My mom has her idea of what the right one would be like. I have my own idea. What they have in common is that they don't bear any resemblance to any man currently alive on this planet.

You could accuse me of hating men, but you would be wrong. Of the real men I have known, there are many that I have liked, some that I have loved, and a few that I miss. There are ones I care about, wish well for, would be there for if they needed me. There are those I want to talk to and those I want to go out drinking with. There are some I'd like to see again and a couple I'd like to sleep with again. But there's not a single one I'd like to share living space with. There's not one that I want to buy furniture with, or diamond rings, and there's definitely not any whose babies I want to bear.

My mom and dad are like a late-model Ozzie and Harriet. They're the Oldsmobile of couples--there's still a few like them around, but they don't make them like that anymore. In their early sixties, they're approaching their 40th wedding anniversary and my dad's retirement from his pretty well-paying blue-collar union job--to name another thing they don't make anymore.

They're leaders in their church, with many friends, many of whom probably take them as role models. They serve as makeshift surrogate grandparents to some of the children of the younger couples at their church, which is what makes me feel the occasional twinge about denying them real grandchildren.

I'm not around as much anymore, but I don't think they've had a real fight with raised voices in years. Of course, they used to fight--long before the church and the big circle of friends. There was yelling and my dad's fist hitting the dinnertable making the dishes jump and sometimes talk about divorce. My dad might have cheated, or come close.

I used to think my family was a dysfunctional wreck, but that was before I got a good look at other people and their families. There are couple who have happier long-term marriages than my parents, but they're a rarity. Maybe my aunt and uncle have a better union, but I'm not prepared to say that unequivocably. For most people, what my folks have is just about as good as it gets.

It's terrible and damaging when your mom has a restraining order against your dad, or when he has a new girlfriend who's five years older than you or he doesn't pay the child support or even when they stay together in icy hatred. But when you're the offspring of a wreck of a marriage, at least you can reasonably hope for a better relationship for yourself.

But if what my folks have is likely as good as it gets, is that good enough? Well, it depends. Maybe you don't like to live alone and you don't have outsize expectations of a soulmate. If you want to have kids, then good enough is probably a lot better than going it alone.

But I don't seem to have a single maternal urge. Maybe that has something to do with they way my mom seemed oppressed by motherhood when we were little. I suppose saying so undermines my claim of the good-enoughness of my parents, but this is all knotty. The opposite of everything is also true.

Anyway, you can't really blame my mom for this one. My genes just don't seem be motivated to propogate themselves. Sometimes I think of myself as some unworkable mutation, other times as the bloom at the end of a genetic branch--like my life is totally justified in itself and not just as a means of continuing the species. Of course, the problem with that last analogy is that fertility and reproduction are a flower's reason for blooming.


My mom wants better for me than she had. It's the desire of a million million mothers weighing their daughters down with their desires and good intentions. She wants me to have opportunities she didn't have and she wants me to take them. Whatever she wants for me, I'm bound to resent being cast as a do-over for her. I chafe when she wants things for me that I don't want. When she wants things for me that I also want, I second-guess my own desires. That might be the pith of daughterhood.

I'm busy running up law school debt that will approach six figures, which worries me a bit. But I recently read a statistic that it costs more than that to raise an American child from birth to age 18, and I found that comforting.

"I'm not going to have children, I'm going to have a student loan," I told my mother. She's proud and anxious about me going to law school. She didn't flinch when I casually posited that I'm not going to have children. This was over the phone, but I can hear the flinch through the receiver She would have flinched if I'd said I'd met a guy I liked. She flinches when I suggest I might stay in godforsaken New Orleans for awhile longer.

It's delicate work drawing out what I want for myself because I want it from what I want as a reaction to what she wants for me.

I don't want a marriage like hers. I don't want a marriage like my aunt's either--I would feel stifled by all that need and affection and holding hands.