There Is a Way Out
I sit in a local playground—small and fenced in, exclusive. This playground lies at the center of a larger park. This larger park, preserved by money from concrete and development, exists in the middle of an expensive neighborhood. A neighborhood known for its magnificent nature, its trails and hills, creeks and reservoir, as well as its schools, rich with funding and investment. Years later, looking back, I will recognize a magical quality to the privacy, the quiet, the protectiveness of that space. Women and children. Mothers with sons and daughters. Nannies and babysitters. Girls and women and young boys. No men. A large skeleton key was needed to get in, to enter that space, to access that playground, with its swings, its sand, its seesaw. There was another protective layer, like a girdle, besides the high wooden fence that enclosed it: the leaf-laden and pine-needled trees that grew close, tall bodyguards, their solicitous boughs reaching across to shade a corner, a bench, a sand pit.
This day I am sitting in the playground with my employer, the mother of the two children I care for as a part-time job before starting a graduate program. Their mother is a kind of role model to me—beautiful, poised, elegant, rich. Dark of eyes and hair, thin and fashionable, this employer, this mother, represents what I would like to be. Whenever I am near her, I become acutely aware of my frizzy hair, big ears, and low-budget wardrobe. This mother has met me at the park and decided to stay for a few minutes before taking her children back home. We sit on a wooden bench together, side by side, chatting companionably as we watch the children play, sometimes getting up to dust off a child who has fallen or interrupting the flow of our own conversation to dispense encouragement or admonition or praise.
Our talk turns to the subject that has weighed most heavily on my mind in recent months. Should I marry my boyfriend of six years? Should I, as my mother advises, either marry or break up? Is it true that staying with him after “all these years” is a waste of my time, time that is precious because I am a young woman in my twenties whose primary goal, according to my mother, is to find a husband?
Later, when I am married and miserable—at least for the first few months—homesick and insecure and experiencing seasonal affective disorder in my new gloomy home in Seattle, I will realize the depth of my mother’s chauvinism. For my mother, born and raised in South America, socialized in the particular and potent patriarchy of Peru, says to me, in response to my misery, to my flailing about on the phone for solutions, perhaps even for an escape, that at least I will be “una divorciada, y no una solterona”—at least, even if I leave my husband, I won’t bear the stigma of spinsterhood, of being an old maid. At the time however, before I married, before I moved away to another state, to another climate, to another subculture. Before I relocated to Seattle’s ubiquitous grey and graduate school, my mother’s pressure affected me; even as my mind rejected the implication that my primary goal, my job as a young woman and a daughter, was to marry well and secure social and financial protection, my emotions—my guilt, my sense of responsibility to my mother, even to my future children—responded to that idea, that imperative.
I ask my employer, in the quiet of the little island created by the fence, the locked door, and the surrounding band of trees, “Should I get married? I mean, what if it’s the wrong decision? How do I even know if he’s ‘the one’?”
My employer thinks for a moment, gazing out at the dappled sunlight on the sand, at the partially buried shovels and trucks and dolls, then answers. “You know, I don’t think there really has to be a ‘one.’ I mean, I’m happily married but sometimes I still think about my exes. I even dream about them.”
“Really? You do? So many of my friends talk about having no doubts and marrying their best friend. But I feel like getting married is like a closing of doors. I’ll be stuck on this one narrow path.”
“I get that," she says, "but look, I was more like you—I wasn’t one hundred percent sure—I had some doubts—and I don’t regret my choice even though I still think about the past sometimes.”
There is a pause as we each contemplate this idea, this notion that maybe marriage does not have to be a tight casket, a windowless room, that it can be flexible enough to allow space, at least psychically, for what or who was not—for, in the end, the path not taken.
“Well,” my employer continues, “I think you should just do it. Get married. You’ll never know unless you do it. You can always—as long as you don’t have children—get a divorce.”
I know now that it is because of this, because of what was said, because of the idea then so radical to me, that I remember that moment in time so vividly: on the bench, in the park, in my twenties, babysitting for pocket money, between college and graduate school, between singleness and coupledom. It was as if, at that moment, with those words, the claustrophobia I felt at the thought of choosing one person to marry, of committing legally, officially, on paper, to one man, one family, one life, suddenly lifted, dissipating like morning mist in the warmth of the sun. I felt a sense of freedom that I had never before felt when thinking about marriage, about making a decision, about the question: to marry or not to marry? The sense of oppression I had always experienced when considering entering an engagement, planning a wedding, signing a marriage certificate, lifted along with my assumption of the irrevocability of the marriage vow. Yes, I could get a divorce. There was a way out.
So I got married. And, more than a quarter of a century after my wedding, I am married still. Almost three decades since I heard that advice, advice that might seem obvious to others, especially today, but that hit me with the impact of a lightning bolt, illuminating the future, freeing my choices. My former employer, however, the mother at the park, the mother next to whom I sat that long ago day on a park bench, the mother who wore white linen and black denim, who adorned her slim wrists with Cartier gold, whose black hair was always smooth and shiny and soft, that mother—the wise woman to my ingénue, the mentor to my protégé, the teacher to my student—is divorced. After three children and thirty years. After a daughter married. After a son relocated to Paris. After the youngest left for college. Thus divorced, yes, but only after empty nest. Only after her chicks had flown. Only when any damage to her children would be minimized by their own adulthood, their own choices, their own decisions.
-Marianna Marlowe
Marianna Marlowe lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. After devoting many years to academic writing, her focus now is creative nonfiction that explores issues of gender identity, motherhood, feminism, cultural hybridity, and more. Her short memoir has been published in Hippocampus, Motherwell, The Write Launch, Raising Mothers, Mutha Magazine, FORTH Magazine, and the Same, and she is currently at work on a memoir in vignettes titled Portrait of a Feminist.