I’ve looked at my wife and thought, you’re the size of my life, and somehow meant it as an insult. She’s a good woman with a small world—the town, her sister, the church, the garden. I married into that world when I was twenty-six and have blamed her for its dimensions ever since. She didn’t make my life small. I chose a small life because I was frightened of a large one, and then spent thirty years being angry at the person who came with it.
The feeling is very specific. It’s a pressure at the top of my spine that appears whenever she tells me something about the neighbors or the garden or what happened at church. It has nothing to do with those things. It’s the feeling of someone watching a life they secretly believe they should have outgrown. I’ve never told her any of this. Not one word in three decades. Instead, I’ve nodded, listened, and quietly turned my own disappointment into resentment toward her.
Her sister asked her in the summer whether she’d ever wanted to travel. I was in the hallway and heard my wife laugh. She said she’d always wanted to, but she’d assumed we’d do it when the time was right. Then she said something that stopped me: “He always wanted a bigger life. I thought I was the reason he stayed.” I stood there listening because suddenly I realized she’d spent thirty years carrying the exact guilt I’d secretly assigned to her.
That night I asked her where she would go if she could choose anywhere. She started naming places she’d never mentioned before—cities, countries, little towns she’d seen in magazines. She had a list. She’d had it for years. Then she looked at me and said she’d never asked because she thought I preferred staying home. I wanted to tell her she was wrong, but I couldn’t. She had spent thirty years waiting for me to ask her to see the world, while I had spent thirty years blaming her for keeping me from it.
