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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
We love each other, but she won't leave her abusive, jealous, e-mail-snooping man.
May 28, 2002 | Dear Reader,
May I take a minute here? I don't think many agreed with me about the woman who wasn't sure who had impregnated her; indeed, readers disagreed with each other, so perhaps no answer could have found wide agreement. In any case, I was driving my wretched car this morning (the headliner has come detached from the ceiling and is sagging onto my head and neck; when this first began I tore some off; I should have glued it back, I suppose, because now it keeps falling down more) and it occurred to me that this problem has three groups of solutions, each of which favors one of its three participants -- the mother, the husband or the baby.
Before proposing a solution it seemed that I ought to ask which of the participants is most deserving of protection, because each solution will favor one participant over the others. In ranking the participants, I looked at who was the most aggrieved party, and who had caused the grief. Clearly the woman, the letter writer, had caused the grief -- with the one-night stand. The husband could be said to be aggrieved by the wife, yet because he is an adult capable of making choices and fending for himself, and he chose to marry her for better or for worse, he is not wholly innocent or deserving of complete protection. The child they have agreed to raise is, however, both incapable of making choices and unable to fend for itself, making it both blameless and deserving of complete protection.
So the best strategy appeared to be the one that maximized the likelihood that the blameless and helpless party would be both cared for and not punished for the mistakes of others. Thus the strategy of outright deception that I outlined.
To consider further subtleties is not only possible but seductive; each case branches off complexly and intriguingly. In some cases -- if they are mature and emotionally stable -- the correct solution might very well be for her to confess to her husband; in some cases the best thing might be to determine the paternity of the fetus and then decide; abortion also certainly remains an option. But what of specific actions and their myriad unforeseen effects? What if she told the husband and because of that he left her? What if she told him and they worked it out and their relationship became stronger as a result? What if he pretended to accept the truth but harbored hostility and suspicion of the child?
What if he insisted on nobly contacting the genetic father in order to involve him in the raising of the child, and she didn't want anything to do with the genetic father? What if he insisted on contacting the genetic father in order to bludgeon him with a shovel? What if the genetic father got wind and sued? What if they all three ended up in therapy, or on Jerry Springer? What if the families of the parties became involved, advocating for mutually incompatible solutions such as abortion, divorce and shared parentage?
What if the mother decided under the stress of the conflict that she no longer wanted to be a mother? What if she decided under the stress of the conflict that she no longer wanted to be married? What if buried aspects of their personalities surfaced under the conflict, creating agonizing fights and emotional trauma? What if conflicts developed between the husband and the family of the mother, plunging him into despair and weakening her family's confidence in him?
What if the husband decided he ought to have an affair as well to even the score? What if the affair he had was with his wife's sister? What if each tried to accept and forgive and simply could not, and their sex life dwindled, and they became morose and started drinking and taking drugs, and their marriage broke up just as the child was being born? What if she told her husband and the baby was born retarded? What if the one-night stand guy committed suicide for wholly unrelated reasons?
The permutations were dizzyingly various and complex. The only thing that could be said with confidence was that there was only one blameless party deserving of complete protection. Silence seemed to be the only thing that could be advised with some certainty to minimize the damage.
Of course we know silence has a cost all its own. But the cost, I hypothesized, would be mainly born by the one who caused all the trouble in the first place; it was a price I judged she could reasonably bear.
As one letter writer suggested, I do seem to approach these real-life problems more like a novelist than a therapist. And how could it be otherwise? I being a writer, and we meeting not in rooms by the hour but in this vast, strangely anechoic intellectual space unlike any humankind has ever before occupied? We do not know each other in the flesh; we know each other only as actors speaking lines, seeking our marks onstage in the dark, looking for threads to hold the narrative together. I don't mean to be paraphrasing Shakespeare, but I do mean to suggest that our strange, unexpected colloquy in cyberspace is only in certain respects a human community; in others, it is utterly abstract. Because we do not know each other's particulars, we rely on principles, on overarching and eternal concepts that embrace us all: innocence, responsibility, betrayal. We populate it not as people with fingerprints and birth certificates but as avatars in each other's minds, as plot points and symbols, as poignant enigmas made of words.
Thank you for your thoughts on this most vexing of questions, and for giving me time to expand on my own.
