The Open Marriage

5

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The Open Marriage, by authors Nena and George O’Neill, was a best-seller in the 1970’s. The book intended to “strip marriage of its antiquated ideals and romantic tinsel” and believed that through non-monogamous exploration, partners could grow and develop personally and ultimately save a stressed marriage. When I am 3 1/2 years old, a therapist introduces this book to mom and dad — an antidote or last ditch effort I’m not sure — to help them navigate their murky infidelities. After a thorough read, they decide it is their best chance to save the family. The open marriage lasts for five years. I am young, but not so young to conclude that something different is happening in my home than my best friend Jenny’s churchgoing household.

mom, dad, Eric and me backpacking at Pictured Rock State Park

I remember mom and dad as happy until they explode. Loving until they’re not. They are respectful and affectionate with each other in public. When they meet at the end of the day, all 6’6” of dad’s charismatic presence stands and greets mom with a kiss. At the dinner table, their conversation is intelligent and engaged until mom dumps her salad bowl on dad’s head and dad throws his water at her face. They both work long hours but also find time to relax, travel, attend workshops at Esalen—a retreat center in Big Sur, California that offers personal growth workshops and live-work residencies—study with wellness-movement pioneers including Brugh Joy and Rachel Naomi Remen and pore through a growing library of mind-body medicine and transpersonal psychology books. Family vacations are frequent and so are the verbal boxing matches that happen when we spend too much time together. Long car rides are torture. Sparks, like a swarm of fireflies, whiz from mom and dad’s heads and land on my brother Eric and me. The invisible line I draw between us does nothing, protects nothing, so I defend myself by becoming nothing — an undetectable survival strategy interpreted at Sweet, Pleasing Kimmy. 

Back at home, loud and angry voices amplify off the wood floors and walls of our home. I rarely remember mom or dad crying; instead, they boom. I hide in my bedroom, shrinking myself down into tiny, imperceptible breaths. Their voices are big, so mine diminishes. They take up space so I get small. This shrink-wrapped version of myself is good at dampening the cavernous fear in my gut. I strain to hear one of them say “divorce” or “it’s over” preparing myself for the worst, but the storms inevitably pass and they seem happy again.

mom and dad in the British Virgin Islands

Mom and dad attend relationship workshops around the world more frequently than most parents visit the car wash. And when they return from these trips, psyches scrubbed clean, there is more kissing in the kitchen and Wednesday afternoons behind a locked bedroom door—sometimes even new wedding bands. Mom’s jewelry box smells like salty metal and amber ;  I like opening it up, filling my nose with familiarity and then dragging my fingers, clink clink clink, through the shiny, musical shapes. My favorite ring is a simple gold band that has “Y APE OU” engraved on the inside. I have no idea what it means but I like saying it over and over in my head. Sometimes the vowels are long and soothing. Sometimes they sound like a war cry.

This is mom and dad’s first wedding ring, made in their early twenties. I don’t want to ask Jenny if her parents have multiple bands. I’m embarrassed by my family. We don’t follow the rules that other families in Wisconsin follow. But I like my parent’s multiple ring tradition. Especially because each time they get a new one, they are happy again.

One night, while mom tucks me in, I ask her what “Y APE OU” means. She says it was their way of saying “I LOVE YOU” but “LOVE” combines Agape, Philos and Eros— divine love, friendship and romance. “When we fell in love, we wanted it to be more than a romantic fairytale and bigger than what the church expected from a good Christian couple.” She laughs when she tells me this and adds, “Be careful what you ask for.”

In their last year of the open marriage, dad quits his heart surgery practice and moves to Esalen. I hear other kids in school talk about divorce and wonder if this is where my family is headed. Dad exits my world smelling of antiseptic hospital soap. Six months later, he returns in an aura of ylang ylang soap and tobacco. Mom drives to Appleton’s small municipal airport to pick him up, but pulling into arrivals she is looking for the wrong man. Dad swaggers into her passenger seat wearing a black leather jacket, his hair pulled back into a long pony-tail and a cigarette hangs casually out of his mouth. She passes a Motel 6 and wonders if it would be a better drop-off point for this strange man than bringing him home to begin a new chapter of marriage. Perseverance prevails.

Dad returns to Appleton Medical Center (AMC) but after his long hiatus, he’s forbidden to practice surgery. He interns on a 32K salary, following his former partners around the hospital like a drop-out medical student. I wonder how this was for him but it may have been more thrilling than embarrassing. He longed to break the rules. While at Esalen, he studied meditation, breath-work and mind-body medicine and brings home some of his new tricks. Research is beginning to make correlations between cardiac health and stress management and dad is on the forefront of introducing this movement to AMC. But to a conservative, mid-western hospital, his “radical” ideas are threatening and he returns home from work feeling increasingly defeated. Sometimes I play with his biofeedback machine, strapping my index finger into a device that measures peripheral blood circulation. I breathe deeply, imagining myself submerged in warm water and try to turn the light from blue to red but either the device or my internal mood ring is defective. It’s always blue.

During the open marriage, mom and dad were encouraged to communicate frequently about their sexual encounters—nurturing intimacy by sharing their intimacies. With her insatiable curiosity and almost Vulcan-like ability to transform negative emotion, mom leads most of these inquiries. She learns about a string of dad’s one-night-stands with nurses at the hospital, flirtations with friends and strangers. He, on the other hand, doesn’t want to know any details about mom’s engagements.

Not until years after the open marriage ends does dad learn that mom had only one relationship in those five, long years—a man she grew to love. But instead of abandoning ship, mom and dad hoist their sails and go back to sea. They have new wedding bands made. Will these be the last? They also start teaching relationship workshops, unearthing meaning and purpose from their painful story. Dad draws from his western medical knowledge and growing interests in natural medicine, mom brings her marriage and family counseling chops to the table. On Sundays they haul sharpies and large, colorful blotting boards into the meditation room (a mid-80’s facelift to my dad’s office, complete with an altar, crystals and Angel Cards) and condense years of pain, angst, curiosity and courage into hope.

But when I ask mom if she’d ever recommend an open marriage to struggling couples, she replies with a resolute, “No way.”

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Note to readers: If you’re new to the Unfixed memoir, I recommend starting with the preface and previous chapters for context and the full story. Begin HERE.