I’ve always loved my husband, but now that we are older and in our 60s, I definitely hate him less. Maybe I shouldn’t have had to wait 33 years — a third of a century — to hate my husband less, but time has been good to him. And it’s not just that he’s aging better than most men this side of Richard Gere, although that doesn’t hurt. It also helped, at least from my perspective if not his, that the industry he spent most of his career in collapsed.
Now he gives more because he has more to give.
Bruce and I met in our 20s, and our relationship got off to an extremely slow start. Let’s say his courtship skills were rudimentary. For our first date, he asked me if I wanted to go “to an art opening and get some free wine.” It wasn’t until a year and a half after we met that I realized this kind, interesting and abnormally tall man was someone I could finally let my guard down around.
I had published a couple of books and was writing screenplays and teaching creative writing as an adjunct professor. Bruce got a full-time job as a magazine writer and editor. We did OK financially, especially because we didn’t have huge material needs and we had enough free time to enjoy each other.
Then we had kids. And I became the first line of defense for two sick and aging parents. Bruce was a committed father, but his job took up more and more of his time. Screenings, book parties, dinners with writers — the demands (his word; mine would be “benefits”) of a magazine gig in those halcyon days.
Despite being steeped in second-wave feminism, I was still stuck with a majority of the domestic grind, like every generation of women before me. I was laboring hard at my career, too. As a working-mother friend of mine recently reminisced over cocktails, “We did everything.” That was our real-world experience of the “having it all” illusion. Doing it all. We did, and we resented it.
I wasn’t a stay-at-home mother, but I dropped off and picked up my kids from school every day, organized their activities, took them to the doctor, bought their clothes, kept them fed, homework, bath, bed, the whole schmear. (When I showed my husband this essay, he wrote in the margins, “Um, you weren’t totally on your own: I dropped off one or the other kid every day and at least in my memory got them breakfast every morning.” The former note is sort of true, the latter is a complete fantasy. PS: He also suggested the Richard Gere comparison above.)
By the late 1990s, my husband made a very (he inserted that word) good living, but we were a family of four in New York City, so we needed both incomes. There were years when I taught 11 classes and wrote books and screenplays, book reviews, the occasional essay, all while running our household and intermittently hospitalizing my parents. I also didn’t have a classic office job like Bruce’s, which meant my days had flexibility. I could do laundry at 2 in the morning while grading papers — the trifecta being simultaneously food shopping on Fresh Direct.
I know our life sounds rarefied, but at the time, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Bruce was always a loving dad. His children adored him. I adored him. He coached their soccer and basketball teams. He is and was a great moviegoing/sports-attending/comic-book-reading/cartoon-watching/Frank Sinatra- and Bob Dylan-listening mentor. He’d take them to the playground on Saturdays, although he arrived back at our apartment one afternoon with only one of my daughter’s shoes. (They cost 30 bucks. We could have gotten a babysitter!) Another time he let her fall off the slide onto her head. (He suggested I might mention the time I created a toxic event in our kitchen when I was sterilizing some formula bottles in a pot of boiling water and left them on the stove so long that they started to melt. OK, but that happened because I was alone with our infant daughter, exhausted, and had fallen asleep well after midnight while he was still at work closing an issue of a newsweekly.)
Bruce was also very adept at coming home from work after the kids had already been tucked into their bunk beds, lights out and all that, and rousing them so that he could read books to them. (Fun times trying to get them to settle back down while he finally ate his dinner, which I’d made and saved for him on a covered plate — why?) He read to them every page of every book of “Harry Potter.” This truly tender, if inconvenient, practice lasted until one evening when I poked my head in and saw he was reading away, enjoying himself, while our daughter was deep in her own book and our son was already fast asleep.
As a man in a still sexist society, Bruce had other uses. Whenever we had a meeting at school, I could call him at the office and say, “I need a penis in the room,” and he’d show up because issues seemed to just disappear when he walked in wearing a good suit, calm and cool (unlike me). And sometimes even wearing dark glasses inside (ugh). (Another bit of Bruce’s marginalia: “I only did that when I needed glasses for distance and I didn’t have my nonsunglasses on me.”) The people in the room reflexively asked him all the questions about our kids’ lives, when I was the one who had the answers.
I was aware that I was very lucky to have the career and family I wanted, but I often grumbled “eff-Daddy” under my breath.
Now that we’re old, all that’s changed. Our children grew up and moved out of the house. There is no more college or camp tuition. We miss them, but there definitely is something to the empty nest. Meanwhile, the magazine industry tanked, and my husband couldn’t find full-time work anymore. Instead he did what he’d always wanted to do: He wrote full time — books for adults and, prolifically, books for children.
I had a new husband! Historically a humorist, with a stinging wit, he was more like a poet now. He’d talk for hours with his picture book collaborators about pacing and page turns and argue about specific words and illustrations. He gave readings in bookstores to toddlers and babies.
These days I have far more demands on my time than he does and much less flexibility, and as always, I wouldn’t mind more room for, ahem, writing — I still teach and chair a department — but Bruce has picked up the domestic slack. He hasn’t quite turned into Meghan Markle, but he learned to cook, and now he does all the shopping; there are martinis and dinner waiting when I come home late at night from work. He’s always down to hear about my day, and we sometimes linger at the table over music and wine talking for hours. He is definitely the happiest and most creative I’ve ever seen him.
Sometimes I wonder, “Why did we have to wait this long?” But I know the answer: It’s all too much for two people, and we were so lucky to have what we had, tumult and all. Now I’m savoring these days with my dreamboat husband.
Helen Schulman is the author of the forthcoming book of stories “Fools for Love.”
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