My friend Jennifer used to say that men were monomonical, a fancy word for obsessed, driven. And she was not refering to sex. She meant they could zero in a project or job and block out everything around them. Implied, in her comment, was the idea that a woman had to keep all the balls in the air, even when they had something to accomplish that should, in theory, be given all her attention.
Monday night, on the way home from my writing group, I was thinking of this, because I knew we were out of dog food, but I also knew that by midnight, I had to submit a story for an upcoming workshop, a story that was less than halfway through its current revision. The dog, I reasoned, was already in bed for the night, and wouldn't notice his empty bowl, and so, I chose my story. I sent the story in, at 11:32 by the clock at the corner of my computer screen and headed up to bed, where my husband had been asleep already for hours.
Yes, hours. The reason I was debating the dog food question: My husband had an interview at 6:30 am the next morning, for the case he is working on. And today, he left the house at 4am for a trip to New York.
Only a couple of days before, we were in Michigan, watching salmon trying to leap over a four-foot dam. The fish didn't know where they are going; their only goal was to get as far as they could before spawning. We stood in awe of these beautiful fish, who doggedly worked their way against the current before attempting and occasionally making the leap over the concrete barrier from which a monster of water rushed at them. There were six of us, three couples, male and female, plus an older man and his dog. And I noticed everyone was saying, "He almost made it that time!" and "Look at him! He's beautiful!" and my favorite, "Come on Dude, you can do it!" When I mentioned that I thought the salmon were going to lay eggs, which meant they were female, we began to correct ourselves. And then one of the women said she thought they were capable of being both male and female, as some animals can be.
Thank goodness for the internet, where we were able to find the answer. Turns out both male and female of the species, are driven to swim upstream until they have completely exhausted themselves and can swim not farther. Then the females lay eggs. The male fish fertilize them, afterward heading off to find another female of the species.
Most of the time, we humans don't know what we are doing either. We spend way too much time analyzing why we do things, or debating, whether in our heads or with each other, whether this way or that way is right, or more likely, why the other person's way of doing things is wrong. And when I began this project, I was pretty sure that Sophia Tolstoy was not treatly fairly by her husband or the history books. But the more I write, I hear not only Sophie's voice, but the exchange of words between Leo and his wife. He wrote, she copied, he wrote again, and so it went. Anna Karenina may symbolize Russian politics or culture or human nature, but it was first, before it became a novel, an exchange of words between two people who loved each other, who began their relationship by exchanging diaries, so that they could know everything about each other. I find that as I write, I hear a tenderness in my ears, of Leo for his wife, and I did not expect this.
Humans have the capacity for love that is about more than procreation, more than maternal love or love between husband and wife. This I believe. And yet we try to limit Love, judge it, declare one kind good and another kind bad. But love is love, even flawed, broken, makes-me-want-to-beat-my-head against the wall love. Love drives us to swim upstream and fling ourselves against concrete barriers, often with no understanding of why.
Choosing to finish my story does not diminish my love for my husband, or even my dog, or my children. Perhaps this is why I empathize at times with Leo, who responded to the call to write stories, at great cost to his relationship with his wife. And Sophia answered her own callings, to her photography, her children, and to a man with whom she became friends after the death of her seven-year-old son. No one knows if they had a physical affair, but from her diaries, it is clear that she felt love for him. And I have a close friend to whom I declare my love every day at the end of our emails. It is a different kind of love than I feel for my husband, but I feel it just as strongly, and the two do not compete with each other.
The thing is, the end result is the same for both of us, human and salmon. Once we fight to get upstream, lay our eggs and protect them until they can live on their own, we die. We can choose to throw ourselves against the wall until we make it across, or we can give up and throw ourselves in front of an oncoming train. Either way, it ends the same way. Both ways are painful and disorienting. And every moment of every day we choose whether to keep going or to stop where we are.
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