Free Recipes for a Perfect Marriage by Kate Kerrigan Page B

Afraid I would lose the bit of power I had, if I didn’t keep him at arms’ length. Those few days in Dublin, though, I felt as if we had everything we could possibly want in life. And we did. Except for the one thing each of us wanted more than life itself.
    For me, it was Michael.
    For James, it was a child.
    James knew I did not want children early on in our marriage, and being an educated, sensitive man, he went along with my wishes and took steps to avoid impregnating me. There are ways that are not against nature or God, but they only work in tandem with luck. And we were lucky.
    I had witnessed the birth of my cousin Mae’s first son, and any idea I may have had about having a baby had been thrown out with the bucket of blood that she shed. When the midwife saw how shocked I was, she said, “It’s the most natural thing in the world.” So is death, I thought—and we spend a lifetime avoiding that.
    I was not maternal by nature. Babies and children left me cold. Some women who don’t love their husbands have children so they can have somebody to love. I needed to love the man I was going to have children with, if I was going to sacrifice my body, my dignity in that way. I was prepared to shrug off the snide comments as the years passed without our conceiving. The sideways looks in Mass when another infant was christened, their screams reverberating around the chapel eaves, drowning out the priest’s murmuring. Neighbors and James’s sisters looked at me with disappointment, disbelief, and latterly, pity. I didn’t care. I thought they were all fools. Babies, as far as I could see, were selfish, squawking, sucking parasites.
    No. I was not one of nature’s natural mothers.
    After six years, without saying anything, James stopped withdrawing from me during lovemaking. He was well over forty and I was edging ever closer towards thirty.
    People would make assumptions if you remained childless, and one of the assumptions they made was that your husband was not a “real” man. James was educated, kept himself neat, and had married late. He was an easy target, and I felt for him because I knew people would be talking. Extra pressure came every year as his brothers’ wives and his one married sister were having at least one baby a year between them. I could see James was hurt that we were seen to be not “producing,” and I assumed his pride was taking a bashing.
    I said nothing when he changed our routine. I just took myself from the bed immediately after we had made love, washed myself thoroughly, and prayed.
    The tension we had experienced in the first year came back into our marriage as if it had never been away. James had grown more sure of me, but I was still no pushover, and we waged the second of our long-standing silent wars. I became physically elusive, which was my only weapon. James in turn started to behave out of character, which I found unsettling. When I scolded him (as I did almost every day) over some household trivia, I could see his chin set in anger, and once or twice I feared he might rise up at me. He became irritable, criticizing the priest and complaining about his job on an almost daily basis. One Sunday, I caught sight of him as he looked up from his book to check the weather through the kitchen window. Pure sadness washed across his face, an expression of devastated loss like there had been after Ellie died. James had a long nose and slim delicate features that gave him an erudite, refined expression. When that confident, sophisticated face became sullied with anguish, the extremity of it tore at me terribly.
    I wanted to reach over as I had done the night we buried Ellie. Except that this time I knew exactly what words would make his sorrow disappear and I couldn’t speak them because I knew I was not prepared to follow them through. If I were a different, weaker kind of woman, I might have lied his pain away.
    I did not love James but I was not coldhearted and I could see that he