The Mistress Never Wins

“The mistress never wins.”

I was eight years old when my mother first imparted these words of wisdom.  At the time, my father was having an affair with a woman named Gwen.  I still don’t know her last name.  Only that her name was Gwen and that my mother was certain Gwen was “just a phase.”  My father was, after all, approaching his thirty-fifth birthday and this is what thirty-five year old men did.  They “got it out of their system.”  Looking back, I suppose my mom really believed this.  Her theory though was predicated on the notion that my father would eventually “tire” (tire a euphemism for becoming impotent) and wholly dedicate himself to our family. The happily-ever-after being a sexless marriage in Florida (preferably Palm Beach) although she wouldn’t have phrased it that way. “You grow old together and a shared history (grandchildren) is more important than sex.” And so she held on, years passed, the list of women my father slept with grew and Pfizer invented Viagra. 

My mother couldn’t have anticipated this.  The notion that my father would stay hard until death-did-them part was as outrageous a notion as laser hair removal.  This new love potion meant that my father need not worry about getting too old to get-it-up.  He could be overweight and bald, lose his knees and no longer be able to play basketball—diabetes, high cholesterol, prostrate problems -- none of that will matter if he’s vital. Ask any man--when you wake up next to twenty-something girl mortality doesn’t feel like inevitability.

This was a seismic shift in my mother’s reality.  My father would never tire.  And so, with each new day my mother’s fear of becoming obsolete grew.  The fact that she wasn’t enough for her husband was old news.  Us kids being away at college didn’t come as a surprise. The wrinkles and thinning hair were unfortunate but manageable.  There was, however, no getting around menopause.  In my mother’s mind the world has little use for a barren woman. Unlike many women my mother has always been fortunate. Although she didn’t think so at the time, she had options.  Only a few credits short of her degree she could have finished school and entered the work force with a college degree which actually meant something back then.  She could have given my father an ultimatum: stop cheating otherwise you’re out.   Or she could have been completely bold and left him. I remember suggesting this, “We can move into a garden apartment in town. I’ll take care of Kim and Arthur when you’re at work. We’ll be happy, Ma. ”

 “I have three little kids” was her response.  “No man wants a woman with three little kids.”

“But we don’t need a man.” 

“Every woman needs a man”. 

It’s easy to dismiss my mother’s logic.  After all, this was the seventies.  Women were speaking up, declaring their needs, voicing their opinions. But somehow my mother could never process that a woman was capable of self-rule.  She went from being someone’s daughter to someone’s wife.  If dependence equals success it only makes sense that autonomy equals failure. 

Besides, my mother didn’t stay with my father out of fear and shame alone.  She loved him and believed if she loved him enough she could fix him.  The notion that anyone can fix anyone-and with love no less-is perhaps the biggest lie of them all.  Yet I don’t know anyone who hasn’t embraced this notion at some point in his or her life.  Which really is at the heart of this book: is something a lie if you believe it?

I got married at twenty-two. Brian, my husband, was twenty-five.  We were young but neither of us were innocents. Both of us had philandering fathers and sickly mothers. My mother got it in her stomach, my mother-in-law in her back.  For both of them the pain was real (the pain is almost always real) but the genesis of the pain was never acknowledged. There’s mom in bed, curtains drawn, as if daylight, and not some twenty- four-year-old lobbyist is the enemy.  And there’s my mother-in-law, also in bed, doped out on pain pills, emotionless.  Like generations of women before them, illness had become their survival mechanism.

Eventually, we’d hear my dad’s car pull into the driveway and us kids, scrubbed clean and ready for bed, would race down the stairs, “Daddy’s home!” Dad would walk through the garage door, his yellow tie loose around his neck. He’d put his briefcase on top the kitchen table, rest his suit jacket on the shoulders of the chair and give us each a hug.  Like generations of men before him all he had to do to survive was come home. 

And not from war mind you. The track, the Playboy Club, some salesgirl’s  apartment. It didn’t really matter where he’d been. He’s home now.  A pint of orange freeze is left out on the counter.  A watch, cufflinks, shirt stays.  The din of a small color TV.  The smell of Right Guard aerosol. It’s morning.  Mom comes downstairs for coffee.  She’s smiling. And so it begins again.  Our effort to be a family.

Back to the garage door.  My father always came home through the garage door, which I could try to reduce to some type of Freudian admission of guilt but I think it was simply a form of function. That said, doors seem to pop up regularly in affairs of the heart.  The first kiss.  The wave goodbye.  The welcome home.  We slip letters under, leave flowers by, bang on, shout out, slam close, and open all sorts of doors throughout our life.  So it’s not surprising that the door metaphor can be found in many idioms about marriage.  When one door closes, another opens.  He has one foot out the door.  And prevalent amongst the girlfriends of married men, “I couldn’t enter if the door wasn’t open.”

Ah, the good’ol open door excuse. Excuse is too kind actually because it implies a naïveté that doesn’t exist in women over the age of three.  Witness any father and daughter in a toy store. The little girl points at a dolly high up on the shelf. The man reaches for it, “This one?” She shakes her head yes.  Her eyes brighten.  Is he really going to do this?  Is he really going to hand her the doll?

Yes.  He does precisely that.  He hands her the doll and she shrieks.  She wraps her arms around his shoulders, gives him a big kiss on the cheek, “Thank you Daddy.” He didn’t anticipate buying her a toy today but the sheer joy –look at her twirling down the aisle. He was able to do this, to deliver this kind of happiness. For a brief moment he feels the rush of invincibility.  And she learns this –right then and there- to get what she wants from him all she has to do is make him feel godlike. Smile a certain way, wrap her arms over his shoulders, coo.  The door to a man’s ego is if not open certainly unlocked.

  So justification is more accurate, the good’ol open door justification.  Now, I don’t know about you but there are many open doors in this world that I don’t enter.  For instance, I don’t walk into the men’s room at Madison Square Garden when I need to tinkle or enter my neighbor’s apartment without permission, kick back and watch The View.   Hermes has an open door policy but that doesn’t mean I stroll in and buy myself a Berkin.  Why? Because a bunch of men with their pants down, dicks drawn is never a good thing. You trip your neighbor’s silent alarm and suddenly you’re being hauled over to the police station.  Mug shot!?  And really, how are you going to feel each month as you’re paying interest on a ten grand credit card charge for a pocket book that makes you look rich but you obviously can’t afford? You see just because a door is open doesn’t mean you walk through it-doesn’t even mean you peak in.

The crazy wife is another popular rationale men offer and single women are happy to accept. It goes like this:  you meet the man of your dreams on MATCH.COM and it turns out he’s married.  You don’t know this until your second or third date.  He reaches across the table for your hand, “I have something to tell you.”  He apologizes ahead of time for not telling you sooner but he never expected to meet someone like you on an online dating service. And then he delivers the news, “I’m married,” he says, “and I have two children.”  He tells you that he desperately wants to leave his wife but she’s crazy, if he does she might kill herself and he can’t live with the guilt.  Or worse she’s so crazy she’ll take it out on the kids. Who knows what she’ll do to them.  At the very least she’ll poison them against him and he can’t live with that because he loves his kids.  That’s the thing about him.  He’s a great guy you tell yourself. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone.  “I hope you understand,” he says.

And talk about crazy, after dinner instead of being mad at him for misrepresenting himself you feel the need to comfort him.  Which is why when you’re having sex you’re able to justify fucking another woman’s husband.  In fact, you’re actually helping her.  You could but didn’t give him an ultimatum.  You are the one making it possible for him to stay in the marriage. Not all women would be as selfless.

And you’re being selfless that’s for sure.  Selfless. Self-loathing. Stupid. Let me tell you something Honey, if a man wants to leave his wife he leaves his wife.  That simple.  No matter what he tells you to the contrary if he stays with his wife he’s getting something out of the deal. Ease, friendship, his golf club membership.

But of all the excuses the enemy makes to justify sleeping with our husbands, the one that gets me the most is the meant to be/love of my life scenario.  “He’s the love of my life.”  Really?  You knew that from stumbling into him at the gym? Was he on the Stairmaster holding up a sign that said I’m the one you’ve been looking for your whole life? Was he wearing a t-shirt that said Kindred Spirit? Please.  This one, at least to me, is perhaps the most insulting.

Shortly after getting married I realized my father-in-law’s secretary was his mistress.  When I finally got the nerve to mention it to my husband his initial response wasn’t denial. Brian told me that I didn’t need to worry; he wasn’t like his father or my father for that matter, “Not all men cheat.” He insisted. “But you have to understand monogamy is a very American institution.  In Italy, most men have mistresses. They call them Goomahs.” When I repeated this to my mother she said, “But your father-in-law’s not Italian and we don’t live in Italy.”

My mom was right, my father-in-law wasn’t and still isn’t Italian and we didn’t and don’t live in Italy.  But being right can have surprisingly little to do with being just.

Back to my mother.                            

I’m sitting on top the toilet seat watching my mother apply eye makeup. She’s getting ready to go out to dinner in New York City with my dad. I watch as she draws green shadow across each of her eyelids. I’m eight years old.  She’s thirty.   The mistress never wins,” she says. I understand on some primitive level this is more than a put-the-napkin-on-your-lap-before-you-eat lesson.  I am quiet.  I’m scared for some reason that my mother will die.

            What I only understand now, at forty-three, and with a thirteen year old daughter of my own is that my mother wasn’t intentionally lying to me. People believe what they want--what they need to believe in order to survive.  So if you believe the lie you tell yourself is it a lie?  I’m still not sure of the answer. What I do know though is that there are the ways things are in life and then there are the ways we want them to be.  Truth I imagine sits just to the left of the lie, somewhere in-between.  

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, I'm a Liar Like Them All.

“Men cheat for pleasure.  Women only cheat for revenge.”

“Women are the enemy. All Women.”

“Only rich girls get to leave.”

My mother not only said those things. She believed them.  And made it her mission to make sure I believed them too.

It’s the collective inheritance of every daughter, the misinformation our mothers pass down to us. We spend our lives extracting fiction from fact, fear from reality, need from want. We bite toenails, get high, eat chips, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, commiserate with girlfriends, make out with guys at bars, fall in love, get married, have kids, breast feed, buy organic -- only to become liars ourselves.

The Mistress Never Wins and Other Lies My Mother Told Me began as a search for certainty.  I wasn’t going to tell my daughter what kind of woman to become.  Instead, I would present her with facts.  If I wasn’t sure I’d Google and let her decide. The problem is this strategy works when we’re talking about teenage pregnancy and she asks,  “How do you even have a baby?” That’s easy, “Well, the sperm fertilizes the egg and..”  It gets a bit more complicated when she follows it up with “So why would someone have sex if they don’t want a baby?”

 I’m not sure how my mother would have answered this question.  She certainly wouldn’t have mentioned the power dynamic within the home, and I don’t think pleasure would have entered the conversation either. There’s no way she’d have said, “For the orgasim Honey.”  I’d ask her, but what she’d tell me today, after divorce, dating and a second marriage would be different than what she would have told me as a little girl.  Which is at the heart of the dilemma. Mothers are asked to give advice on so many things they can’t possibly know the answers to.  Sex at twenty has almost nothing to do with sex at forty.  But you can’t know that until you actually become forty. 

 I’d like to tell you that my responses to my daughter’s questions are more thought out than my mothers, that they are rooted in knowledge and not fear, that the answers I give my daughter are absolute.  But as you know other than birth and death few things in life are binary. My answers are (and I know how sick this is) merely variations on my mother’s -- preconceptions informed by my own limited life experience.  In my quest was to tell the truth to my daughter I too have became a liar. Sadly, in all probability somewhere along the way my little girl will become a liar too. But maybe not.  Maybe if me and you, are able to somehow forge an open dialogue with our girls, to admit that we don’t have all the answers without making them feel insecure -- maybe we can become the mothers they need. 

It’s a tricky time to be a woman.  And sure, it’s always been tricky but with more options come more complications and women have more options now than they’ve ever had. Yes, there’s a glaring inequity in the number of women in positions of power versus men BUT THERE ARE WOMEN IN POSITIONS OF POWER.  My daughter asked me the other day if I thought Michelle Obama would run for president and I smiled to myself because she’s growing up in a world where the position of First Lady isn’t limited to being a social ambassador for America but is rather a stepping stone to the presidency.

But I want to be clear.  This doesn’t mean that my daughter’s not interested in eye shadow.  I grew up in Jersey in the Bon Jovi era of high hair and tight jeans, and let’s just say I’d challenge you to find someone who can wield an eye shadow brush with greater finesse. Other than my daughter, who also knows how to use liquid liner, which is a skill I never came close to mastering.  More importantly unlike teenage me she doesn’t leave the house with four different shades of blue on her eyes.

I learned how to put on makeup by watching my mother. I would sit on top of the toilet seat and watch her apply false eyelashes in awe.  My daughter is being taught how to wear makeup by a YouTube sensation named “Miss Glamorazzi”   And my daughter is equally in awe of Miss Glamorazzi. My daughter knows where Ms. Glamorazzi grew up and who her boyfriend is.  She knows Miss Glamorazzi’s favorite brand of mascara and candle scent. And she knows that the reason Miss Glamorazzi started wearing makeup is because she had bad skin and makeup made her feel more secure.                                                                                A lot of what Miss Glamorazzi teaches my daughter is familiar.  We didn’t have YouTube, we had the makeup experts at “Seventeen Magazine”.  But here’s the difference: The other night when I walked past my daughter’s room, she was lying on her bed waiting for her homemade sugar mask to harden as she listened to the audio book of Sheryl Sanberg’s Leaning In. I smiled and thought: now that’s fucking great.

But this is what I mean when I talk about it being tricky for women. A friend of mine was asked to give a high school graduation commencement last week. The premise of his address was that only in high school are you asked to be good at everything at the same time:  being good at language, math, science, english and history…He commended the graduates on finishing high school, reiterated what a huge achievement it is and declared that from this moment on they wouldn’t be asked to be good at everything at the same time ever again.  It was a really unique perspective and something I had never thought of.   But then I realized that the reason I had never thought of it is because I’m a woman.  He’s a man.  Women never graduate from having to be good at a lot of different things at the same time.                  
You may disagree with me, and that’s fine.  Throw your arms up in the air. Say I’m backwards.  Limited in my belief system.  And fuck.  That may all be true.  You can rattle off the statistics, tell me that there’s a growing number of men staying home to care for their children. That it’s a trend, in fact, and I’ll tell you I think it’s really great and about time.  But there’s no denying the biology. Women simply don’t have as much time to start a family.  It’s perfectly reasonable for a man to work twenty hours a day and then at forty-five decide he wants to settle down and have a kid.  A woman can’t. She has to figure out how to work those same twenty hours even with morning sickness.

So what’s the right thing to do when you’re adult daughter tells you she gave Joe his ring back?  Instead of getting married she’s taking the job offer in Milwaukee. That she’s going to wait just one more year; “I’m this close” she says and smiles the smile that’s been melting you since before she ever had teeth.   Do you remind her that she’s forty-one?  Do you tell her that a good man is hard to find? Do you warn her that being the anchor of a morning news might mean nothing to her if she misses out on having a family?  This is what my mother would have told me.  And the problem is no matter how much I may have wanted to argue it, she would have been right.