Gilchrist Ellen - The bitch in the house: 26 women tell the truth about sex, solitude, work, motherhood, and marriage

For Dan, of course

E. S. Maduro

Veronica Chambers

Jen Marshall

Sarah Miller

Kerry Herlihy

Daphne Merkin

Catherine Newman

Kate Christensen

Chitra Divakaruni

Hazel McClay

Karen Karbo

Jill Bialosky

Cynthia Kling

Hannah Pine

Helen Schulman

Kristin van Ogtrop

Hope Edelman

Laurie Abraham

Elissa Schappell

Susan Squire

Natalie Angier

Nancy Wartik

Natalie Kusz

Ellen Gilchrist

Vivian Gornick

Pam Houston

T HIS BOOK WAS born out of angerspecifically, my own domestic anger, which stemmed from a combination of guilt, resentment, exhaustion, navet, and the chaos of my life at the time. But ultimately, it is not an angry book. Its a book that shows us that the trials and tribulations of our work and relationships, children and homes and sex livescomplete with their passions, dysfunctions, and frustrationsare not ours alone but the same or similar struggles of so many others. Its a book that reveals that if the grass sometimes seems greener, sometimes it is. And sometimes, its decidedly not.

The book began two years ago, after my familymy husband, Dan, and our two children, then aged four and onehad just left New York City to move to a small town in Massachusetts where the kids could each have a room and Dan could work part-time from home instead of fulltime from an office, enabling him to write his second novel and do his part of the co-parenting arrangement wed both always (if vaguely) envisioned. The move came, for me, after an autonomous decade in my twenties indulging in all the things I had come to valuea rewarding, lucrative career combined with exercise, romance, solitude, good friendsfollowed by six whirlwind years that included marrying, moving three times, and birthing and nursing two children, all while contributing my necessary share of the family income by writing a monthly magazine column, publishing a novel, and completing a second novel under contract. By the end, Id worked my way up to roughly two-thirds time hired child care, much of it taking place in our apartment (in which I also worked). Our final year in New York had been a veritable marathon: nursing a baby at the computer while typing to make a deadline; sprinting home from my daughters nursery school, both kids in tow, to return phone calls; handing the children off to Dan the instant he walked in at night so I could rush out to a coffee shop to get my work done. When we moved, I expected things to finally be different. Id be able to work purely and efficientlyto focus as I had years agoknowing Dan was on during those times. Wed be calm, wed take family bike rides... our New Lives would begin.

Instead, my life, my marriage, my schedule, felt more overwhelming than ever. The phones rang nonstop. (We had three different distinctive ringsDans work line, my work line, and the family line. Total nightmare.) FedEx packages and cartons of books I was supposed to be readingI was writing Mademoiselles monthly books page at the timearrived by the week, to be added to the still-unpacked boxes that rimmed every room, dust bunnies breeding around them. I rarely managed to cook a good dinner, as my own mother had virtually every night, and I rushed my children through the hours so I could get to all the things I had to do, furious when they wouldnt go to bed, when they were up calling me in the night. Dan was doing more parenting than he ever had (and feeling, I imagined, like a better father than those of previous generations simply by virtue of being around), yet I still felt I was the one who managed and was responsible for the kidsfrom their meals to their clothing, activities, schoolwork, baby-sitters, birthday partiesas well as handling all the domestic things Id always done (grocery shopping, cooking, laundry, school and social responsibilities, and so on). I still had the same workmy income was now even more importantand, it seemed, less time than ever to do it. My days were nonstop at high speed, my brain flooded with lists and obligations.

All day long, I stomped around barking orders, irritable and stressed out. I was angry at the cat for waking me, at the car for having no gas when I got in it (late for somethingalways late), at the toy Id just tripped on... and at Dan. Because hed used up the coffee filters or Cascade without putting them on the list; because hed finished his work and had time to check out the New York Times and Salon while I struggled to find time for mine; because I was always more anxious and frantic than he was. Of course, Id fallen in love with him partly because of this very calm, but now his ability to relax when I never seemed to felt unfair, oblivious, even rude. I resented him and this chaos I found myself ineven as I never stopped being grateful for the elements that created it. Two healthy children, a nice home, an interesting job... what could I possibly be mad about? And yet, mad I was.

So, night after night, once the kids were asleep (sort of), I left laundry unfolded, phone calls unreturned, school forms unfilled out, and my own work undone to go online and fire furious e-mails to my friends to try to figure it out. And I began to realize something. A lot of these womenparticularly those who, like me, were ambitious women (often writers) juggling jobs and marriages and, sometimes, small childrenalso were resentful, guilty, stressed out. I want a partner in my husband, not another child, one fired back at me. I told him if something doesnt change, Im leaving, even though we just got married, said another, adding, Yesterday I actually had a fantasy that we got a divorce, moved back into our separate apartments, and just dated each other again. Im fine all day at work, but as soon as I get home, Im a horror, said a third. Im the bitch in the house.

The bitch in the house. Thats exactly how I felt. The opposite of what Virginia Woolf called The Angel in the Housebut with anger to boot. Sometimes my friends and I would get on the topic of our sex lives, orin the case of the married ones, it seemedlack thereof. Put me anywhere near a bed and I just want to sleep, said one mother. The recently wed woman mourned the loss of the hot sex shed had with her husband before theyd tied the proverbial knot. One young single friend whod just moved in with her boyfriend already felt the waning of her desire. (In the same breath, she spoke of how it scared and amazed her how angry she got at him sometimeshow shed walk in from work and see a sinkful of dishes and explode with rage, while her poor boyfriend watched, baffled, from the couch, beer in hand, newspaper spread before him, stereo blaring the Dave Matthews Band.)

Newspaper and magazine stories appeared regularly to echo our feelings. Why Women Hate Their Husbands, screamed a cover line on Talk magazine. (The articles subtitle: Love, sex, family, careerit was all supposed to be so easy for the modern woman. Then why are this therapists patients so furious?) In a piece in the New York Times Magazine, a modern working couple visited the Love Lab (a Family Research Lab in Seattle that, after watching a couple interact, predicts whether they will divorce), and, the male half of the couple reported, In ten minutes, my wife chalked up one hundred and thirty moments of criticism. I displayed one hundred and thirty-two moments of defensiveness. (His wife, he went on to say, was a keen critic of an institution into which she had twice been recruited. Marriage, she said, was advertised falselythe myth of enduring romantic loveand its responsibilities sharply limited a womans growth.)