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Reflections on Identity
Why Wasn’t I Enough?
The elusive question of enoughness in a marriage, and who gets to decide
Four years after the demise of my decades-long marriage, I struggle to put this question to bed: why wasn’t I enough?
It had not occurred to me while I was in it that it might end — truly, never. It wasn’t just that I believed marriage was forever, a binding contract whose vows I took literally. It was also my belief that my husband was so in love with me that he would never exit of his own volition — and I certainly wasn’t going anywhere, so the marriage appeared, to me anyway, to be bullet-proof.
I understood that marriage, like any relationship, has ebbs and flows. It ebbs and you look at your spouse with total disdain, musing aloud how you will be able to survive yet another godforsaken morning listening to him gulp his coffee; it flows and you reach for his hand in the car to share a laugh about an impossibly inside joke that the kids in the backseat are annoyed they don’t understand.
Sometimes there is a stiffened back and narrowed eyes when he walks into the room, sometimes an easy smile that radiates warmth. It never occurs to me that he sees this range of emotion cross my face, so housed am I in my own private universe. It is only later…
