There are some books no twelve-year-old should read.

When I was a kid, I liked to watch the Dinah Shore show on the portable TV while my Mom fixed dinner.  One day, Marabel Morgan was on defending her book, The Total Woman.

This was the mid-70’s, the height of the Woman’s Movement, and Dinah was taking Marabel to task.  You greet your husband at the door wearing nothing but Saran Wrap? Dinah asked, aghast.

Interested in the sexual, my ears perked up.

A woman should allow her husband to make all the major decisions, right down to the color of the freezer? Dinah shook her head.  Tell me the truth. Do you really believe that?

Mom snorted as she opened up a can of corn beef hash. Clearly, Dinah and Mom weren’t buying what Marabel–with her QT-tan and her frosted pink lipstick–had to sell.

I was dusting the living room , not long after this, when I discovered The Total Woman on the wall-to-wall shelves. Surprised, because clearly my Mom would never have purchased the thing, I flipped the pages in search of the sexy bits.  There was lots of stuff on greeting one’s husband at the door in hot outfits–you could be a cowgirl one day, or a pirate, or a Las Vegas showgirl–but there was nothing whatsoever about plastic cling wrap.

Sitting on the carpet, I read on:

    When Dad came home that evening, having spent the last nine hours at a place he liked to call ‘a little taste of hell,’ Mom greeted him in stretch pants and a sweatshirt covered with paint.  As usual, she’d completely forgotten to comb her hair. Toilet’s clogged, she said from the kitchen door. Chipped beef on toast tonight.  Fifteen minutes.

After supper, as was his habit, Dad trudged down to the basement to drink himself stupid.  When he staggared back upstairs, he rattled our cages for a couple of hours, slammed the cabinet doors around, cleaned up the mess in the kitchen, and then passed out in bed. Unhappy with his lot in life, like many men of his era, he wanted to punish us all because there was nothing in it for him.

Why don’t you just divorce him? I asked Mom, sick of the nonstop tension. He’s a horrible father and a shit for a husband.

You can’t just get up and go like that, Mom explained, snapping her fingers. Living takes money. Without  Dad, the family breadwinner, we’d end up eating cat food and living in a cardboard box.

Inexplicably drawn to Marabel’s book, to her mindlessly happy face glowing from the back cover, I went back to it the very next day.

If you fulfill his needs, he won’t have to escape some other way…you may have a husband who does not do anything but stay home drinking beer in his underwear.  The responsibility of the family may rest on your back because somewhere along the line you usurped his role.  Your nagging may have taken the wind out of his sails and now he has no desire to keep working for you.

Why hadn’t I seen it before? Dad’s drinking was all Mom’s fault.  Really, to improve our homelife, what she needed to do was dress up like Annie Oakley. Light some candles. Chatter on about pleasant things over a nice roast squab dinner.

And I suppose it makes sense that, fifteen years later, I’d assumed it was all up to me to carry my own marriage. To adapt to living in Iran, the country of my husband’s birth. To remain pleasant when my in-laws moved into our dorm room for months on end. To smile as our savings was given away. To always look good, even under a chador. To keep my gripes to myself. So my husband wouldn’t leave me for one of his graduate students. Because the streets of Iran, in case you were wondering, weren’t a good place to wind up without a pot to piss in.

After moving back to the States. After the divorce. I found myself studying other people’s relationships. I admired those couples who really seemed to make it work. But mostly I predicted disaster, just by looking at the wife.  The fat lady with a tray of cookies for her kid’s karate class?  She had fifteen minutes, tick tick tick, before her husband drop-kicked her to the curb. The lady chewing gum, reading The Enquirer at the checkout counter? Keep that up, and she’s be joining Parents Without Partners.

How did your view on marriage get so skewed, a friend I’d known since college asked me one day. Over the course of her marriage, she’d gained twenty pounds. She’d chucked the date nights, the lingerie, and the cute little skirts. Her husband changed diapers while she ate chips. Saran Wrap, in her house, was strictly to protect leftovers. Content to be herself, she wasn’t even the tennsiest, weensiest bit worried.

Now, married to a wonderful man, an American just like me, I get intellectually that marriage is about equal partnering. About negotiation, mutual respect,and allowing the other in when your completely vulnerable. He knows me inside out, and he truly loves me.

Emotionally,however, the twelve-year-old still rules. The one who believes,thanks to Marabel Morgan, that “A great marriage is not so much finding the right person as being the right person.”

Where is the balance, I constantly ask, between being authentic–fat or thin, grouchy or cheerful, lazy or motivated–and being what I believe my husband wants me to be?

Here’s what I ask myself on a daily basis. Was Marabel not right when she said you can only change yourself? That, for someone to love you, you first have to love yourself? Can you love yourself when you let yourself go? When you blow up like a balloon, let your mind shrivel, abandon all hobbies and dreams, focus solely on the kids? Why would anyone–man or woman–want to partner with that?

Perhaps, this is where I come down on the subject. At least for today. Marriage is about giving your all. Expecting the same in return.

No twelve-year-old can be expected to know, however, that what is missing in The Total Woman is the notion of reciprocation.