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THE PRESSURE COOKER
On a frigid December day in Burlington, Vermont, as the anger of a crumbling marriage filled every part of me, I sprinkled a white powder into my husband’s Scotch and gave the concoction a quick stir. Seeing the powder dissolve into the brown liquid made me feel like someone was covering me with a warm blanket on that cold, lifeless day.
No, I wasn’t going to kill him. Not yet anyway. Believe it or not, I was acting from a place of love and only wanted to see him squirm as a few hives and rashes rose on his skin, a mild allergic reaction. Assuming I’d chosen the correct dosage—or overdosage in this case—I’d find enough satisfaction in his discomfort to keep faking my smiles for another day or two.
Through the window, past the strings of Christmas lights lining the back-porch railing, snow fell onto our vast lawn that stretched to the forest, reminding me of our first New England winter almost two decades ago. As I wrapped my fingers around his tainted drink, I could almost see our younger selves throwing snowballs back and forth, then building a snowman with a carrot nose and a top hat, all the while laughing and singing Christmas-carol duets like only newlyweds could. Those two lovers had no idea what lay ahead, how they might kill all the jolly, effectively knocking Santa out of his sleigh.
Glass in hand, I went to find my husband. He’d driven me to this point, and I’d run out of options. Waltzing down the hall like a mad Mary Poppins, I sang, “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, the medicine go down, the medicine go down.”
Allowme to back up for a moment, and please—despite how ugly it might get—try not to pass judgment until you’ve heard the entire story.
When my husband lost his way, stopped “seeing” me, and our marriage inevitably decayed, I decided I would do everything in my power to get him back. Divorce was not an option. Where I come from, you figure out how to make it work. You don’t run for cover the moment it rains. You take your partner’s hand and dance in the downpour. Besides, I was Margot, the Hallmark-Channel-and-Under-the-Tuscan-Sun-watching dreamer, a woman who refused to believe that I had chosen the wrong husband or that my heart had led me astray.
That’s why for nearly a year, I’d been executing a ludicrous New Year’s resolution to make my husband love me again and to save my marriage. Looking back, I suppose I went about things differently from most of the invisible wives out there, and I now see the error of my ways.
Rather than pointing out our marital issues and asking (forcing) my husband to go to couple’s therapy with me, I thought it might be a good idea to improve myself, or “raise my game,” as my husband would say, pulling from his deep bag of hockey lingo. I lacked self-confidence and struggled with self-doubt. Maybe it wasI who was causing the problems. Maybe I wasn’t worth being loved anymore.
So I did everything I could to become Superwife. I needed to give exactly what I wanted to receive in a marriage. If I led by example, I could show him how to love me again. I would be a bright light in the dark tunnel he’d lost himself in, even if that meant becoming a figurative punching bag and a shell of the woman I used to be.
The main issue, as you’ll discover, was that my definition of the bestmewas all wrong. With each day, I had moved further away from my true self. Revisiting the memories now, nothing about my plan made sense. What did changingmehave to do with changinghim? We were destined to walk a rocky road. Ah, the 20/20 of hindsight. When you lose yourself to please someone else, no one comes out unscathed.
There was a devious twist to this project of becoming Superwife. I couldn’t let him have all the fun. If I committed to working hard to strengthen emotionally, change physically, and succumb to every one of his demands, I expected something in return. It wouldn’t be easy to transform myself while also doing my best not to point out his flaws—he wasn’t exactly easy to live with—so I created a solution to deal with the certain fury that, at times, would surely bubble up inside me. At times, I was a nuclear meltdown waiting to happen.
I likened this solution to turning the release valve on one of my favorite tools in the kitchen, the pressure cooker, which was quickly regaining popularity in the United States. While I bent over backward for this man, even when he ignored, insulted, or just plain annoyed me, I would feel a pressure building that would require release before an explosion occurred. In fact, I’d already tested this pressure-cooker idea, and I’d been correct in my hypothesis. The occasional release allowed me to forge ahead with the plan of being the (almost) perfect wife.
If you’re not familiar with a pressure cooker, let me brief you. I consider my cooking life broken into two parts. Before I discovered this amazing invention, and after. I use it nearly every day. It will cook beans, rice, quinoa, soups, hard-boiled eggs, and a thousand other things so easily and quickly. When the food’s ready, you turn the release valve and a tremendous amount of steam spits out, almost like that from a steam engine’s cylinders while racing down the line. From my newfound, healthier vantage point, it was abundantly clear that my own train was about to veer off its tracks.
What could I have done to turn the valve and release the steam on my emotional pressure cooker, you ask? I think this is the part you’ll find most entertaining about my story. It is as sad as can be, but I can now laugh at the absurdity. Let’s say, with some creativity, I could exact revenge on my husband without his even knowing it!
His ignorance was the key to my plan’s success. I certainly could not make him fall in love with me again if he knew I was anything less than perfect. No, this plan required a stealthy Margot Simpson to appear flawless in every way. To be the woman of my husband’s dreams. Only in the background, slyly, deviously, and expertly, could I wage my subtle revenge, hence turning my release valve.
I became the queen of the passive-aggressive onslaught.
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, when I was young and full of energy and barely into my twenties, I was performing on and off Broadway, doing exactly what I’d wanted to do since I was a little girl. Gosh, from as far back as I can remember, I’d been an entertainer. I’d grown from a girl singing songs with my mother, to performing for family and friends in our living room, to grabbing the lead in plays throughout grade school. In college, I’d double-majored in music and drama. Then, as stage actors who crave the ultimate success in their profession do, I’d moved to New YorkCity. Within months, I’d nabbed a role in my first off-Broadway show.
By the time my husband found me, I was performing a three-month run playing Polly in a re-run ofCrazy for You.Our production was coming to an end when I first spotted him in the crowd, and by then, we owned the stage. I’d never had so much fun working with a cast and crew before. That night, when we came out for the final bow, a man in the audience and I locked eyes for a moment. I remember the lightness tingling in my heart. It was almost as if, during our brief eye contact, he’d put me on his back and flown me into the air like a bird. He returned several more times, and each time he sat closer and closer to the stage. As it was a sold-out show, I could hardly believe he had not only found tickets, but good tickets at that. Who was this man?
On the fourth night of his attendance, I found a bouquet of lilies and a note waiting for me backstage. My heart leapt as I read his wonderful comments about my performance. His name was Rory Simpson. To my disappointment, he hadn’t left his number, but on the night of our last show, after our final bow, I strutted to the end of the stage, thanked him for the flowers, and we shook hands. A lightning bolt of energy surged through me as he boldly kissed my cheek.
The next day, we met for coffee and meandered through Central Park. Rory was leaving the next morning, so he persuaded me to have dinner with him that night. After a lovely candlelit meal in an Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side, we kissed, and I fell under his spell. He proposed six months later in Central Park, and I left my Broadway career to become a homemaker in Vermont.
I never resented the move. The choice hadn’t been difficult. I had finally found the life I’d been singing about for years. I happily walked away from my stage career because, more than success in that arena, I wanted a family. Fighting for new roleswould become increasingly difficult as I grew older, but my roles as a wife and a mother would be permanent. I craved permanence. Blowing the minds of my family and friends, I married Rory Simpson and became a Vermonter. A few years later, I gave birth to our son Jasper, who grew to be a kind and gentle boy who didn’t deserve the suffering that would come his way.
It’s important that I don’t paint an unfair picture of Rory. He’s a good man deep down. Sometimes his good was buried so deep it would require more than an excavator, but like the core of the earth, there was no denying it was indeed down there somewhere.
For a very long time, he had been a great husband and father. It’s just that his career trajectory hadn’t left much room for family. Rory eventually ran for mayor of Burlington and won. I remember feeling extremely happy and proud, but I had no idea how much his new job would consume him.
Toward the end of his first four years, when he started to talk about running for the senate, he checked out of our family. Point being, if I get carried away in the developing story and let some of my anger toward him surface, please remember that he had been my dream man for many years.
Things got in the way. Isn’t that what often happens?
In addition to having been a chaser of fairy tales, I must admit that I also had been afraid of being alone. That’s easier to see now. After you’ve spent twenty years with someone, you can’t imagine saying goodbye. No matter who he becomes or what he does or says, he’s a part of you. Go find a couple that has gone through a miserable divorce, and I bet they will confess—possibly under extreme torture—that they’re still connected. Not only was it nearly impossible for me to imagine trudging through the rest of life without a partner, I also couldn’t imagine fighting over custody of our son. How could we possibly do that to Jasper? I would happily sacrifice my happiness to give him a secure childhood in a two-parent home.
It was the second week of December when I noticed my plan was backfiring. It had begun as a New Year’s resolution in January. Almost one year in, and I was unraveling. But I told myself that often the struggle becomes strongest when you’re close to winning. I couldn’t give up at that point. My parents were still together, and I wanted to celebrate the same longevity with my husband. I had spent the entire year doing everything I could to turn our relationship around, including losing weight, cutting my hair, letting Rory do whatever he pleased, and loving him when he didn’t respond with even an iota of love back. How could I have stopped mid-plan? I believed if I kept trudging through, he’d wake up and realize what he had—what we had.
Back to the mad Mary Poppins story, only an hour before I sprinkled the powder into Rory’s drink. It was Christmastime in Vermont, and I was singing a much different song. I was high on the Christmas spirit, singing “Deck the Halls,” and easing down our long driveway that traversed through a forest of tall snow-covered evergreens. I’d left to pick up several extra bags of ice for the party we were hosting that night, but I wasn’t worried about the ice melting on the way back. I was in no hurry. The holidays were my favorite time of year, and I did everything I could to slow down the moments.
