Cesar says he was happy to exchange vows— he believed in family—but saw his wife more as a necessary encumbrance than as an equal partner. Ilusion knew her husband’s rural upbringing was culturally very different from her middle-class Mexican-American youth (her dad owns a precision machine business). Still, she was surprised by how coldly judgmental her new husband was. “Cesar didn’t know better,” she says now. “He was raised that women are last on the food chain. You feed everyone else first, including the dog.”
At the time, Cesar says, he believed he was fulfilling the man’s role: working to make money to feed his family. But he was never around, and when he did come home, “If he didn’t get what he wanted, he was verbally abusive,” Ilusion says, “screaming at the top of his lungs.”
When their first son, Andre, was one year old, Ilusion was rushed to the hospital for emergency gall bladder surgery. She almost died, she says, but Cesar didn’t visit her until days after the surgery. “He came to visit for two hours, but he was like, ‘I can’t believe you’re sick.’ He was so annoyed.” And the day she came home, “He’s like, ‘I’ve got to get back to my dogs.’ ” Not long after, Ilusion told Cesar goodbye. He was stunned.
“I asked God: ‘Why you give me the strongest, most stubborn woman in the world?’ ” he says. Mimicking what he’d seen his father and uncles do, “I just focused on everything she did wrong,” he says, a list that went “all the way from Alaska to Argentina. I thought it was going to keep her calm and submissive.
Instead, it sent her packing, and Cesar admits his ego was bruised. When he called her, crying, asking her to come home, she said there was just one way she’d consider it: They had to go to counseling. The idea went against every macho value he held dear. But he didn’t refuse. “I threw my little temper tantrum and all that, but from that moment on, I didn’t stop thinking: So what do I need to do so I can gain my family back?”
It was in counseling that Cesar experienced what the couple calls his “lightbulb moment,” when the therapist urged Ilusion to tell Cesar what she wanted. Here is how the couple, sitting together in the kitchen, recall the scene.
Ilusion: “I’m like, ‘I really want you to listen. I want you to be there in our household. I don’t want to be treated like a piece of property. And honey, you know, I want you to tell me that you love me,’ because he never did.”
Cesar: “Wait a minute. There was no ‘honey’ in that [speech].”
Ilusion: “Okay, whatever. I was hurt.”
Cesar turns to me. “No, this is my wife when she wants to get some shit across: ‘Cesar!’ ” he cries, issuing an avalanche of Spanish invective.
Both Millans agree, however, about what happened next. When Ilusion finished her laundry list of what she needed, Cesar’s face brightened as he looked up from the pad on which he’d been furiously taking notes. To the therapist, he exclaimed: “She’s just like dogs!”
The couple jokes about this now, though at the time, were it not for the counselor, Ilusion says she might have stormed out in frustration. The therapist helped her to see that Cesar was using the animals he utterly understood to try to begin to understand one he couldn’t: his wife.
“It wasn’t about me any more,” Cesar says, musing on the moment that led them to reconcile after six months apart. “It was about the pack.”
No single revelation mends all a relationship’s ills. Marriage, as anyone who’s tried it can attest, is an ongoing project. And both Millans are searchers who’ve delved into all manner of selfhelp literature (the D.W. loves Wayne Dyer; the M.W. just read Radical Forgiveness: Making Room for the Miracle, by Colin Tipping). After 16 years together, their goal is to appreciate rather than resent their differences. It’s not always easy.
For example, when Ilusion gets hurt, it can take her a while to get over it. And during that period, as she searches to understand what exactly has led her to feel as she does, she wants Cesar to be sweet to her—even though, she acknowledges, she’s not being very sweet to him.
