Between us:
Challenging voices that attempt to derail relationships

By Heather and Joel Glenn Wixson

The Context
Heather and Joel Glenn Wixson live together in California where Joel is completing an internship in clinical psychology. They moved to California in August of 1998 with their two cats and their three week old daughter.
    Heather is an accomplished theater artist who has worked extensively on the stage, on camera, and on radio. She has also created numerous programs directed at teenagers using the theater as a vehicle to open up conversations about issues faced in the inner city. Since leaving the east coast, Heather has devoted most of her time to raising the Glenn Wixson's daughter, but has managed to work part-time as an actor and teacher. Heather decided to take this year off to focus on raising her daughter and to be with Joel in California. Her sacrifice was part of the couple's plan to meet the requirements for Joel's doctorate. They both wanted to devote a lot of time to their child.
    Joel is a Narrative therapist. Prior to his internship in California he was working in Quincy, Massachusetts with people who are often described as homeless. His interest in Narrative grows from his experiences working with members of non-dominant groups. His internship is at the California Polytechnic State University, in San Luis Obispo where he spends nine hours a day a during the work week. The rest of his time he spends with his family.
    What follows is based on a conversation between Heather and Joel in which they discuss their relationship, their choices, and the critical voices they faced along the way. Although not presented here, the entire conversation was interspersed with the squeaks, squeals, and laughter made by the Glenn Wixson's daughter. (We would have liked to include that stuff, but some of the sounds she makes can't be transcribed.)

The Conversation
    Joel - So Why don't we talk about some of the critical voices that we've experienced in the course of our relationship. That would include our courting, and the process we went through of coming together, and the marriage, and that stuff. Even about being parents, and thinking about whether we wanted to be parents.
    Heather - Can you say what you mean by critical voices?
    Joel - Like for instance "the right relationship," and what it means to have the right relationship, and whether or not ours was the right one. The critical voices that specify what the "right relationship" is.
    Heather - Why don't you start talking about yourself in terms of our meeting and your experience of the critical voices, then I can jump in.
    J- OK. I can remember, back when we first started seeing each other, encountering these ideas about whether you were the "right one" and whether this was the "right relationship." Whether it was "good enough," or if we were "soul mates."
    Heather - Well for me I can remember something quite powerful. It was whether I was the "right one," not if it was the "right relationship." I saw you, and I wanted you, and my critical voice was very much about myself wondering, "Am I the right one for him?" and "Am I going to do anything that will make him not want me?"
    Joel - Wow.
    Heather - I've had experiences in the past where I evaluated myself against the guy. If I picked the guy and was into the relationship, I was thinking, "Am I the right one?" and "does he think I'm the right one for him?"
    Joel - It sounds like the whole evaluative thing. I don't know if that's a gender thing but it's wild that I was thinking more about whether it was the right relationship in general. I remember having this experience of you, that you weren't like anybody I had ever dated before. Because you weren't like anybody I'd ever dated, the relationship was confusing for me. I didn't know how to make sense of it. I didn't get what it was, and I certainly didn't think about whether I was the right one for you or not. That's wild.
    Heather - I don't think it was particularly healthy, but that voice was there. I think it was a major thing in the process of our courting because before we got to the point where we were ready to marry each other I overcame it, and I stopped worrying about being "the right one."
    Joel - Oh yea, I remember that. That was very clear.
    Heather - That was a huge turning point.
    Joel - It sounds like a victory. Does it seem like a victory for you?
    Heather - Yeah.
    Joel - How did you overcome that voice?
    Heather - I'm not sure. Probably the same way I've been able to overcome other critical voices. It gets to be tiring. It gets redundant and monotonous. It's like, "enough already!"
    Joel - Wow.
    Heather - In my life it's been a process of becoming more and more the person that I really want to be. So that person overcomes the critical voices, to use your term.
    Joel - And has victories, to use my term?
    Heather - Yea.
    Joel - Part of what we wrote in our vows was that we wanted to support each other and that we didn't want to be enveloped by each other. I've been really proud of our relationship because it has been that way. It's about two people supporting each other, who are autonomous and not intertwined. Our lives are intertwined but we aren't somehow.
    Heather - Here's one. I consider this a critical voice but I don't know if other people do. There is this thing in this culture that the other person makes you whole and complete. Something that you and I realized was that completing the other wasn't what we wanted. We grew to understand ourselves as complete individuals who were coming together. We wanted to be two complete individuals together.
    Joel - I get all kinds of stuff from you and your experience and the kinds of stuff you do in your life. That's a huge part of the relationship that you bring to it. But it's not stuff you bring to complete me. It's stuff that's about you and that enriches me.
    But that's not necessarily how it is "supposed" to be. There was lots of critical stuff about what the relationship was supposed to be. For example, what it meant for us to be together and what it would mean in terms of what we could and couldn't do. And what we would have to give up, and sacrifice to be together. "Right relationships" told me that we would have to give up our independence and our careers. We would have to give up our goals for what we wanted to do with our lives. We would have to sacrifice those things for the other person.
    I can't say that some person specifically said that stuff to me, but I certainly experienced that as a voice in our lives when we were getting together. It really effected me when we were thinking about what we wanted to do, and our dreams, and our visions of how we wanted our lives to be. Like your experience of some of the stuff that went on with my family. There was a push for you to do certain things and act in certain ways as my wife.
    Hanging out with the women, and what the men could do, and what the women were supposed to do, and certain tasks that you felt you were pushed into doing, for example. They were connected to the idea of a "good, supportive" wife that is in the culture. The influence of those ideas can be strong in my family.
    Heather - And it's not just your family. It's still happening. It's very much a part of my life. The whole thing about giving up career stuff. That's been very challenging for me this year. I have sacrificed, and I have given stuff up, and I stopped the flow of my career to be out here with you. It's very challenging in terms of figuring out how I frame this year in my life. Being the type of person I am, an independent/career/family loving person, and resolving that with the fact that I stopped working. Because I stopped working that might seem to invalidate the "career" part of who I am.
    Joel - Wow. And I'm also thinking about things that came up when you were working and we were living back east. You talked about a desire to be connected to the home and doing things that are usually connected to being "domestic." Those things were associated with a way of being a women that you didn't like, even though you liked doing things like making a home for us. Doing those things might also seem like it's different from the idea that you're "out there doing the career," at least in the way people think of what a career women does. I imagine there were a lot of critical voices saying what you could do and couldn't do. I wonder if those voices colored what it meant to want to work on the apartment, and to want to cook sometimes, and to want to take care of home stuff. I imagine it might have seemed important to reject those things you wanted to do because it was being connected to a kind of life that you really didn't want, sort of the standard "women's work" role. But you liked it, too, even as an independent career artist. It sounds like doing those things could appear to support those roles that we're supposed to adopt as married people.
    Heather - Yea. The thing that interests me in my life is not playing into stereotypes because I'm supposed to, but there are elements of a stereotype that interest me and that I enjoy.
    Joel - And so not playing into a stereotype because we're not supposed to can turn into us not doing things we want to do. For me there are things I like to do that usually are attached to typical "male" roles. For example, I like the work I do. Because of what it is, it's more regular than yours. That identifies me as the bread winner, not because I make more money that you, or because I'm the "head of the household," but because I go somewhere every morning. So our relationship could be described as stereotypical even though that doesn't describe our relationship the way we see it. That really bothers me, and I have struggled against those types of definitions of us.
    Heather - Yea. I know that I can't just do my career. I'm not just my career. I'm not just a mother, I'm not just a supporter of your career, and I'm not just a home maker. I'm all kinds of things and I have all kinds of interests. I think women, at least in my life, experience all kinds of critical voices that stop us from finding a balance of those things.
    Joel - I'm wondering what some of those might be.
    Heather -For example, we've had this baby and I'm about to go back to work. She's going to be one year old and I'm going to start working again. There's a push in the culture for me to stay home. There's also a push in the culture to go back to work. There's critical voices all over the place. They say, "you should be working- you shouldn't be working." I have to find it myself. I have to figure out what fits for me, how I will define me.
    Joel - I'm thinking about that in terms of the baby, too. I am struck by the idea that there are certain things that we are supposed to be doing to be a "good mom" and a "good dad." There are also these other things that you're supposed to be doing to be "good role models," but they're not the same. They're not connected. In some ways one makes it more difficult to do the other. It's like this idea of what the "super mom" is. She can do everything, she can have her own life and be totally immersed in her children. She can have a career and be fully engulfed in her family. I'm just thinking about how, as difficult as this year has been for you, we have been able to balance all of the things we want to do with our relationship. Like doing what we each want to do without being so separate that we don't have a relationship, even though this year has been a lot about me being at CalPoly.
    I wonder, though, if it's also an example of how we have been able to be together and distinct. This year we came up with this plan to get me through this internship thing. The internship will put me in a position to go on and make a fair amount of money and do what I want to do. You, because of our connection, were willing to come along with me, and focus on the baby.
    You know, something just hit me. It's like your coming out here is one of those things that could be recast as your doing a stereotypic mom/wife thing. But it's not. You coming out here was a part of our plan that was rooted in our vision for our relationship. Doing this was a time when one of us needed the other to make a major change for a bit to fulfill the goals of the other. In order to not make that seem totally domestic we have to act like it was something else, but it was. So it was "the wife sacrificing for the husband," but that statement doesn't include the history of our relationship. I would do the same, and I may do the same in the future. That isn't necessarily part of how it would be viewed.
    We could have made the decision not to do this, simply because it seems like one of those stereotypic domestic things, but we didn't fall into that trap. We did it because it made sense for us and our relationship. It's part of creating our relationship and our connection that really stands up against "what relationships are supposed to be" even though, on the outside it might look like that we are capitulating to those ideas.
    Heather - Yea. I think that the word balance has always been really important for me in my life. I balance my dreams with our relationship because I don't want to loose myself and I don't want to stop working. I don't expect all of my needs to be met by you. I wonder if there's a voice out there that says you're supposed to get everything from your partner, and if you don't that there's something wrong with your relationship. I just don't experience that from you.
    Joel - I don't experience that from you either, and I'm wondering how we figured that out? Like how did we get the idea that our partner wasn't supposed to "meet all our needs?"
    Heather - We may have just come to it because we both have interests that are quite distinct. Your career and my career are really different and so we're pursuing these separate things. We are meeting all kinds of people along the way
    Joel - So just by having different careers and interests it became obvious that there were things that each of us would get from other people, and at the same time, the stuff that I get from you is so intense.
    Heather - Like what?
    Joel - Like what I get from our conversations, and your ideas, and your vision of theater and how it is, at it's root, a social change force. It's just fantastic and stimulating.
    Heather - That's it. We knew right away that our careers were different, but that the foundation, the way we viewed the world, was the same. What our goals were within what we do is the same.
    Joel - Yea. Those shared goals and dreams and values were the same. One of the huge and ongoing categories of critical voices that we've been experiencing recently is about parenting and I wonder if we could talk a little bit about that.
    Heather - It's really intense. There's just all kinds of expert voices out there telling me, and us, what to do and what not to do. It's totally removed from our experience. For example it tells me that there are "ways" to get your child to sleep at night, and there are "ways" to get your child to behave, and there are things that your child "should" eat. There is so much pressure pushing people away from their own instincts. It's really powerful.
    Joel - Not only parents, but grandparents. We have had so many experience where our parents don't want to tell us things or make suggestions. Parents of our friends have even said, " I don't want to tell you what to do because we did it all wrong." How horrible it is. It's so disconnecting of them from stuff they know. I mean if they were such bad parents then where did we come from?
    Heather - I would hate to look back in thirty years and think that everything I did was wrong. So that's a battle. Even the fact that we're about to embark on a drive across the country. I read yesterday in a magazine that that wasn't "a good thing to do with an infant."
    Joel - And I am reminded of our coming out here when the baby was three weeks old. There was so much fear and trepidation expressed to us about whether that was a good idea. Yet that fear was all based on expert knowledge, not on our experience and our knowledge of how we would handle it. What it means to be "moving back" is another thing. The critical voices have a field day with that one. All kinds of stuff about "failure" and "retreat" comes up for me. There is so much that can get attributed to being "a bad parent." Like whether she sleeps or not.
    Heather - Yea, it's "all us."
    Joel - Yea. If she sleeps well, we're good parents. If she doesn't, were bad. If she cries, we're bad. If she doesn't, were good.
    It also gets tossed on her. If she cries, she's bad. If she doesn't, she's good. This whole evaluation thing having to do with making her "good" or "bad," and attributing goodness and badness based on her communicating in the only way she knows how is hard to deal with.
    And it seems like such a little thing to talk about having a "good day" and, of course that means the baby didn't cry. But I wonder what the effects of that kind of thinking are on parents. It puts us as parents in this totally evaluative mode of always trying to figure out if she's good or bad, right or wrong. It reinforces, in the culture, and in the discourse of parenting, and of being a baby, things about being a "right" baby. The bottom line is she sleeps when she sleeps. She just does, and she does. It's not about her being "right" or "good."
    Heather - Yea, but there are things I've noticed about her sleeping. I've noticed that she sleeps better now with the covers off because it's warmer so I don't put the covers on her.
    Joel - And that would get attributed to "bad parenting," to have your baby sleeping without the covers on. Even though it's totally consistent with our knowledge of what works for her, it could be recast as "bad parenting." It goes back to how these are knowledges that we've developed simply by the fact that we have her. We do stuff that's consistent with our knowledge of the person that's a part of our life, who happens to be our daughter, as opposed to going with knowledges that are "expert," and that are supposed to be "right." We've done a lot of things that are supposedly against expert knowledge, yet we have this wonderful little kid.
    Writing our own vows is another example of us going against "expert knowledge." I mean marriage vows, the traditional ones, are this contract that describes how you are bound to the other person. Not only did we say our relationship wasn't going to be that way, we wrote vows that expressed how it wasn't going to be that way. They form the foundation of our real relationship.
    Heather - It's wild when you think about it, I mean how many couples get recruited by the idea, "till death do us part." I wonder if it pushes them toward divorced. We said, "this is about supporting each other as we live out our dreams." And that's what we're doing.