We will leave early.
“So you need to work out custody and visitation?” she asks.
“Not exactly,” I say. “We’re having some financial challenges, so we’re still living in the same house. In separate rooms.”
Deirdre nods, scribbling furiously. “Kind of like double-nesting—when divorced parents each get an apartment and come back and forth to the family home instead of uprooting the kids.”
“What Judy isn’t explicitly saying is that we’re broke so we can’t afford to split up. What Judy also isn’t saying is that one of the reasons we separated is because we never had sex anymore.”
I roll my eyes. “I wouldn’t say ‘never.’ I’d say rarely.”
He rolls his eyes. “I’d say extremely rarely.” He looks at Deirdre for help. “Judy used to be really into it, but then she wasn’t anymore. It’s like one day that part of her just shut down.”
He isn’t wrong. Even the Chinese acupuncturist I started seeing when I still thought it was a temporary shutdown lingered ominously after taking my pulses. “You closed for business down there,” she had said, slicing her hand through the air with absolute certainty. “Closed. For. Business.” But the needles didn’t help.
“I’m just stressed-out! And exhausted!”
“Everyone’s stressed-out and exhausted!”
I think about the past decade, see myself trapped in a snow globe’s bubble with Gary’s debilitating anxiety, which has radically curtailed his social life, and ours; the death of both my parents within two years of each other; the intense pressure of being the primary breadwinner—all of it falling down, in a silent snow, around me. The strains on our marriage turned our relationship into a friendship—or, more precisely, a family: full of closeness and kindness and deep love while short-circuiting the sexual connection. Didn’t Freud write about this? And how many articles have I read that say this is the new normal, not to mention my own anecdotal research over the years proving that almost every woman I have ever known since Teddy’s preschool days confessed to me the same lack of interest, the same toll of stress and petty grievances and the cruel diminishing of hormones. Aren’t I just one in a long line of hourglasses turned over, on the other side of time? Aren’t I kind of normal?
“Sadly, this is actually quite common for many many couples, Gary, for a whole host of reasons,” Deirdre slips in soothingly before Gary makes clear in a loud voice that he doesn’t care about other couples right now.
I hug the dog and scan the office for a white noise machine, the mainstay in every therapist’s office, hoping no one in any of the neighboring offices will overhear us. But Deirdre’s machine is especially small and ancient-looking, huffing and puffing and working overtime in a corner; we need one the size of a basement dehumidifier here to drown us out. “Now that we’re officially technically separated,” I tell Deirdre, “I’ve told him he’s free to do what he wants.” I turn to Gary and fling my hands out over the sling. “Go have sex!”
“But I wanted to have it with you!”
“But it just didn’t work out that way!”
“But why not? I still don’t understand!”
Deirdre leans forward. “Yes, why not, Judy?”
I stare down at the dog, listen to the hum of the white noise machine. I have no other answer except for this: “Because I’m dead inside. And I don’t know if I’ll ever feel not dead.”
“Well then, Gary,” Deirdre offers, “let’s think about your options.”
“How am I supposed to have options when we still live together?” Gary yells. “If I meet someone, where would I bring her? Home to my family? To my—‘crowded nest’?” He shakes his head. “What good is an open marriage if all the doors and windows are locked?”
Deirdre looks up from her pad, eager to clarify. “So this is an ‘open marriage’ as opposed to a separation?”
He waves her away. “I don’t care what you call it. Judy should help me find someone. If the roles were reversed, I would do it for her.”
“You would help her find a boyfriend.” Deirdre shoots me a little side-eye.
“Absolutely.” He sits back, crosses his arms over his chest, then turns to me. “You know it’s true.”
I shrug. “It is true. He would help me. That’s the thing about Gary. He would do anything for me. Even that.”
Deirdre hugs her mug of tea with both hands, folds her feet up under her long flowing skirt. She’s getting comfortable for the rest of the story. “Tell me about that, Judy.”
I shrug, then force myself to speak. “The whole thing is just really embarrassing, for both of us,” I whisper. “Our arrangement. Not having enough money to be able to get divorced like normal people.”
“It sounds like you feel that there’s shame in staying. Shame in not leaving.”
I blink in disbelief. That’s exactly how I feel.
“Lots of couples can’t afford to split up right now in this economy,” she says. “Lots of couples with children either stay together, like you, until they figure it out, or they get divorced and double-nest. There’s no single right answer. And this kind of child-centered parenting can buy you some time while you figure things out and everyone adjusts.”
“But we’re not being child centered. Not really. Gary started sleeping downstairs in the guest room two years ago. Teddy was eleven then, and we told him it was because Gary’s snoring was out of control, which is just a big lie.”
Gary nods. “Judy’s the one who snores like a barn animal, but she’ll never admit it.”
I ignore him. “Do you think Teddy knows what’s really going on?” I ask Deirdre.
“Kids always know.”
“Do you think we’ve damaged him?”
“Children are resilient,” she says with a gentleness I’m grateful for, then exhales the way they do in yoga classes to signal a redirection. “I want to come back to Teddy but I need to get a bit more of the big picture. Tell me what kind of work you both do.”
Gary shifts in his chair. He hates this topic as much as I hate the no-sex topic, but he’s learned to just plow right into his shame. “After I dropped out of law school because of my anxiety, I’ve done SAT and LSAT tutoring; dog walking; worked in a special-needs after-school program. Now I stock snacks in a coworking space for startups. Which is ironic, since I barely know how to use my phone and I hate technology.”
“What’s the source of your anxiety, Gary?”
He shrugs, pretending his family résumé is no big deal. “Middle child. Raging alcoholic father. Long-suffering divorced mother. You know, the usual.”
“It doesn’t sound like ‘the usual,’” Deirdre says. And it isn’t. Both of Gary’s sisters have struggled with drinking over the years (he got sober before we met), and all three of them were estranged from their father, now dead, after the divorce when they were teenagers. But during the years when all our kids were small and we still got together for holidays and birthdays and summer vacations, before Gary had to limit how much time he could spend around his family because it made him too anxious, they were fun: they were loud and angry and volatile, but they were also affectionate and hilarious and inclusive. I was the odd one out—the only child, the lone Jew in a room full of Irish Catholics—always being pulled into a conversation about sports I knew nothing about, or to listen to, and sometimes mediate, a story about some terrible childhood misadventure—near-fatal riptides, sunburns, bouts of food poisoning—that almost felled them all. I loved every minute of it.