12. Vows of Mutuality: Enjoying Equality In Marriage
When entering into a marriage one ought to ask oneself: Do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this person up into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
It seems impossible that I fell in love on Word of Life Island in 1967, having just graduated from college. That makes me old. Indeed, I’ve sometimes wondered as I have been writing these lines if my story would be more relevant if I were in my twenties or thirties? But late sixties? Do I have anything to say to young women who are dating and dreaming of marriage today? I certainly hope so. But I also hope that my message resonates with older women who have endured decades of despair in marriage.
I do not assume that most women in my situation could testify to a very satisfying second marriage. But long before John and I courted and married, I was able to say that, despite awful abuse, I did not regret my first marriage. I see how each step followed another. I would not be where I am today without that flight of fancy on Word of Life Island, without that fateful decision to marry someone who was unfit to be a husband and father.
Were those steps predetermined by God? Was the abuse predetermined? Was my marriage to John predetermined? Such philosophical brainteasers are beyond the scope of this book, but without the abuse, I would not have separated from my husband, and it necessarily follows that I would not be married to John. Where, then, would I be today? I’ve talked to women in this situation. Some are absolutely miserable; others alleviate their misery by finding friends outside the marriage. Husbands are bound by the Bible to love their wives. No church should ever stand by a husband who treats his wife badly, and no woman should feel trapped in such a marriage. Sometimes divorce is the only option.
“Man is condemned to be free . . . because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”1 True, these are not the words of Calvin or even the Wisdom of Solomon, but Jean-Paul Sartre also has wisdom to ponder. And depending on my mood, I often make his lines my own. But then how do we deal with the burdensome responsibility of our choices?
For me to regret my falling into temptation, deceived by the serpent, in that Adirondack island garden paradise so many years ago, is almost to regret giving birth to Carlton, who is father of Kayla, and to regret marrying John and inheriting two stepdaughters and sons-in-law and three delightful grandkids. So the world turns. How do I explain this life of mine? I don’t pretend to know the answers. And I often don’t even know what questions to ask.
A lot of water has rolled over the dam since Carlton and I made our escape in 1987. We have both remained in Grand Rapids, sometimes seeing each other three or four times a week, other times going for weeks without even talking on the phone. The strangest aspect of my 1987 separation was my ex-husband’s abandonment of Carlton. During most of that first year, he and Carlton spent Saturdays out at Lake Michigan, but then in late summer, he moved away without leaving a forwarding address. He and Carlton saw each other once after that, and then he simply vanished.
Life was busy for Carlton and me, and Carlton insisted that his dad’s abandonment was his own business. In fact, he told me his youth director had come alongside him after Christmas and asked if he had gotten a phone call from his dad. When Carlton said he had not, the youth pastor hugged him and told him how sorry he was. Carlton shrugged as he told me, saying he had tried to play along. Then he added (referring to the youth director), “He doesn’t know Dad. That’s just how Dad is.”
But for his father not to have contact with his son for almost two decades? Had the custody arrangement been reversed I would have been almost out of my mind. And I certainly would have been taking every opportunity to be with Carlton.
The Bible is not known for stories of good marriages. In fact, if divorce were as easy to acquire in the ancient world as it is today, marriages would have been breaking up right and left among God’s habitually unfaithful followers. Wives would be abandoned, no questions asked. But sons? Would a father abandon his son? Hardly. Abraham loved Ishmael and gave him up only after Sarah’s rampage. David loved his disloyal son Absalom and wept uncontrollably upon hearing of his death.
The best thing a wife could ever do for a husband was to bear him a son. The biblical genealogies are critical in this ancient landscape, and they progress from father to son. Didn’t Carlton’s father even care about his descendants? About seeing his only son grow to manhood? About talking sports with him—the Tigers, the Lions, the Pistons, the Red Wings? Didn’t he care about holding a granddaughter in his arms? Apparently not.
What is so mystifying about his abandonment of Carlton is that he for a time, apart from abusing me, was a good father. As a little family of three, we had moved in 1978, when Carlton was four, from Crown Point, Indiana, to what I had hoped would be a wonderful new life in Grand Rapids. I was somehow able to move beyond the awfulness relating to Deana, and now this was a dream come true. Both my ex-husband and I were hired to be teachers at Grand Rapids School of the Bible and Music, my position part-time. We purchased a nice home in an integrated neighborhood one long block away from the school. The campus became Carlton’s second home.
I got along very well with John Miles, the school’s founder and president. But our easy interaction ended after a conversation—his telling me he was very troubled by my husband. He said he was uncomfortable around him and that he found him to be very sneaky. He simply could not trust him.
Is it a sin for a wife to lie in order to protect her husband? I suppose the Bible church minister doubling as a marriage counselor would have said no, it is not a sin—that submission to a husband (and therefore to God) might require such. I lied. Not because I was submissive. I lied because I wanted so desperately for this employment situation to work out. I told Mr. Miles (as everyone called him) that I had no idea what he was referring to, that I regarded my husband to be trustworthy. Mr. Miles knew I was lying. My ex-husband was soon demoted and then terminated after he had finished his sixth year at the school. I continued teaching for two more years until I could no longer juggle my responsibilities there with my schedule at Trinity.
Some years later, I had another personal encounter with Mr. Miles after he had retired as president. He happened to be driving by one afternoon, saw me out raking, and stopped. I invited him in, and we talked. He knew my marriage had ended.
I reminded him of an incident several years earlier. I had left the campus late after my evening course, delayed by a student who needed extra help. I was walking south on Giddings when I realized a car was coming very slowly behind me, though not passing. There had been some incidents in the neighborhood. My heart was pounding. I was carrying books and a heavy briefcase, wearing a skirt and heels. I noticed lights on in neighboring houses and thought of how I might drop my books and race to a front porch for safety.
The car continued keeping pace with me, as fast as I was walking and as hard as my heart was pounding. Then I could see my own house in the distance, as I was now almost loping down the sidewalk. Suddenly, the terror was over. I heard the cranky voice of Mr. Miles. He was furious. He scolded me, reminding me that the rule for students applied also to faculty: no walking alone after dark. It was dangerous, and I was foolish not to have called a security guard or him or my husband to escort me. He waited in his car until I was inside the house before he drove away.
I tried to jog his memory of that night, but he had forgotten. But I didn’t let the matter go. I chided him for assuming I would be safe behind locked doors. I told him I had walked that long block hundreds of times and that I had never even once been attacked in the neighborhood. It was inside that house, not outside, where I was assaulted.
He did not point out that he had tried to get me to open up. He did not point out that if I had poured my heart out to him that day in his office, he would have made sure I was safe. He did not point out that he would have gone to the mat for me in a custody battle and would have made certain my teaching salary was enough for me to support Carlton. He didn’t have to. I knew that.
In the nine years we lived in Grand Rapids prior to our separation, my ex-husband was fired from three successive jobs: one teaching position and two editorial positions. How was he able to obtain these jobs? The simple answer is that he was charming, articulate, and intelligent.
This is a critical point. Someone reading this book might easily imagine I was married to a mentally disturbed man who could easily be identified as an abuser. But that was not the case. My ex-husband’s only outwardly identifiable trait was his strong opposition to women in ministry and equal partnerships in marriage and the accompanying misogyny, though well disguised in public. I have no doubt there are also abusers who profess to be egalitarians. But a strong stance against women’s equality should be seen as a red flag.
By 1988, Carlton and I were floundering through life. He graduated from high school with no academic honors. Among the popularity awards, however, he was voted class clown. Actually, that was no small achievement, considering that 62 percent of his large high school was made up of minority students, mainly black. His humor and easygoing manner won him many friends.
The biggest change in our relationship came when he announced at age twenty that he and Melissa were getting married. We were at O’Hare, just the two of us, on our way to Florida for a short vacation. We were on the moving walkway between concourses B and C. My heart sank. He was way too immature to be a husband—and father. Is Melissa pregnant? Amid the airport bustle, I was unable to catch his response, except that I knew it wasn’t no. But by the time we had gone up the escalator and found our gate, I was tenuously ecstatic. How could I not be? This would not be another abortion statistic. This baby would be wanted, and I was going to be a grandmother. What could be more thrilling than that? And I loved Melissa.
An auto accident brought Kayla into the world two and a half months early. After spending weeks in a neonatal unit, she arrived home with a monitor. Home was my home, where I had hired a carpenter to join two bedrooms to make an upstairs suite. It was surely not the ideal, but better than living on the street. Carlton adored his darling daughter and was in many ways a great father. But he was anything but a great husband. The marriage was breaking down even before the wedding. Then months later, amid tears, I helped Melissa and tiny Kayla move out (behind Carlton’s back). I bought her a microwave as a housewarming gift for her new apartment.
Should I have been surprised that the marriage ended so quickly? Not if I had read statistics. They were barely more than children themselves, and both sets of their parents were divorced. Over the years, their relationship improved. They learned to enjoy sitting together at Kayla’s school functions. Together they have snapped pictures as she and her boyfriend headed out the door for the prom. And one day, they will join in giving her away in marriage and welcoming grandchildren—a lineage that will continue despite abuse, divorce, and parental abandonment.
Now in college, Kayla is a confident and resolute student, balancing her classes, her job as a bistro server, her editing at the school newspaper, and a serious boyfriend. Life is good. And life is very good for me since 2004 when I married John. His marital background couldn’t be more different from mine. In marrying him, I knew this was not a union between the two of us alone. I was joining him and the abiding memories of two dearly departed wives. Our marriage ceremony included singing a rewrite of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and a remembrance by name of those who had gone on before us—my parents, his father, and especially his beloved first and second wives.
John first married his high school sweetheart (she, too, named Ruth Ann). A picture of her and John sits on a shelf near my desk. I look across and see it even now as I’m writing. She was a nurse with an earthy sense of humor. For a time she worked in the hospital emergency room, always poised for the worst. She was good, and she knew it. If there was going to be a terrible accident, she wanted to be right there as the gurney came through the door. She was capable of quickly assessing a situation and giving orders. She saw things a doctor might have missed. She saved lives—all but her own.
It was a dark day when she and John were given the diagnosis of stage 3 ovarian cancer. The odds were not good. Surgeries, chemo-therapies, alternative medicines followed, even as she carried on for three years with work, church activities, vacations, and fussing over a grandson and then a granddaughter. She knew the medical community, and she had the best care possible, but she succumbed to cancer shortly after daughter Laura’s summer wedding to Bob. Near the end, she was so thin that it’s hard to look at her picture packed away with other family photos. I have come to know her through John, through her dear daughters, and through her beautiful, smiling face in the picture as she cuddles close to her beloved husband. They were faithful to each other for thirty-seven years, till death did them part.
Little more than a year later, John had a new bride. He had known her from a distance at Calvin College and at church. Then he heard she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He sought her out just to give her encouragement, only to realize she was the one who was encouraging him, having known of his loss. Soon there was a get-together for coffee, then for dinner—and within months they were inseparable. But when John mentioned marriage, Myra held back. Never before married, she was independent and was not about to entangle someone else in her deadly serious medical issues. She was talked down by a persistent lover, and with the support of all her delighted friends, she took the plunge. They married in early October and honeymooned at Thistledowne at Seul Choix, a lovely remote bed-and-breakfast on the northern shore of Lake Michigan.
Soon after that, I became acquainted with Myra. We were connected by a mutual friend who knew we were both struggling with difficult work-related situations. We often got together and commiserated, understanding so well what the other was going through. But more than that, we had lively conversations about every issue imaginable.
Before earning a PhD in education (with a specialty in learning disabilities) at Northwestern University, Myra had been an elementary schoolteacher. As a professor at Calvin, she stepped out of the insular atmosphere and developed strong collegial relationships with professors at nearby universities. She was a sponge, soaking in and experimenting with their research findings, a pattern that wasn’t always appreciated by colleagues. She interacted easily on almost any subject—except for her terminal illness. I asked her about this on occasion. Always appearing optimistic, she would brush off concerns and optimistically explain a new chemotherapy.
I’ll never forget the midnight Christmas Eve service as I was walking amid the crowd in the center aisle. She was ahead of me and managed to get my attention. She suggested we sit on a bench. She’d had a long day. She talked mostly about the three grandchildren and how much fun it was to open presents. She laughed and talked as though she didn’t have a care in the world. We parted as cheerfully as we began.
The next day, I packed for a flight to Phoenix, meeting my sister for hiking in Tucson and Sedona. I had no cell phone in those days, and I left my computer at home. On my return, when I retrieved emails, the messages were all the same: Myra had died. Impossible. I had just talked with her. She was doing so well. I later learned from John that what she didn’t tell me was that they had met with someone from hospice on the morning of Christmas Eve. Typical Myra. She wanted no pity, and the last thing she would think of doing was to spoil a jolly conversation with news that she had only a few days left to live.
Through John, I have come to know Myra even better. Before she and John married, Mom (Myra’s mother) tells how she had expressed her fears to Dad, wondering how her independent daughter would be able to manage being married. Dad simply grinned and said, “I think John can handle her.” As it turned out, at least from my outsider’s perspective, “she handled him.”
John tells stories about his “handling” her. She was an art collector, to the extent a professor living on a modest income can afford to be. She had purchased a large, striking original painting and had taken it to be framed. When she and John arrived to pick it up, she scrutinized the finished product, carefully examining it up close and from a distance. Then she said, “That won’t work.” John and the framer were stunned. The framer pointed out that she had carefully chosen the frame and that he could not return her payment. From the studio John and Myra moved to the parking lot as tempers flared. It ended with John pacing the parking lot and Myra ordering a new frame.
On another occasion, they had hired the services of a professional to paint Myra’s office in their condo. Once the work was completed, Myra realized that now the walls and furniture were at odds. The room needed a somewhat different hue. John was furious. She insisted there was no alternative, and she would do the repainting. Recognizing her superior sense of feng shui, John insisted on doing it himself, a task he actually enjoyed, though not without rubbing it in. With each telling of those stories, I love Myra more. Sure, she was a perfectionist. But she was so much more than that. She had a flare for fun, for throwing parties, inviting her friends for good food and filling the room with her lively presence.
John always says she had real class. She did, though he’s quick to point out that I do too—adding that the only difference is that mine is quite low. Low class or not, I have also managed to “handle” him.
John and I had a small backyard wedding at my house on Giddings. At the crack of dawn that day, storm clouds poured down buckets of rain, soaking the basement carpet. So there I was—a water vacuum dumping gallons of water into the washtub. But the rain stopped in time for the late Saturday morning wedding, and the sun came out. John had helped prepare the house to make it perfect for our big day. We had moved a sofa to our covered deck in the back. I had raced out in the morning to cover it with a tarp. Guests came and left before we noticed that an old, torn, paint-spotted tarp was still on the sofa. I was horrified; John was in stitches.
There were other little glitches. Just before the ceremony was to begin, I noticed I had forgotten to purchase cocktail sauce for the shrimp. (I catered my own wedding, a practice I do not recommend.) Carlton was on it. He offered to drive down the street two blocks to the Miti-Mini Superette. Not trusting him, my last words hurled from my bedroom window were, “Don’t you dare go any further than Miti-Mini.” Long story short, that little neighborhood grocery store didn’t have any, nor did another little grocery store, so he stood in line at the supermarket for cocktail sauce—while his mother, the bride, paced the upstairs floor and fumed.
Cocktail sauce delayed the wedding for forty minutes. But the sun was out. Carlton, forgiven and looking strikingly handsome, walked me onto the back deck and down the steps to where John was seated in a white Adirondack chair. One problem. He appeared to be in shock, entirely inert. He has since claimed he was so awestruck by my hat that he forgot to get up. I had to motion for him to stand. Poor henpecked groom could not even say his vows before his bride started telling him what to do. We laughed ourselves silly over those little upsets. Had the day gone perfectly, we wouldn’t have stories to tell. That is how our married life began, and that is the way it has been all these years since.
(That black and white, large brimmed hat is a story unto itself. It holds secrets. I reveal only that it was very lovely, and it alone cost more than all the rest of my wedding garments put together.)
John is the least demanding man I’ve ever encountered. I often comment to people that he’s the perfect husband, having had three strong wives to whip him into shape. He is easy to please and rarely complains. In fact, he’s probably best summed up in Jerry Seinfeld’s quip: “Men want the same thing from their underwear that they want from women: a little bit of support, and a little bit of freedom.”
If John and I were to list all our commonalities and compatibilities, it would require, I am sure, a full ream of paper. Before we married we knew we both loved the outdoors. Biking, hiking, and kayaking were activities we could hardly live without. I added picnicking to that. He had enjoyed going out to eat with his late wives. For me, perhaps on rare occasions. But in good weather, my style is to pack something from home or purchase takeout. Even our anniversary dinner is a picnic. We shop together at Russo’s deli counter and head for our favorite spot along the Grand River. Unlike any other picnic, this one comes complete with a white linen tablecloth and stemmed glassware. People have actually stopped and asked us what’s going on, and then they happily congratulate us.
John hates airports with a passion, so we do our traveling by car. Every January, we drive to Big Bend National Park, where we stay at the Chisos Mountains Lodge and spend a week hiking. John had been there with Ruth and Myra, and he went there to mourn and meditate after their deaths. There is no place we love more than that incredible expanse of land bordered by the Rio Grande River.
Every fall, we make a pilgrimage to Spooner in northern Wisconsin to the farm and the nearby town where I grew up. While there, we drive around to my old haunts, John enjoying it as much as I do. We visit the run-down one-room school were I spent first grade, seated not far from my older brother and sister. To celebrate our sixty-fifth and seventieth birthdays, we kayaked the Yellow River for three days, biking back to spend each night in Spooner. Our paddling took us by familiar homes of cousins and neighbors and right through the farm on which I grew up, now owned by my younger brother.
In addition to travel and outdoor activities, another pastime that binds us tightly together is John’s reading to me every morning and every night. He sits up in the bed as I lie beside him. We both love history and Southern or British fiction, not to mention the edgy books we’ve read together on biblical or theological themes. Our favorite magazine is The New Yorker, and I’ll often hand him a section to read aloud to me. We love to experience good writing or a good cartoon together. And it seems as though almost every day, after I have glanced over some particularly good essay on the Internet, I’ll ask him to sit at the screen and read it aloud.
Soon after we married, John and I made two life-defining critical decisions (and many lesser ones). The first was to purchase a low-priced home in a flood plain on the Grand River, several miles north of Grand Rapids. Together we transformed it with the help of a competent carpenter. We love living in that river-rat community. No one puts on airs. And we are all bound together by floods. On any given season, we can expect at least a fourteen-foot flood, which means our house sits on an island, and we kayak in and out to higher ground where we park our car. In April 2013, we went through the hundred-year flood, with the river actually in our house.
Perhaps the most significant decision we made was to carry on with a little garden-and-gift business we now operate together. In the late 1990s, when my teaching at Trinity was winding down, I opened a business with Carlton, whose academic life was faltering. Soon Carlton Gardens was up and running. Shortly after that, however, I was contacted by Calvin Seminary, and my teaching career resumed. Carlton moved on to bigger and better things, and the business floundered.
After John and I married, however, through the encouragement of friends, we decided to bring the business back to life. John, having retired early (as professor of music at Calvin College) during Ruth’s final months of illness, was eager to take up carpentry, a trade that was the occupation of his grandfather and a dream of his father. So on this wonderful little acre of land (with an original house and garage transformed into the main showrooms), he has built outbuildings, including a charming little chapel complete with a plaque in memory of Ruth Ann and Myra Jean.
Now John and I work together every day. He is involved in carpentry projects, while I’m writing, painting, and waiting on customers who wander in. I had never imagined I could be with a person virtually 24/7 and still get along so well, though admittedly the business is spacious enough to keep us out of each other’s hair.
Since reading Love and War by Mary Matalin and James Carville, I’ve reflected a great deal on how they have maintained their love for each other amid such significant differences, and not only in matters of politics. Their very personalities seem to be entirely at odds. I’ve asked myself, ever since I began following them in the 1992 political campaigns, if I could survive in a marriage like that.
Like them, John and I have strong opinions on many things. But we share the same worldview. Unlike the Matalin-Carville marriage, ours is not centered on fighting those battles. After finding my own voice during seventeen years of singleness, it would have been hard to settle into a marriage to someone whose social, political, and religious views were significantly at odds with my own.
On little matters of household roles, many things have just fallen into place. He putters around the kitchen and concocts interesting meals. He also runs the dishwasher. I take care of the laundry. We shovel snow, rake, and generally enjoy gardening together. In fact, it might sound like John and I have a marriage made in heaven. Well, not quite. We have our differences. In fact, sometimes it seems like we’re bickering about things that are utterly inconsequential.
John is a walking encyclopedia and dictionary combined. We’re right now driving through southern Mississippi, and the road sign pointed to the town of Lux. He can’t help himself. He not only defines the Latin word, but then the phrase lux perpetua (perpetual light). “Let lux perpetua shine upon them”—part of the Latin Mass. He can even quote love songs in Latin. But at the same time, he struggles with saying those three little words that are so essential for a meaningful relationship. Maybe it’s harder for men than women, but through my loving encouragement—and perhaps a little sarcasm—he’s now able at appropriate times to say those rare words: I don’t know.
An almost everyday topic that we bicker about relates to words. I’m the writer in the family; he edits and cannot go through an afternoon without his crosswords. Words are everything to us. He brought the massive two-volume OED (Oxford English Dictionary) into our marriage, and he somehow manages to make it work for him most of the time. Tonight we were nattering about the word toilet. I defined it as “a commode” or “an outhouse,” like the one-holer I used as a kid when I went to the toilet. He grabbed volume 2 to prove me wrong. From toilet he turned to commode. I don’t think the OED wordsmiths are correct, but John is still crowing about his verbal skills.
Another daily matter. John strongly objects to my coaching him while he drives, and he even objects to my term coaching. All three of us wives have had no doubt that we are better drivers than he is. In fact, his first wife, Ruth, forced him into the passenger seat when roads got slippery. Myra and I, both having driven tractors since we were six, simply came by driving intuitively. I risk his displeasure by saying this, but he drives like a woman.
I have my own Mother Goose lines that mimic the familiar rhyme: “Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean, and so betwixt them both, they lick’d the platter clean.” Right there, we see in the Sprats a serious marital difference, but they solve it amicably. Our situation, too, might someday be solved:
John Worst did not drive fast,
his wife could not slow down,
and so betwixt them both,
they walked about the town.
Our most heated arguments have related to his recycling. I’m a saver; he recycles. “When are you going to throw away these papers,” he growls. So I sort papers. All well and good, until he recycles that critical article or the receipt needed for tax purposes. There is, I’m convinced, such a thing as recycling sin. In fact, on one occasion, both of us searched high and low for hours and failed to find a musical score he had finished the day before. On the ruse of picking up a grocery item, he drove to the recycling center. Finding it closed, he crawled on his stomach under the metal fence and went through the bin where he suspected he had dumped it. The good news: he wasn’t arrested; the bad news: he didn’t find it. After he returned home and confessed his sin, I ordered penance. I told him to go up to his study where he had done the work and to meditate for as long as it took to remember where he had put it. In less than a half hour, his deep thoughts took him to the file cabinet and to our 2013 tax documents that he had worked on the previous day.
Ours is a marriage of mutuality. But I ordered him to do penance. Was I, then, assuming the headship in our marriage? Sure. And John sometimes assumes headship. I am the boss every Christmas when a complimentary box of chocolates arrives in the mail addressed to me. I open it and offer one to him and then pick one for myself. Then I hide the box, and they last for the next ten days. He simply can’t be trusted as boss of the chocolates. Together we savor chocolates. More than that, we savor marriage.
For John and me, the game of baseball offers a metaphor for marriage. He’s had three home runs. I struck out and went back to the dugout, my head hanging low. But the next time at bat, I hit a homer out of the park.
I close with the striking words of Arista in Michael Sullivan’s novel Heir of Novron:
How can you regret never having found true love?
That’s like saying you regret not being born a genius.
People don’t have control over such things.
It either happens or it doesn’t.
It’s a gift—a present that most never get.
It’s more like a miracle, really, when you think of it.
I mean, first you have to find that person,
and then you have to get to know
them to realize just what
they mean to you—that right there
is ridiculously difficult.
Then . . . that person has to feel the same way about you.
It’s like searching for a specific snowflake,
and even if you manage to find it, that’s not good enough.
You still have to find its matching pair.
What are the odds?2