What makes a good wife julavits

Apparently it's not. A caretaking investment in one's own family that trumps all others is still a gender expectation we've yet to overturn. The woman who refuses to be single-mindedly committed, from an emotional standpoint, to her husband or children remains an unsettling figure. My first husband and I fought over this exact terrain, though I wouldn't have predicted this when we first met and talked about his tomato garden.

A charismatic bluster of a man with a shotgun under his bed, he also liked to wrap his hair in a kerchief and nightly mop our floors. He cooked and picked out drapes and bought me skirts at sample sales.

He was refreshingly impossible to categorize, falling somewhere between lumberjack and charwoman. But I was away from home a lot I worked as a waitress , and this started to bother him. During a disagreement about whether I should go to an artists' colony for six weeks, he said, "I just hope that someday, when we have kids, you'll be able to put our family first.

I did not find this comment retrograde or chauvinistic; at the time, I merely found it bewildering. Thirteen years later, I'm less bewildered. Beneath his complaint lurked a valid emotional unease, a red flag raised to signal our key incompatibility: He was not a husband for whom a wife with a willingness to leave home for long stretches of time was tolerable.

When we fought, "the marriage" was often cited, as though it were a third party, almost like a boss, to whom we were beholden. Problematically, we interpreted our obligations to it differently.

He saw my temporary leave-takings as abandonments, as my shirking the expected physical closeness and intensity of the marriage. I saw them as natural extensions of the marriage. These tend not to be resolvable differences of perception. We eventually divorced. More than a decade later, I still feel guilt over our failure to align realities, because when realities don't align—especially when they fiercely don't align—you self-protectively conclude, One of us is crazy.

Often enough I worry that the crazy one was and remains me. I've internalized my first husband's worries about my abilities to adequately care for my family. I have asked myself: Do my loved ones suffer from my outgoingness? Do I dedicate more caretaking energy to friends and strangers than I do to my own family? And if the answer is yes, why on earth would I do that? I have some answers. Their identities didn't begin and end with their families, regardless of whether they had careers save a brief premarital turn as a journalist, my grandmother never did.

Not that there's anything wrong with identifying oneself in that manner—now a wife and mother myself, I better understand the bravery that entails—but when I was younger, I sought other role models.

And so I want to provide that variety of role model for my children: You are not my entire reason for existing. This is what my life facts say. But it's not just about life facts. I have a close friend who would seem to be the preeminent gender warrior she's the majority breadwinner, and her husband does most of the child care and housework , but she's elevated caretaking to an extreme-sports level—and looks it.

She is literally physically wasted by her familial exertions. When her daughter has a tantrum, she comforts her for 45 minutes. Every minor spousal upset is grounds for a daylong psychological summit. She's attentive and empathic to the point of self-erasure. Of course there are reasons why she does this. It's all a balancing act, as we're repeatedly told—usually after we've fallen off the beam.

My point, though, is that I justify my failure to focus exclusively on my family the following way: I am embodying a way to be in the world. I am my own person. You too need to be your own person. However, the kind of role model I am has its limits. There are dangers. Also—as I realized this spring when my husband became scarily, possibly life-threateningly sick—it's a bit of a lie, this stance of mine, a neat ideological cover-up. I'm scared to be alone and so inoculate myself by always being a little bit alone.

We tried to parse our feelings of endangerment. Was gender primarily to blame? By being on a diet, our husbands were albeit for very different reasons behaving like so many of our female friends, some of whom developed eating disorders and became incredibly boring. I was one of those women for a year. Luckily I was able to escape what is often, tragically, inescapable. When I emerged from my brief anorexia incarceration I thought: Well that was a very huge waste of my time.

The monomaniacal dedication of brain activity required to maintain an eating disorder was an inexcusable squandering of one of my best brain years. Plus the obsession was inherently perverse. Even though I was fixated upon nothing but my body, my brain was somehow totally disengaged, save intellectually, from its singular concern.

My body, despite the molecular-level attention paid to it, belonged to a faraway creature, a numb, gray sylph.

Also I did not tell my friends, but to myself I admitted: I was jealous. I was jealous of Dr. Fuhrman, the man who masterminded the diet my husband is following. My husband approaches my claims with a loving but skeptical eye. He is, as a friend once said, a monk or a holy person who might better live in a tower or the desert. He thrives on discipline and solitude. Most remarkably he can, without compromising this integrity, happily follow the occasional diet mastermind like Dr.

He has followed a few masterminds since we got married these are not whimsical switches; he keeps up on the research and responds in kind. I perform the same function for him. But he is much less threatened by social inequalities than I am. I do not often give him much of a chance, granted. When people start talking about my work in front of him, I quickly steer the conversation in another direction.

It makes me uncomfortable to be complimented, but especially in front of him. Only I feel this way. My career competitiveness extends to my male friends. Once I overheard one of my best writer friends a male talking to another of our best writer friends also male. Theirs was just harmless boy banter; my friends are too old to play organized sports, so their competitive energy must be rechanneled onto the athletic field of short-story writing.

But it got me thinking. Did they talk to each other about me that way? Later I asked the first friend, Am I a threat? I asked it in jest but I was not kidding.

I wanted to know, even though the question was, in some ways, moot. Obviously I love and admire my friend; obviously I am not out to threaten him or his career.

But what I was asking without asking was this: Do you feel endangered by the possibility that I might be as good as, or even someday more successful than, you?