Farting in Bed and Other Deadly Sins
Few experiences help you come to terms with how rotten you are than being married or eating smoked ribs.
One of the best things about Jonathan, besides being a good friend who takes me trout fishing and gifts me fine whiskeys I pretend to like, is that he smokes ribs. And when he does, he invites me over to enjoy them—which is what we did on a recent Sunday, our third annual Fishing Friendsgiving Feastmas.
The trouble with me and ribs, however, is that they are so delicious that once I’ve swallowed the first bite, I do not take a breath until I’ve gorged myself to the point of bursting like a piñata. When a plate brimming with smoked ribs is placed in my line of sight, I transform into Joey Chestnut on the Fourth of July. And like a porta-john on Coney Island after Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, I know what awaits on the other side.
The pleasure derived from Jonathan’s ribs is identical to the joy my children feel on Christmas morning as they open their many thousands of presents. But, unlike them, my blessings cease at nightfall.
This time, my eyelids had just shut when I was jolted awake by a violent donkey kick to the shin. Afraid I had sleptwalked onto a neighboring farm, I felt around for Haley only to realize it was not an equine that had struck me but her right foot.
“Are you serious right now?” she asked as I regained consciousness. “You’re farting in bed.”
“It’s the ribs,” I said apologetically. “I’m asleep.”
Pinching her nostrils as she waved the fumes in my direction, she responded, “Go sleep in the bathroom then.”
I chuckled, thinking the woman I love most in the world was overreacting. But she was stone-cold serious. So I squeezed my buttcheeks together and asked God to plug the escape route. Mercifully, He did, saving me a night on the cold tiles.
I am not proud to admit this—though I’ve admitted plenty of embarrassing things here before. But this is the thing about marriage. No matter how much Febreze you spray in the air, the stench always overcomes it. Eventually, your spouse will know the truth of who you are, at your worst and best, because that is the nature of intimacy: it’s growing so close to someone that you can no longer hide that you pop your pimples, pick your boogers, or pass gas after dinner.
In 2015, my first wife left, and I can think of few things besides physical violence that affect a man’s psyche like being abandoned by a person who promises to love you but can’t. Abandonment is written into my family tree—both my grandfathers were left by one of their parents as boys. But I was not the least bit prepared when it came my turn to face the broken promise.
After my divorce, I sought to vanquish my former self and become someone new and better. Rather than writhing on the floor before the crowd like Oscar De la Hoya after being blasted in the liver by Bernard Hopkins, I got in the gym. I lost weight and bought nice, expensive clothes. I picked up women with humor, wit, and a cool gaze that implied both depth and mystery, doing my best to keep my inadequacies tucked inside the lining of my new sports coat. I wanted people, especially women, to see me as worthy of love and admiration.
A friend who became a mentor in that season of my life had been divorced under similar circumstances. He then married one of the kindest and toughest women I knew, so I trusted him to tell me what I should do to get on the right side of my shame. Eric’s advice was straightforward and did not include buying clothes, crafting smooth pick-up lines, or creating a Tinder profile.
“Be a better dude,” he said, handing me a copy of The Exemplary Husband. On the back cover, the publisher called it “a biblical blueprint for the mandate God has given to husbands in the covenant of marriage to love their wives, even as Christ loved the church.” Eric advised that I read it with the aspiration of doing a better job in my second marriage than in my first.
“I don’t need that,” I told him, bluntly, recounting the facts of my story in bullet points in case he’d forgotten. “She wronged me, dude.”
I relayed this conversation, days later, to the pastor counseling me through my divorce. But he also seemed to have a hearing problem. Because when I denounced my mentor as a jerk, he asked me what I knew about the Parable of the Prodigal Son. “Specifically the older brother,” he said.
“Good dude,” I responded. “Loyal, hardworking. I see myself in him.”
“But do you remember what he said to his dad in the story?” my pastor asked.
“Yes, of course,” I said. The older brother chastised his old man for welcoming back his little brother without conditions, even after he’d blown the family fortune on wine and women. Who’s to say he wouldn’t do it all over again? He was right to be pissed.
Matt nodded, satisfied with my retelling, then handed me another book, The Prodigal God by Tim Keller. He explained that the older brother was a moralistic fool, and suggested that we had a lot in common. I reacted the same way I had to Eric days earlier. “Dude, did you even listen to my story?”
In the Biblical recounting of my first marriage, I was Hosea, not Gomer. I was Uriah, the murdered husband of Bathsheba. I was not the one who screwed up. But of course, time and marriage to a woman I can’t throw under the bus for my failures has revealed the truth.
The Bible told me plainly that I was no good when I first opened it at 17. But I checked the box admitting I was a sinner in need of salvation believing God wasn’t really serious. I wasn’t Mother Teresa, but I knew He was pumped to have me on his team. I didn’t smoke weed or get bad grades. I didn’t drink and drive. I was special, and God could use me to become more famous.
This, right here, is my most despicable quality, and I could neither hide it as a new believer telling my evangelical friends not to waste their time sharing the gospel with pregnant girls in the hallways of Bayonne High School or the divorcee pretending he hadn’t contributed to screwing up his first marriage.
Naturally, my misguided sense of superiority is paired with the bad habit of pointing a finger out at the world and never back in on myself. Why am I not more successful today? I blame my parents. If they had let me attend a prestigious private college out of state and not insisted I save money and stay close, I’d be on the bestseller list! In fact, if my dad hadn’t let me quit club soccer after Mr. Kaminski benched me in the final, I would’ve become the next Batistuta. If they hadn’t put dulce de leche on my pacifier and filled the fridge with soda and Little Debbies, I wouldn’t be making my dentist’s mortgage payment next month.
But it’s not just my family I hold the pitchfork to. If it weren’t for bosses who chose to hire from outside instead of promoting me, I’d have the management experience to justify a higher salary. And I wouldn’t have to work so hard at my day job if my so-called Facebook friends subscribed to this newsletter or bought my book instead of writing “Congrats, dude!” on Facebook and continuing their scrolling.
If it weren’t for my three small and unreasonable children, and the attention they demand every second of the day, or my students, and the lack of attention they pay to anything I teach them—though they still write me on the eve of their great aunt’s death in a tragic farming accident that also claimed their laptop to request an extension or new grade—I would be majestic.
But while I can revise history for those of you who haven’t known me as long or as well as Haley does, the cracks surface under interrogation.
Passing the blame results in people you love avoiding your texts or hiding from you in the grocery store. Last week, I spoke with my stuck-up best friend Jeremy on the phone and asked if he thought I came off grumpy when complaining about one thing or another. “Dude, you’re like one of the grumpier people I know,” he said. My immediate reaction was to recoil and redirect. “No way, but what about so and so? They’re way more negative.”
I’ve made such a habit of burying my joy and gratitude for life beneath pessimism and bitterness that even the people closest to me think I’m a butthole.
But the best view of my sin comes from Haley’s side of the bed. I am selfish and egocentric (typical writer). I am quick to take offense and quicker to spot the speck in my brother’s eye than the log in my own (typical man). I covet the lives of friends with rich dads and more successful careers. I want to be respectable like aid workers and church elders—but not because I want to help; rather I want to be seen helping, lording wisdom over my neighbor, and earning my way to a monument (or at least an invitation to give the commencement speech at my alma mater).
There is no number of love letters I can write, family pictures I can smile for, or houses, cars, and Starbucks gift cards I can buy to convince my wife I’m better than I really am. She knows me better than anyone on the other side of the fourth wall.
This is one of the paradoxes of marriage. In mating season, I danced like a bird of paradise. And then I was forced to keep up the charade until she vowed not to leave until her death or mine. I did my best to present Haley with one side of the coin—the one in which I was a handsome, mature, church-going volunteer soccer coach who could squat a miniature horse and lavish words like honey from my tongue.
I took her on adventures to the world’s largest tree house, Tennessee’s most beautiful waterfalls, and ice skating below the giant Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. I spent more on a diamond ring I still have an insurance policy on than I ever had on myself. And while one of the things we cherished early on was that neither of us beat around the bush, she also strove to present her prettiest picture. But all the showmanship melts away in the intimacy that comes with time. That is why marriages don’t last: because the differences that become irreconcilable might’ve always been there, one spouse just did a good enough job hiding their feelings or playing the fool until the curtain fell and real life smacked them in the jaw.
One of the most evocative images of this marital truth came on the third day of our honeymoon in Mexico. My eyes closed with the image of my tan, muscled bride’s long legs wrapped around my torso. Hours later, I woke to the sounds of her hurling in the bathroom. Moctezuma had taken his revenge. And she refused to open the door, not wanting me to see the monster she had become.
But we’re all monsters, aren’t we?
Most days, I open a Bible featuring a starring cast of outcasts, oafs, and losers. I sing songs about a Jewish laborer-turned-homeless preacher born into an imperial colony, abandoned by his friends, and executed at 33. I submit to a God who is still incomprehensible to me nearly two decades since I joined his team.
Throughout history, those closest to heaven have been the likeliest to declare themselves the filthiest sinners. “No man knows how bad he is until he has tried very hard to be good,” C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity. Lewis, a reluctant convert who lost his mother to cancer and friends to war and hated God through both, was a mean atheist who dabbled in the occult. The Apostle Paul was objectively worse: violently binding up fathers and mothers for execution. But even years after his conversion, he did not write in his letter to his young friend Timothy, “I was once the worst of sinners but at last have become a pretty decent dude.” No, despite authoring many of the letters that would eventually comprise the New Testament of the Bible, he remained the worst of the lot.
While my first instinct is to become enraged when she threatens me with banishment from the bedroom, and I hardly say sorry or fold laundry, I know that marriage to Haley is the best thing that could’ve happened to me—better than a million-dollar book contract, a phone conversation with Wright Thompson, or a weekend playing FIFA and eating asado with Lionel Messi.
And yet I still behave like a donkey a lot of the time, griping about my lack of freedom to write or fish or walk through McKay’s or watch a movie alone at the theater. But rather than telling me to shut my trap and accept that I’ve got bigger commitments now than I did before our kids were born, she adjusts her schedule around to let me go. Much of this story was written while she took the kids to the gym, got them down for a nap without my help, or killed time before dinner.
I did not intend for this to be a New Year’s Resolution, though that feels like its natural conclusion. It’s been easy to admit I’m an average writer or an okay father, but it’s harder to reconcile the constant garbage swirling inside my head with the image of respectability I seek to portray in the public eye. For that purpose, I have my wife, whose role is not necessarily to keep me humble—I kind of hate that—but to remind me that even the nicest button-down and the most flattering pair of jeans won’t cover up what’s underneath. I may strip down to my boxers for your entertainment in my stories and over drinks beside a fire, but the person who sees my naked flesh every night is my wife. And most of the time, rather than crossing herself or escaping through the back door, she welcomes me gladly into bed . . . as long as I haven’t eaten ribs.
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Also. I too struggle with gas...especially post BBQ. It’s a blood bath
I hate that I’m almost a month late on reading this, but MAN. So glad I did.
Thanks for always giving us a glimpse into real life. Appreciate you inviting us into a larger story..at least for those willing to jump in!