Wednesday, January 29th

DISMAL RAIN, all the snow melted off. I look out over a brown field to a toneless gray sea, but I have a bunch of spring flowers on my desk—three red and yellow tulips, two each of flat-cupped daffodils (one has brilliant orange cups and yellow petals, one large flat white petals and an orange cup), plus a small spray of mimosa. Why is it that mimosa shrivels in the air? It arrived yesterday all fluffy and alive and has now withered already, all its panache gone.

As I think over those three letters I wrote about yesterday I realize freshly how brave people have to be every day to maintain themselves against all that is asked, against what they have to accept that they can’t do (because it goes against the grain too harshly) as well as the courage to do what they can and must do without falling to pieces from exhaustion. The greatest problem of my young married friend is really fatigue … this seems the insuperable fact about bringing up small children. There is no rest. If there is hostility toward a husband who is not at home enough to take his share of simply being human, then it all becomes doubly hard to handle, and the “bone loneliness” eats its way into the psyche.

The price of being oneself is so high and involves so much ruthlessness toward others (or what looks like ruthlessness in our duty-bound culture) that very few people can afford it. Most people swallow the unacceptable because it makes life so much easier. At what point does one feel that doing battle, however painful and rending, is necessary? This is the excruciating question. If a woman loves her husband and knows how tired he too is when he comes home from the wrangles and tensions of work, when can she allow herself to demand attention, to put her case squarely before him? There is no good time. For years my mother buried her anger—and sometimes I think she was right to do so, because in his sixties my father was never going to change. Letting the anger out would have made no difference, only upset him, not led to a sudden vision of what he had failed to do and to be for her. So she beat herself inside—and he never grew up.

That is the tragedy. If things are never fought out, it means that somewhere deep down the marriage does not make for growth. Stability has been achieved at a very high price, too high a price, some would feel. I admire my former students who are now married because they have the guts to fight, painful as it is.