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By Root 350 0

and you can’t imagine life without looking into that lover’s face. Maybe you hope things will improve. Maybe the love blinds you—maybe you don’t know you’re being abused. My brother Frank asked my mother once why she put up with all the beatings from my father—especially the ones that left her face knotted with ugly, black lumps and bruises. “Hell,” she said, “I asked for all that. I’d mouth off too much and your father would put me in my place. I deserved it. It’s as simple as that.” Her answer—the idea that she believed she had earned the horrible beatings—makes me angry and sad, but it also makes plain that sometimes we accept the misery of a relationship, and we can’t imagine ourselves outside of that misery. It becomes part of our identity. The idea of leaving the misery becomes more fearful than the prospect of staying with it. You might not know who you were if you left that dynamic—you might have to make yourself all over again. Or, at least, you might have to find somebody else you could make the same mistakes with all over again.

I think my mother truly loved my father, and I think my father truly loved my mother. Once, during one of their interviews, Schiller remarked to my mother: “It sometimes sounds like you were awestruck by your husband.” She replied: “Well, I could see him as a person with many flaws and everything else. But I still, you know, even to the last day of his life, I would still feel that little click, that beat of my heart, when he’d drive his car up into the driveway. The way he would be seated behind the wheel, all smiles and confidence, or the way he’d be sitting at his desk. That would really win you over.”

“How would he sit at his desk?” asked Schiller.

“Oh, like he just would have to do everything so well, and was so unconcerned that you were even in the same room. Then he would get up and walk across the room for something and he’d reach over and pat you under the chin or something. So you would know he was aware of you, even though he’d acted like he was too busy to notice.”

I had never known my mother to talk this way about my father. I had never before heard such a tenderness in her voice. Beneath those words, I could tell that her heart was cracking as she spoke.

I remember the look on my father’s face as he sat and held my mother’s hand that night I found them in the kitchen. I remember my mother hearing the news of his death, and crying out from such an astonishing place of loss and loneliness. Yes, those two people loved each other. It is plainer now in retrospect than it ever was when they were alive. Or maybe I can just see it a little better now, having learned for myself what a bittersweet thing love can be. From my vantage, love—no matter how deep or desperate it may be—is not reason enough to stay in a bad relationship, especially when the badness of it all is damaging or malforming other people. But I didn’t get to make that choice for my parents, any more than I get to make it for you.

Of course, there were other reasons my mother stayed. For one, she was a woman in a world that did not encourage women to leave their husbands or find their own way. There were few job options, few support systems available for an untrained woman with several children. She was trapped, whether she knew it or not, in a way that many women before and since have been trapped.

But perhaps the single greatest reason my mother stayed was for the children. Certainly, this is one of the foremost arguments that some people will raise against divorce: the disorienting impact that the separation might have on the children, and how hard it will be for them to find healthy nurturance and a moral paradigm in a single-parent structure. As I think about myself and my brothers, I have to wonder if a divorce would have produced worse results than what the marriage produced: four deeply troubled boys, two of whom helped bring on their own terrible deaths. I hear people argue against separation, and I’m afraid that what is really being said is: Stay together for the sake of the family. Do anything for