Feeding the Passion

Last night my husband came over with the dogs, a routine that is becoming more and more common. We hung out and watched TV. I made dinner. Duck with orange glaze and homemade cranberry passion fruit sauce, roasted purple potatoes, saffron rice and black beans. Yum.

One of the things I particularly hate about living by myself is cooking for one. I love to cook. I love food. In my family food is an important sign of love, and I always envisioned I'd have a big family with rowdy Sunday dinners, and a house full of friends and neighbors who would feel welcome in my kitchen and my home – to visit or to stay.

Even though many a conversation in my family was centered around planning the next meal, I never quite had that house full of guests I dreamed about growing up. My life was always a little chaotic on account of my parents divorce and my mom's downward decent into a sort of self-centered narcissistic despair. As a result we didn't really have the sort of home one entertains in.

To be frank, our house was a mess. And I don't mean a little cluttered. I mean filthy. The shower tiles were ancient, a number were missing, and the rest were covered with mildew. The glass on the shower door had been broken – probably in a fight between me and one of my brothers, and was held together with masking tape. There were holes in the doors from fists or other objects being punched through them. The 1970's blue speckled linoleum and baby blue walls were stained and dirty, and almost never washed. The walls were covered with hand-prints and paw-prints, remnants of spills, and childhood artistic exploration with felt pens. The carpets were threadbare – likewise the couches and drapes, which had been purchased before I was born, were tattered showing their stuffing. The furniture had rings.

The refrigerator was always stuffed with a mixture of fresh and rotting food, and the kitchen floor was rarely if ever mopped- perhaps because it was covered with bags and boxes. Every cupboard and closet and countertop was overflowing. Our house was literally filled floor to ceiling with stuff – most of it we didn't need, and if we did we couldn't find it. My mom would go grocery shopping and have nowhere to put the food, so she would leave it (the non-perishables) in the paper bags on the kitchen floor, or in the garage. We had mice.

The biggest problem was that my mom refused to throw anything away. You know that story by Shell Silverstein, the one about Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout? She would not take the garbage out? It was one of my favorites, and I can still see the towering piles of garbage overflowing from her house in the illustrations of that book. That was pretty much my life.

My mother hoards. Pathologically. She saved my baby clothes, my dolls, and all our old toys. She saved piles of children's books we had long since out grown. After all she said, one day, we might want them, perhaps for our own children. The closets were overflowing with threadbare towels and sheets. She would buy new ones, but keep the old ones too. She saved every photograph, and school art project, all the broken and mismatched dishes. She saved old shoes, mismatched socks and mittens, broken alarm clocks and Tupperware without lids. She saved popsicle sticks and baby food jars for future art projects we never did. It didn't matter what it was, it could somehow, someday, be repurposed and therefore was not going to be thrown away. She saved and saved until every space in our hose was filled with crap.

All this saving and mess had a profound effect on me when I was growing up. I rarely brought friends home. I was embarrassed to have my boyfriends pick me up at my house, and usually met them on the front porch.

To make matters worse, my mother was constantly blaming my brothers and I for the mess. She would say how tired she was from work and how if we would just help her out – take out the garbage, empty the dishwasher, vacuum the carpets once in a while, the place wouldn't be such a mess. And we bought it – all of us – hook, line and sinker. We believed that none of it was her fault, and that if we just tried harder, kept our rooms cleaner, helped out more, we might one day live like normal people.

I tried to clean up after myself, but the task was too overwhelming. On the occasions when I did a major cleaning, there was always an enormous fight, as a result of the things that inevitably were thrown away. I remember once I spent an entire day cleaning and scrubbing the kitchen. I wiped out all the cupboards and re-organized them, got all the clutter off the counters. Scrubbed the sink and stove until it shined, and cleaned out the refrigerator. For the first time the kitchen didn't make me lose my appetite.

But the first thing she did when she saw it was go through all the drawers and look for things I threw away. Then she went through the trash and retrieved it all. Then she took everything out of the cupboards I had so carefully organized and made it a big jumbled mess again. She couldn't find anything she told me, and who did I think I was afterall, reorganizing HER kitchen? It was perfectly fine the way it was, and I was one arrogant child if I thought I knew better. That was the last time I ever cleaned the kitchen. In fact I wouldn't even empty the dishwasher after that. I pretty much just gave up and accepted that this mess was my life.

She didn't seem to think the way we lived was abnormal. She still invited out friends in. She suggested we have parties. It was a constant source of shame and humiliation, and she simply didn't get it. As an example of how deluded she was, my senior year in high school, the minister of my church youth group thought it would be funny joke to take a video camera into the bedrooms of different kids when they weren't home and see how neat and tidy they were. Though I was generally fairly organized, my mom let him into my room on a day when it was a disaster. I learned of this little prank when he played his video at baccalaureate in front of the entire class and their families – and used me as the butt of the joke. In contrast to the straight-laced boy with a perfect family whose socks were neatly folded at the foot of his bed, were the piles of clothes on the floor of my closet, the unmade bed, and the desk overflowing with papers. I was, needless to say, mortified, and I have never forgiven this minister, or my mother.

I suppose that makes her sound rather evil. My dad used to tell me that she was sick, and at the time, as a teenager I would get incredibly angry at him for saying that. But he was right. She used clutter (and still does) as a way to remain a victim and avoid having to confront the difficult parts of a normal life. By surrounding herself and us with chaos, she had an excuse not to date again, not to make new friends, not to face the pain of the divorce. The clutter and mess were a distraction that she found comforting – but it also kept her so preoccupied with her own self-pity that she rarely had time to consider how her four children were faring.

Don't get me wrong, she did her best to make sure we were fed and clothed, but beyond that, I don't think she spent much time worrying about my emotional development – and frankly she missed a lot. She missed my having what I now can only describe as a complete nervous breakdown at the age of 10 and beat my 6 year old brother and my dog with my fists in a screaming hysterical fit of rage. She missed it when after a spat over a boy, a girl in my eighth grade class single-handedly managed to turn all my friends against me. No one spoke to me for weeks, and I remember really and truly wishing I could die, and figuring that no one would even notice. She missed it when later that year I become so distraught that I couldn't to my schoolwork and I dropped out of the honors class because I couldn't finish a report on how Alaska and Hawaii became a state. She missed a lot.

Eventually I stopped looking for someone to notice my teenage anguish. I pulled myself together and learned how to take care of myself – since it was apparent that there was no one who would come to my rescue. But admittedly, one of the things I always hoped for was the adult life I never had as a child: A loving family, a warm and cozy home where people would always be welcome, food would always be offered. A place that is clean, comfortable and inviting. I don't have the big house anymore with the guest room, or the happy family, but I still can cook a nice meal.

Still, it's pretty hard to cook anything interesting if you are the only one eating, unless of course you don't mind eating it at very meal for a week straight. And since my husband is still the best friend I have, I like to have him over and cook for him. It's something I know he appreciates, since I am acutely aware that he eats spaghetti almost every night now that I'm gone. It also seems that he is a bit lonely too. He works from home, so he can go days without human contact unless he seeks it out. Over the last several years of our marriage he really began to isolate himself – and it was one of the behaviors that lead to our undoing. He stopped calling his friends and family, and often didn't return their emails or calls. I was always making up excuses for his rudeness to other people. He still has friends, but in terms of day-to-day interactions, I am pretty much it.

So from time to time he comes over and we have dinner. On occasion I will stay at his place or he will stay at mine. Mostly this is platonic, but last night he stayed and well – it wasn't so platonic.

I wish I could say that it was good. It wasn't terrible. But something was missing. There was no passion. No moment of wanting each other so badly we couldn't help ourselves. It felt forced. And the truth is that I just sort of went along with it because I wanted to see what I might feel. I wanted to see if being with him physically could help reignite the emotional fire. Because the truth is I do love him, and if I thought I could make this work, I would. I want him to be happy. I enjoy hanging out with him – and lately he has been more fun. At least I can see he is trying, and that's a start. But what do you do when you love someone, and you are no longer attracted to them? Does attraction come back?

I mean, the whole time he was on top of me I was thinking about Berlin, or William, or anybody else I have been with who absolutely made me lose my head. I was thinking about how I felt something with them that is completely absent from what I feel for my husband now. But I still feel such tenderness toward him, and I at least want to feel passion for him. I want to have all that again – but I don't know if it's possible. And it worries me, if I ever choose to go back to him, will I be giving up passion and good sex forever? Can I do that?

And how is it that sex can be so good with someone you don't love, or who doesn't love you, and so mundane with someone you care about deeply? What the hell is wrong with this picture?

Tonight he made me dinner. He went to some trouble to make eggplant parmesan, which was surprisingly delicious. This is something he hasn't done in a long time, and I know required some planning on his part. I was touched. Really. But when he asked me to stay, I decided to go home. I don't think I'm ready for this yet. I still need the passion.