Keeping Score in the Pandemic (and beyond)

I was waiting for time to "revise" this, but time is gone. So, here it is! This blog is for us anyway.

Keeping score is a great way to kill any relationship. This was a cornerstone of the parenting classes we took before Zoey was born, and all those glossy books I read about pregnancy and parenthood. They advised me not to tally the number of times I had changed diapers versus the number of times he had, or things like that. Their reasoning must have been that constant competitiveness in time as chaotic as early parenthood leads to nothing but stress and resentment, and I understood that then as now. But looking back, I can’t recall how they accounted for the unfairness of the actual distribution of labor. Keeping score breeds contempt, but in a marriage wherein one person tends to give more than the other, not keeping score can be equally as dangerous.

I never thought about any of this stuff before I became a parent. We never kept score, I don’t think, until we had a child. He did his thing and I did mine, and we didn’t make demands on each other and we cooperated and supported one another in complimentary ways. Making our marriage work was a common goal, but we both did our best supporting that goal in different but equal ways.  

Because my mind is primarily flooded with useless sitcom storylines rather than useful information, I’m reminded of an episode of That 70s Show, in which Eric feels his masculinity is in question because Donna keeps beating him at basketball. He talks to his mom about it, who says Your Father and I played lots of games over the years. We never kept score and we always had fun. I’m sure she meant that the didn’t keep score in the sense of resentment and rank. Eric learns as much when he enjoys a round of basketball with Donna before dinner and as she is called home he shouts who won? Her reply: I wasn’t keeping score. I hate that show, but I used to think this particular episode was very sweet.

Now, the don’t-keep-score rule emerging as a sitcom premise is only one way in which I see the faulty promise in such a sentiment. We all keep score. The process of life is not about learning not to keep score but learning to manage how you feel when someone who is not you wins the game. This is especially true in marriage and parenthood if you intend on either being a life-long pursuit. Even if your brain does not keep score, your heart does.

In life, my grandmas were very different from one another. They were for me different models of femininity and strength and intelligence and kindness, divergent tales of what it means to find love and success and happiness and to confront tragedy and feel a weakness of spirit.

My Grandma Amel is humble, and gentle, and kind, and subservient. She doesn’t want the spotlight and has never had it shone upon her. When we would sit around recounting the innumerable stories about my grandpa, a man of rural adventure who was somehow both terrifying and oddly charming, she would to no one in particular: all they’ll remember about me is that I liked the color lavender. It wasn’t a bitter sentiment. It was an acknowledgement that she had married a man who stole every room he entered. Hers was a life of service. Sometimes to him, sometimes to her children or grandchildren, sometimes to her enormous garden of flowers and food, sometimes to scrubbing laundry in her giant hand-cranked laundry machine or mowing grass with a manual lawnmower at the cabin. But she seemed to like it this way – not that she never dressed up, but she preferred tea to brandy, lemonade to margaritas, coffee over beer. This is perhaps one of the reasons why as a young girl I loved her more than anyone in the world. She was soft, and kind, and she fed me fresh raspberries in tiny glass dishes, and we took evening walks and she listened to everything I said like it was the most important thing she had ever heard.

I imagine it was similar with my grandpa, who was a walking ulcer, his stomach so full of acidic anxiety that when he was young he was told he had stomach cancer and would die before he was 30. He was always angry about something, and he never stopped talking, and he liked to put on a show. These were things she handled very well.

If you’re keeping score at home, it should be obvious by now that even if she enjoyed her life, the scales were a bit out of balance. This didn’t stop as he got older and slowly fell to pieces.

Service. Walking behind him and holding him by the belt to make sure he didn’t fall. Cleaning up his vomit. Trying with all her strength to lift him after a fall in the bathroom, collapsing in fatigue when her arms gave up, waiting by his side until morning when she called Mark to come and help. When he was dying, she ate every single meal with him and spent all but a few hours of each day with him at the nursing home, even as he forgot who she was. Service. She never left his side and she never complained and she never voiced any thought that things should or could be different.

My Grandma Gmack was bitter, and feisty, and strong-willed, and tragic. She cared a great deal about what others thought of her, and was her whole life fighting an internal battle against the fact that she grew up poor, hated the name that was given to her, and always seemed to come up short of what she wanted. She loved to throw parties and tell jokes and dance and buy fancy things, and she took delight in the art of showing off. She was sad and lonely on the inside and held many regrets that took rot near the end. But she was to me a woman of life and pursuit – travel, friends, marriage, work. And amid all this, she rolled through real tragedy: the death of her children, a sister ravaged by cancer, her own personal health battles that lasted for more than a decade before she finally died.

I suppose I think only a survivor could stand life married to my grandpa, a man I don’t like very much but of whom I have a handful of fond memories. My thought is that they had fun together. They went to parties and ate good food and played games and traveled and lived what they thought was the good life.

But thinking on them together, I almost always picture them fighting. It was good-spirited fighting or ribbing when we were kids. Like an old married couple. They were both fiercely independent, yet they were partners in business and in marriage and in parenthood. If you’re keeping score, on paper the game looked much closer than it did with my other grandparents – they both didn’t do much around the house, as all of that fell to my mom while they were working and traveling and living the good life. But if he could be mean, she could be just as mean in return. That’s why they worked. It’s not a good reason for a marriage to work, but it has taken many couples to the grave.

So. Different ladies. But one thing I’ve learned about them in their final years: in marriage, they both kept score. I know this, because in their final days, each of them tallied up their points and held their husbands accountable – whether they were alive or not, and whether the reality they remembered ever actually existed.

Grandma Gmack became obsessed with the idea of my grandpa’s infidelity about two years before she died. At first, the infidelity took place in the present time and place with another woman at the senior living community. Friendships were broken and sometimes fights between the two of them became physical because she so fiercely believed in his betrayal. As she swirled down the drain of dementia, she became further entrenched in the truth of his infidelity, even as the timeline started to blur and she sometimes drew the story in a scene of fifty years ago. All my life her anger at him had been on the playful side, or just a bit of weariness, and in the end it was just laid raw and bare. She refused visits and phone calls and cursed his name openly. It may have looked like a close game in their marriage, but in the end she must have realized that even through all the fanciness and independence she was keeping score, and she had lost the emotional battle of wills. All that was left of her was the part that truly, deeply hated him and somehow rolled that hate into a story of infidelity that may or may not have root in truth but gave her mobility to at least add one more giant strike to her tally before passing away.

Grandma Amel is yet alive – in some ways. And hers is a different kind of misery. A life of service sounds like an honorable thing. But when those you serve leave you, you find yourself an empty shell of a thing. All her life people needed grandma, grandpa more than any of us, and she had always provided. Then after he died, we tucked her away in a little retirement community and did our best to fan the flame of life slowly dimming in her heart. But it’s easy to forget someone as they fade to gray and sit glassy-eyed and vacant. Only recently has her indifference to life taken a turn, in that she is consumed with confused guilt: she laments that she did not do enough for her family and will be taken to task for it. I was a terrible mother, she says. Then she talks herself into believing he’s still here – only, selfish as she claims she is, she has left him alone and no one is taking care of him. I don’t deserve to live. I won’t sleep for weeks. Gary, what will everyone say when they find out I just left him there to die?

A lifetime of service was apparently not enough to even the score – is this because he never said thank you? It’s not impossible. Gratitude is one way to level the playing field and although I’m sure he felt it, he wasn’t one to show it. She would never say she was keeping score. But here she was, looking at the tally of her service to her family, and bemoaning how little she thought she had given.

I think of myself as almost a perfect intersection of these women: kindness, warmth, service, yes, but also strength, resilience, courage, independence, and spirit.

All of this is just to say that as a privileged white girl in the midst of a pandemic and global outcry against racism I am afforded the opportunity to think about death in this casual way. People whose lives are really at risk don’t have the luxury of waxing philosophically on how or when they might die. But being in a pandemic has laid bare my marriage for better and for worse, as he and I tinker about this tiny little world together and try to maintain sanity.

It is so much harder to not keep score when you are stuck in the same house for 3 months and the world is set on fire by racism and sickness. It is so much harder not to count every time I wipe the counter, every time I entertain Zoey, every time I make the grocery list and plan dinner, every time he asks me to do something in addition to these tallies I’ve already added up, every time I sacrifice something I want to do to make things easier for him or Zoey. I am my Grandma Amel: doing these things is part of my nature and does bring me joy. But I am also Grandma Gmack: the imbalance of the score sets fires in my head that target him, even though he doesn’t know it because the Grandma Amel in me often just carries on rather than actually talking about the issue.

I used to settle the score by embracing my Grandma Gmack-ness. When the score was out of balance, I’d travel. I’d take a week off and see my friends and rediscover the part of myself that exists away from marriage and family. I’d have a long day of conferences with students and love the exhaustion of it, just because it was mine and it came from work that I did not as a mother or wife. I could leave the house, I could drive around, I could farm out my motherhood to babysitters. I’d come back and see he had done more than I probably knew – be reminded of how he manages the bills and keeps the house working and builds games and toys that make our life unique and special. And our scores could be reset when we saw other couples, when we had fun together with people we loved and stopped thinking about the world as one occupied only by us. But there are so few ways to reset the score these days.

This will all pass, of course, as the pandemic builds into a different crisis or any number of other things happen. But what’s bothering me is this: what will I cling to when I’m in those last few years of crazy? Will I collect all the bitter remnants of times when I felt taken advantage of and light them on fire, or will I push them aside and instead go swimming in a sea of irrational shame and guilt?

I’ve played over the scenarios in my head, and I just hope that Mark is gone by then. That I’m not spitting angry fire at him over things only magnified because of the pandemic, or things he can’t be held accountable for because I haven’t addressed them. He doesn’t deserve that. I actually don’t know what his scoreboard looks like these days, or if he’d be surprised to see mine. I wonder how many times in a marriage the game can start over before both players quit. We are nowhere near that point, and most days our marriage is one of appreciation and fondness, but I’m starting to understand why some people reach it. And others – like my grandmas – grit their teeth and persevere, pretending to wipe the chalk board clean every once in a while, when really the deepest tallies are cut right into their hearts and will only emerge when the line between fact and fiction disappears.