Writing that Should Not Have Been Published, Part 4

This scene takes place after the end of the official marriage project and after I’d written a first draft of this book. I wanted Mark to read and sign off on the book before I tried to sell it to a publisher. Having him read the book was one of the best marital therapy sessions we ever had. What I could not seem to explain to him verbally he was able to understand by what I had written. Our marriage improved greatly after he finally read the book.

I want Mark to know everything there is to know about me. I hand him “Project HEA,” all 125 single spaced pages of it.

“I’d like you to read this,” I say. “I want you to know everything. I want you to understand my perspective. Most important, I want to give you the chance to read this and comment on it before I allow my mother, agent, friends, relatives, and the world to read it.”

“I’m not embarrassed about anything,” he says.

“Mark, it’s pretty graphic. I even wrote about our sex lives,” I explain.

“You did?” he says, he eyes open wide.

“You need to read it,” I say.

He picks up the printout and opens it to the middle. He reads a page. Then he flips 20 pages ahead and reads a page. He flips forward another 20 or so more pages. Then back some pages. Then forward. He’s trying to find the sex scenes. This is how, at first, he read a friend’s memoir. Mark flipped through the book, skimming page after page, until he found the section with the sex scene.

I suppress my urge to hit him for reading my book out of order. I leave the book with him at his shop. I head home to work on the weight loss book I must finish by early October. Periodically, throughout the day, I worry. What if he doesn’t like how I’ve described him? What if he feels I’ve defamed his character? What if he’s wounded when he learns I once fantasized about other men? What if he tells me that there’s no way in this lifetime that he’ll let me publish a book that describes so many of the secret details of our relationship?

“But he knows me,” I reassure myself. “He’s known about the book. This is a true story. I have no secrets. Everything is going to be fine.”

That night I ask him how his reading is going. It isn’t. He hasn’t gotten around to looking at the book.

The next night, I ask how it is going. He hasn’t read a word.

He brings the book home Saturday afternoon. It sits on the floor of the sun room. It doesn’t move.

Later, as we are cleaning up after dinner, he asks, “Can I go out tonight?”

“Yes, but on the condition that you read some of the book first,” I say.

“Okay,” he says. He leaves the kitchen and heads to the sunroom to attend to his reading.

Kaarina is watching a movie. He’s reading the book. If I stay in the house, I will sit in front of him and watch his facial expressions as he turns the pages. I take the dog for a walk. Thirty minutes later, I’m back. He’s made considerable progress. I bathe our daughter. He reads some more. We settle her into bed.

“It looks as if you got through a lot,” I say.

“Yes,” he says.

His monosyllabic way of talking is killing me.

“So? Has anything surprised you?”

“No, we’ve talked about everything I’ve read so far,” he says.

I’m relieved.

“I don’t think you should talk about the night you almost shook the baby,” he says.

“Why?”

“I don’t think it adds anything,” he says.

“Are you worried about what people will think when they learn that your wife almost did such a terrible thing?” I ask.

“No, it’s not that. I just don’t think it adds anything. If you are going to have it in there, you need to expand on it. You drop this bomb, and then you never explain it.”

“But it shows how desperate I was. It shows how crazy I was. It shows how much help I needed,” I say.

“If that’s true, you need to add more to it,” he says.

“I’ll take that into consideration,” I say, and I do. I think about it that night. I think about it the following day. I read over the section. I add a few lines. I edit it. I delete a few sentences and replace them with different sentences. I don’t delete the section, though. No, I can’t do that. I won’t.

I would assume that most mothers, if they are being honest, will admit that they’ve struggled with the ugly monster, too. My parents often told me that they “wanted to throw me out the window” during my first six weeks of life when I suffered from colic and cried all night long, every night. I now understand their sentiments. I’ve heard of parents who have left hand prints on their toddlers’ rear ends. I hope I never do this, but I can’t say I don’t understand what drove them to it.

If it’s not the ugly monster of rage, then it’s the monster of neglect. My mother, even, admitted that, after I stopped crying all night from colic, only to develop an ear infection, she accidentally put penicillin in my ear and anesthetic in my mouth because the pharmacy switched the labels on the medicine. She never questioned why she was putting two drops from a large bottle of thick pink liquid in my ear and a teaspoon from a tiny bottle of foul smelling thin liquid in my mouth. The pediatrician couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t getting better. Mom is an intelligent woman. She has a master’s degree. Who could do such a thing? A woman who hasn’t slept in 6 weeks, that’s who.

I’ve heard of babies who have rolled off changing tables because their mothers put them there and then walked away. We’ve all read the news stories about the babies who were forgotten in cars on hot summer days or of babies who drowned because their mothers decided it was a good idea to answer the phone or the door while their babies were in the bath.

Rested people do not do these things. Sleep deprived people do.

It’s taken me three years to learn how to ask for help. It’s taken me three years to be able to admit to myself and to my husband and parents and friends that I am not perfect, and never will be. It’s taken me three years to realize that my daughter is better off if she occasionally is not in my presence, even if, in her own perverse way, she’d rather be with the mommy monster than with a well-adjusted stranger.

Three years.

Thank God our daughter is still alive. Thank God I still have a marriage to save.

That’s why I’m not editing the baby shaking story out of the book.

Note: It turned out that I drastically changed the book, which meant, roughly a year later, I asked him to read it yet again.

UPDATES

* I’ve been doing 1 to 3 radio interviews a day for the past few weeks. You can listen in on several of them at WCBS/NY.

* The Frugal Kiwi reviews PHEA and compares it to a patchwork quilt. Here’s an excerpt, “I read it in one sitting because I couldn’t put it down. The writing is candid and Alisa allows herself to be so vulnerable to her readers that the book feels like a tale told between girlfriends over a few bottles of wine. She exposes her own faults and culpability with the same frankness she tells of her husband’s.”

* There’s still time to enter the Fabulous PHEA Giveaway! Be entered to win a Kindle, a stay at a B&B, marriage counseling, a vibrator and more with proof of purchase of Project: Happily Ever After.

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