I started laughing ( Gee--thanks, Mom! ) but she spoke over my laughter with urgency.

"I'm serious, Liz. There's something you have to understand about me: I've been raising children my entire life. I grew up in a big family, and I always had to take care of Rod and Terry and Luana when they were little. How many times did I get up in the middle of the night when I was ten years old to clean up somebody who had wet the bed? That was my whole childhood. I never had time for myself. Then, when I was a teenager, I took care of my older brother's kids, always trying to figure out how to do my homework while I was babysitting. Then I had my own family to raise, and I had to give so much of myself over to that. When you and your sister finally left for college, that was the first

moment in my life I hadn't been responsible for any children. I loved it. I can't tell you how much I love it. Having your father to myself, having my own time to myself--it's been revolutionary for me. I've never been happier."

Okay, then, I thought, with a surge of relief. So she has made her peace with it all. Good.

There was another moment of silence.

Then my mother suddenly added, in a tone I'd never heard from her before, "But I do have to tell you something else. There are times when I refuse to even let myself think about the early years of my marriage and all that I had to give up. If I dwell on that too much, honest to God, I become so enraged, I can't even see straight."

Oh.

Therefore, the tidy ultimate conclusion is . . . ???

It was slowly becoming clear to me that perhaps there was never going to be any tidy ultimate conclusion here. My mother herself had probably given up long ago trying to draw tidy ultimate conclusions about her own existence, having abandoned (as so many of us must do, after a certain age) the luxuriously innocent fantasy that one is entitled to have unmixed feelings about one's own life. And if I needed to have unmixed feelings about my mother's life in order to calm down my own anxieties about matrimony, then I'm afraid I was barking up the wrong tree. All I could tell for certain was that my mom had somehow found a way to build a quiet enough resting place for herself within intimacy's rocky field of contradictions. There, in a satisfactory -enough amount of peace, she dwells.

Leaving me alone, of course, to figure out how I might someday construct such a careful habitat of my own.

CHAPTER SIX

Marriage and Autonomy

MARRIAGE IS A BEAUTIFUL THING. BUT IT'S ALSO A

CONSTANT BATTLE FOR MORAL SUPREMACU.

--Marge Simpson

By October 2006, Felipe and I had already been traveling for six months and morale was flagging. We had left the Laotian holy city of Luang Prabang weeks earlier, having exhausted all its treasures, and had taken to the road again in the same random motion as before, killing time, passing hours and days.

We had hoped to be home by now, but there was still no movement whatsoever on our immigration case. Felipe's future was stalled in a bottomless sort of limbo that we had somewhat irrationally come to believe might never end. Separated from his business inventory in America, unable to make any plans or earn any money, utterly dependent on the United States Department of Homeland Security (and me) to decide his fate, he was feeling more powerless by the day. This was not an ideal situation. For if there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities. Felipe was no exception. He was becoming increasingly jittery, quick-tempered, irritable, and ominously tense.

Even under the best of circumstances, Felipe has the bad habit of sometimes snapping impatiently at people he feels are either behaving poorly or interfering somehow with the quality of his life. This happens rarely, but I wish it would happen never. All over the world and in many languages I have watched this man bark his disapproval at bungling flight attendants, inept taxi drivers, unscrupulous merchants, apathetic waiters, and the parents of ill-behaved children. Arm waving and raised voices are sometimes involved in such scenes.