How to Shatter a Marriage

A single moment revealed our relationship was already broken

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

When my husband smashed the table, this is what I did: nothing. Well, not nothing. I turned my face into a plate, made clean of all scraps. No emotion leftovers. I made “all gone.” Eyes clear, like bone china moons.

I was quiet when I took the chunks and splinters and placed them in the alley trash bin. I was quiet when he left that night. I was quiet when he returned the next day. Sliced apples into a bowl and drizzled honey in wide zigzags over them.

I had bought the table at a yard sale a few blocks away. It had a checkerboard top and a drawer for keeping game pieces. I thought it was charming, with its spindle legs. I imagined it had lived a long life of chess games, and I wanted it to live a little longer. Maybe I would teach my kids how to play checkers, and later, my husband could teach them how to play chess.

My husband said he wished he’d thrown it at the television and shattered that too. Maybe then I would have understood how angry he really was. Maybe then, he said, he would have made his point. He said this the next day when the sun was up and the kids were awake. After he returned home from wherever he went to cool down.

---

Three years later, we live in a different house in a different city. We are preparing for Shabbat dinner. An out-of-town guest arrives early to help. Together, they get high in our bedroom before the food prep begins. I open the windows to let in the California sunset.

My husband likes to host big, elaborate meals with lots of side dishes. Nothing is simple. No four-ingredient salads, no roasted veggies. He presents a spread that takes a whole afternoon to prepare. He comes home from the market loaded with herbs and fresh meats wrapped in paper. He measures the spices into tiny glass dishes, as if he were hosting a cooking show.

I don’t help with the meals. This is one of a million tiny spoken and unspoken choices I make to keep myself away from his anger. I’m in charge of tablecloths, flowers, candles, and music. I make things beautiful. When guests arrive, they say, What a beautiful home! That response is perfect. That’s exactly what I want them to see. A beautiful home filled with beautiful flowers in beautiful vases.

Our guest is slicing tiny tomatoes right across the center of their plump red and yellow bellies. Every half dozen, she scoops them up off the wooden board with her clean hands and plops them into a bowl. It’s such a rustic act—slice, scoop, plop. It feels wholesome.

They start talking about Judaism. My husband explains Shabbat, the way Jews treat it like a holiday, call the day a “bride,” and bow when she enters as the sun tucks behind the hills. The way Jews wear white to reflect the light of the world, the light we welcome into our homes and hearts when we pray over matching white candles.

I’m only half listening, as I snatch up small socks and stuffies strewn about the living room. I look out the front window. The view from this house is so beautiful. It’s more than I ever dared to hope for. From here, I can see the hospital where I was born. I imagine an invisible loop traced from that day, following me all the way to Chicago and back, closing the gap right under my bare feet.

“I’ve always wondered, why do Jews smash a glass at weddings?” I hear our friend ask. The conversation has traveled from Shabbat rituals to other Jewish traditions. I remember choosing the glass we would break after our own vows. My mother took a scrap of cream satin left over from my wedding dress and hemmed a large square kerchief in which to wrap the glass before my husband’s foot would stomp down upon it.

“It’s a symbol,” he replied, “that what is broken can also be beautiful.”

At this, I pause. Because, no. That isn’t it at all.

I know exactly what it symbolizes. Because as a conversion Jew, I studied this. I spent months planning the kind of Jewish wedding that would welcome our non-Jewish friends and family into the traditions, not alienate them. I wanted each choice to be intentional, full of meaning, and accessible to all. I even created a wedding program so guests would fully understand the reason behind each choice.

The program explained everything with headlines like, What is a chuppah and why do people get married under it? and Why do men wear yarmulkes?

So I knew the answer to the question, Why do Jews smash a glass at the end of the ceremony? I knew because I crafted the answer. In the program, I wrote about the destruction of the Temples and the Holocaust. I wrote, “Being torn apart encourages us to grow and gives us the opportunity to come back together, stronger and more resilient than before. We break a glass as a symbol of this natural process.”

But here is what I didn’t write: Some couples keep the shards and turn them into mezuzahs to hang on a doorframe or Shabbat candle holders. They want to keep the broken glass as a reminder of their vows.

But I think the real reason is this: Glass can break so easily—a careless bump of the elbow, flick of the wrist, and a goblet will shatter. You could, of course, take every tiny shard and piece it back together. You could, with a lot of patience and effort, create a glass again. But you can never make the cracks disappear. You can put a thing back together, you can say sorry, you can work really hard to make sure it never breaks again. But you can never forget that carelessness shattered a thing that was once whole.

I didn’t write any of those things in our program. So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that my husband didn’t know. After the ceremony, I threw the glass away.

I move back toward the kitchen and begin to set the table. I want to correct him. Maybe I do. Maybe I add my two cents to the conversation. Or maybe I’m quiet as I set folded napkins and polished glassware on the table. I don’t remember.

Should I have bound the splintered table back together? Maybe filled the cracks with gold, like some Japanese artisans do to preserve the history of an item? Sealed each splinter with glitter glue, perhaps? Maybe a constant reminder set beside the sofa would have stopped my husband from breaking things. Maybe if he set his morning coffee on its mended checkerboard after each sip, he wouldn’t forget what he did. Couldn’t forget the history of the object, the way he held it above his head before driving it into the ground with his whole self.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that he forgot.

I could draw a new loop starting at the exact place under the chuppah where my husband’s shoe smashed the glass and closed the circle at the moment I left him. Within these two curved lines, maybe I could keep his rage and all the things he broke at a safe distance. When people ask what happened, I say our marriage broke. A hundred tiny fractures and a one good whack, and it shattered.

Join us on May 18 at 8:30 p.m. ET for a Q&A with Jazmine Becerra Green on Invisible Marital Abuse: When “It Wasn’t That Bad” is a Lie. Link to get a reminder or visit Open Secrets in the Substack app. Subscribers will be notified when we go live.

If you're struggling with intimate partner violence or know someone who is, help is available. In the United States, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233 or text BEGIN to 88788. Outside the United States, see the NO MORE Global Directory.

Jazmine Becerra Green is a Pushcart Prize-nominated queer, Chicanx writer and poet. Her work has been published in The Boston Globe, Bust, and Hypertext, among others. She writes a Substack newsletter called Living Room, where she publishes essays on coming out later in life with children. Jazmine is working on a hybrid memoir and lives in Los Angeles with her partner and wildlings. You can find more of her work at jazminebecerragreen.com or jazminebecerragreen.substack.com. Pronouns: she/her.