Good Faith, Good Wife

“We can simplify life from this moment forth. There is only one path to walk, one decision to make in every instance, and all our burdens will be lifted, all our anxieties released. We can decide to act in good faith. We can be silent for a moment with ourselves and let our inner guide direct our behavior, our words, our thoughts.” 

    I am exactly one day older than Hilary Duff, whose new album came out today. It’s a little easier to be successful when your parents start your career before you even hit puberty. She has also been married twice. We are both remarried divorcees. Celebrities—they’re just like us! I suppose we can’t be successful at everything, even with a team of publicists and a stylist whose job is to make everything you do look intentional.

    Yesterday at work, during a phone call, I apologized for how long a task was taking. It wasn’t my delay. It was approvals. Endless, ceremonial approvals. I’ve worked for over a decade in universities—a Kafkaesque hellscape—and I have never seen more bureaucratic red tape, slower queues, or more ornamental back-and-forth than here.

    The accented woman’s voice on the line said, calmly, “I’m not surprised. You’ll have to manage your expectations. It’s very slow here. It won’t be like any other place you’ve worked before.”

    She said it the way my doctor suggests watching what I eat. Ma’am, I assure you, I see everything I eat. I have working eyes.

    Manage my expectations. I’ve heard that before—usually right before something deeply disappointing happens. I’m not sure how to manage my expectations any more than I already do. I expect nothing. I expect never to get what I want. I expect just barely enough to survive. I expect the future to be no better than today, but with more emails.

    I hold on to facts like there are women out there being beaten to death and at least that’s not me. Small facts. Administrative facts. Proof of life in the absence of hope. I cling to them like a string tied to a helium balloon.  I cling to them with the belief that if I grip tightly enough, double knot, they won’t slip away. I am white-knuckled.

    But maybe they’re right. Maybe I expect too much out of life. Maybe my expectations are wildly unrealistic—like hoping a committee will reach a decision before my uterus shrivels up and I am too old to achieve an orgasm.

    Apparently, I thrive in this environment. I spent years constructing routines, structure, guidelines, boundaries. I don’t regret it. I needed the bumpers. Without them, I bowled gutter ball after gutter ball. Chaos makes me dizzy and sick. When my grip loosens even a little, I spiral.

    But now my comfort zone has tightened into a straitjacket. There is no room to move forward, backward, left, or right. Fill out a form about it. Don’t worry—you’ll receive an automated email once it finishes review:

“Someday, you could be loved in a way you’ve never been loved before. But it’s a process. Please manage your expectations and have good faith it might happen before you die."

    You can’t remove it all in one night, tempting as that may be. There is no dramatic escape montage. No backpack, no train hopping, no jaunty folk song. Change happens centimeter by centimeter, hour by hour. The next right thing is baby steps—each one documented and filed.

    Running away with a little hobo sack tied to the end of a pole is a child’s dream. A cartoon solution. There’s no running away from yourself. Anywhere I’d go, I’d already be there—building another prison I’d learn to hate in a few years, complete with color-coded calendars, strong opinions about fonts, and aggressively important Post-it notes.

    Ultimately, it’s not my expectations that betray me, but the patterns I’ve repeated my whole life: the hope that some singular, external thing might arrive and fix everything at once. When really, it’s a slow, internal, multi-step process. Like waiting on twenty approvers so one small task can move forward. I apologize for the delay. Please bear with me another moment.

    Even Hilary Duff sings sad fucking songs and gets divorced.

    There’s no easy way out. No escaping humanity. Just micro-adjustments. Acting in good faith toward something better—whatever better turns out to be. Probably managed expectations. Possibly even less. Ideally, silence.

Be buried with an epitaph like, Beloved Wife.

Though Hilary Duff and I both know that would only apply to the second marriage.