I had been smoothing it over for twenty-two years. I did not know that was what I was doing. I would have called it being a good wife. I would have been right and incomplete. The smoothing was the small daily labor of making sure my husband's mood did not become the household's mood. If he came home tense, I cooked the dinner he liked. If he was short with one of the kids, I apologized for him afterward to the kid. If his mother said something I knew he would resent, I changed the subject. None of this is unusual. The cognitive household labor data is by now well-mapped. What I had not understood was that the smoothing had a second function, which was that it prevented him from ever encountering the actual shape of his behavior.
I stopped in October of 2022. I did not stop on purpose. I stopped because I was, for unrelated reasons, exhausted. I had been awake at three a.m. for nine nights in a row with a sick parent and I had nothing left for the additional infrastructure work of running interference between my husband and his own moods. The first night I let him be tense at the dinner table without correcting for it, our oldest daughter, who was sixteen, said something at him about it. He looked at her with an expression I had never let him develop. The expression said: nobody has ever spoken to me this way at this table. She was right that nobody had. I had been making sure of it.
What followed was eighteen months of marital negotiation that I would not describe as pleasant. He had married a woman who managed the temperature of the room. He was now married to a woman who reported the temperature of the room. He told me, several times, that I had become harder to be married to. I told him, the third time he said it, that I agreed and that I was not going back. We came close to divorcing twice. We did not. The reason we did not is that he is, fundamentally, a decent man who was being asked to learn a skill at fifty-one that he should have learned at twenty-one, and he eventually decided that the cost of learning it was lower than the cost of losing me.
Our kids have noticed. Our oldest, now eighteen, told me last month that her father is 'easier to talk to' than he was three years ago. I did not say anything. I do not think she has fully made the connection that the change in him was downstream of a change in me. I think she will make the connection in her thirties, when she will, statistically, be doing some version of the same smoothing in her own marriage. I would like for her to make the connection earlier. I do not know how to give it to her without coming across as a lecturer. So I am writing this. She might, one day, read it. If she does, my only message is the one my mother could not give me: you do not have to.
The other thing that has happened, which I did not anticipate, is that I am much less tired. Not in the way a vacation makes you less tired. In a deeper way. The smoothing had been costing me an amount of energy I had not been able to perceive because it was constant. The metaphor that comes to mind is that I had been running a refrigerator in a room I did not know was a kitchen. The refrigerator is now off. The kitchen is colder and the marriage is colder and the colder kitchen is, surprisingly, the one I want to live in.