Not a Wasted Word

{Continued from yesterday’s post.}

Of course I hoped my husband and I would have children and be happy together, but he couldn’t promise that he’d ever want to have kids, let alone commit to having them in the near future. At this point, I was 29, but he was 28 (which is VERY young to be building a family in San Francisco), but my clock was ticking. I wasn’t even sure I’d cycle once I was off birth control. There was no time to fuck around.

Finally, after a year of counseling my husband decided he’d rather have a family with me than leave me to live kid-free.

For us (for me) there was no casual period of just giving it the good, old-fashioned go. When I went on BCP at 24, I hadn’t cycled in almost a decade. I wasn’t about to stop taking them to just wait and see what might happen. I immediately went to acupuncture, boiling sticks and leaves into horrific potions that I’d gulp down between gags, and chasing a Traditional Chinese Medicine diet with a million supplements. Even before we knew we had any reason to worry, trying to get pregnant was stressful.

Then we had an ectopic pregnancy. I was crushed. We grieved. I was sure our tale of suffering and loss had only just begun. Again, not a fabulous time in our marriage.

Then, miraculously, we got pregnant again. And after an anxiety-riddled pregnancy, we had our daughter. I was elated. The first year was pretty great.

Then she became a toddler and the realities of parenting set in. My type A personality took over as I tried to do all the things. This was fortuitous because, for the most part, my husband was totally and completely overwhelmed. When I thought maybe my husband should help with something I generally didn’t say much because, after all, I had wanted the kids. In my mind I had pressured him into parenthood; if it weren’t for me, we wouldn’t be here.

That mindset only enabled my husband’s non-confrontational, Type B personality. If he can get out of something he doesn’t want to do, you better bet he won’t do it. His parents did A LOT for him (and continue to enable him, even now). The transition to parenthood was truly challenging for him. It didn’t help that our daughter was a spirited child from the start, who thoroughly exhausted us. She rarely napped, had massive, prolonged tantrums that required us to keep her from harming herself for extended periods of time, and generally wore us out.

My daughter’s disposition was truly challenging. Even I, a teacher who had done a ton of childcare in her teens and twenties and had a lot of experience with kids of different ages, felt totally ineffectual most of the time. I read all the books, but the strategies rarely worked with her. Two- and three-years-old were HARD years for us. It didn’t get much better at four, or even five. Of course, by then, we had another child to parent.

The arrival of our second child definitely rocked the boat for us. It threw the delicate balance (or lack thereof) into turmoil. My husband had to step up in ways that weren’t required before. Yes he was doing more than he had with our first kid, but there was exponentially more work (or seemed to be). While my husband was exhausted from doing more than he ever had before, I became more and more resentful as the work load quickly overwhelmed me.

Eventually, after much exasperation and resentment, a ton of arguments and plenty of all out fights, we’ve finally settled into a rhythm that works well enough for both of us. Neither of us is super happy with it–both of us feel overwhelmed much of the time–but we’re trying to make it work.

The thing is, we’re both unique people with different strengths and weaknesses. What is relatively easy for me, is incredibly difficult for him, and vice versa. Our kids also complicated things.

Take “night parenting:” I basically do all the night parenting. We’ve tried to institute more equitable arrangements, but they never last. There are many reasons why I always end up getting up with the kids every night, and being with them most weekend mornings. First of all, the kids want me in the night. They make this known loudly–I could never sleep through their screaming for me, no matter how hard I tried. If my husband gets up with them, I end up awake in bed and neither of us is getting any sleep.

I can get up, get my kids what they want, snuggle with them pretty quickly, and then fall back asleep pretty easily and consistently. I almost always fall back to sleep within minutes of returning to bed. My husband, on the other hand, takes forever dealing with them, and then can’t fall back asleep for 45 or more minutes. He also needs more sleep; he generally gets over an hour more sleep than me a night but is always more tired than I am.

I realized recently that it doesn’t make sense to make him share the night parenting with me. The burden on him to get up with them in the night is much higher than it is for me. He is miserable the next day when he has to be up with one of the kids. When he’s miserable, I’m miserable. The reality is I’d be fine doing the night parenting if that time, and the interruption to my sleep, were recognized and valued. Honestly, having my contributions be recognized and valued would go such a long, long way.

I wonder though, if my contributions can ever be accurately valued when my husband has never done so much of what I do (and no, I’m not exaggerating, he has literally NEVER many things that have fallen to me in these last six years of parenting).

There are other complications. We only have one car and I use it to commute. My husband drops our son off a little later than he could because he doesn’t want him to have such a long day at school. This means he gets into work later and then needs to leave later. I, on the other hand, am technically done by 3pm most days. I feel a lot of pressure to pick up the kids sooner rather than later. So I take care of pick-ups. It’s almost impossible for my husband to get to even one kid before 6pm on public transportation without taking an hour off of work. Usually, if I can’t pick up the kids, I have to ask his parents to get them for us.

Our kids compound issues as well. They are both horrible at falling asleep. Neither one of them is asleep before 9:30 or 10pm, and they need a lot of attention until they finally conk out. Our son is usually up (after at least one night wake-up) by 6am. It makes for really long days and precious few moments to ourselves.

We do have a couple things going for us. We both have high thresh holds for clutter. I usually start getting stressed out first (probably because I know I’m going to be the one who eventually has to clean it up), but I rarely feel pressure from my husband to make the house look nice. I appreciate that. We’re both okay eating less than stellar meals most nights, though my husband is trying to cook more, which is nice.

So I guess in the end, the reasons why we can’t seem to manage an equitable arrangement are complicated. I had to reach deep into my past to explain why I married a man who didn’t even want kids when we met, even though that was my top priority in life. That explains my initial guilt at asking him to step up, which allowed us to become deeply entrenched in unproductive cycles of avoidance and resentment. Of course, so many other dynamics are also at play. Who knows what intricate combination of forces molded my husband into the person he is. Sure one could call him lazy (I have on occasion), but he is a thoughtful man who I believe respects me; the internal mechanisms that keep him from stepping up to assume responsibility are surely as convoluted as the ones that compel me to perpetuate our unsatisfying dynamic. Perhaps he lacks a certain resiliency that his childhood, and inherent nature, couldn’t provide. I definitely take on more than I can manage, until I lose it and melt down (I grew up watching my mother manage everything without ever breaking down, so my default response to generally that I can do it, even though that isn’t always the case). I’m sure I do as much to maintain our dysfunction as he does. We’re both working on it.

I feel like I could write 1000 more words on why we fail to achieve an arrangement that feels equitable, but I think I’ll stop just shy of 2500 and say this instead. Early parenting has been a challenging time for us, for a lot of reasons, but I have hope that the next stage will be better. I think both of us will find parenting elementary school-aged kids easier and more satisfying; the requirements at that age play to our strengths. We both struggled greatly in the toddler phase (in fact we still are; our three-year-old son is driving us batty), but we are seeing the light as our daughter matures. In two or three more years, we may just have an marriage that feels equitable. I’ll let you know if we ever get there.

Recently, I discovered Cloud’s blog Wandering Scientist. I really like her writing; her thoughts on the election have echoed my own (the ones I can’t manage to get down) and her “Weekend Reading” posts are amazing–so many links to great articles that I missed throughout the week but I so need to read.

She is also really good at linking to past posts in which she touched on a topic that she is delving into again. Last weekend I fell down a rabbit of these links to a post where she admits that she can’t really understand why some couples cannot maintain an equitable division of labor, despite the fact that both parties believe that marriage should be an partnership.

You see Cloud has the kind of marriage most woman want, where the childrearing and chores are divided, if not equally, in way that feels equitable to both parties. Sure things get out of balance, sure they have arguments, but they always find a way to work it out.

In that post from 2012, Cloud presents two marriage scenarios, one in which the marriage looks like her own, and one in which it looks like, well, mine. Then she asks her readers why they think a couple in a marriage like mine (where the woman is dissatisfied with the division of labor) can’t manage a marriage like hers. She wasn’t so interested in the cultural messages at play, because supposedly both couples are internalizing them, but instead wanted to know why some couples can’t achieve an equitable division of labor, even if both partners say they would ultimately prefer that.

There are over 150 comments on that post – many are responses to comments and then responses to those responses. I read them all. I thought a lot about the question, because I am in that situation and I wonder a lot why we can’t seem to manage a more equitable division of labor.

Her post inspired me to write a response, not so she can better understand (she wrote this post 4 years ago, and gained a lot of understanding from the responses–I don’t think she’s thinking much about this stuff anymore).

So I started to think about why I think my marriage is the way it is, and I kept falling back farther into the chapters of my life, until I realized there are even pieces of my childhood conspired to create the marriage I am trying to improve today.

So here goes. An attempt to explain why (again, I believe) my husband and I were fated to fall into a set of relationship dynamics that neither one of us realized we were signing up for.

I really do believe it all begins in my early childhood, as I watched my mother mourn my sister (who died at three months old having never left the NICU), and then lose three sons to stillbirth (at the time they were considered miscarriages but they all occurred between 20 and 24 weeks). She never went to therapy to properly process these loses, which were rarely, if ever, acknowledged by the friends or family. While I have very few concrete memories from this time, I truly believe this left me with a fundamental fear of not only losing pregnancies but also being unable to have a child.

That fear was compounded by the fact that after a few years of pretty regular periods (they started the day I turned 12), I stopped menstruating entirely for almost a decade. My mother also suffered from amenorrhea, which she attributes to the difficulty she had getting pregnant (it took her over two years to get pregnant with me).

Basically, I went into my twenties assuming I’d have a hard time conceiving and carrying a pregnancy to term. Having kids and being a mom was also my only goal in life; I had no professional aspirations to speak of.

From 16 to 21 I was attempting to manage a pretty crippling depression. I tried all sorts of SSRIs, and therapy but nothing helped for very long. Finally, at around 22, I emerged from the fog, fundamentally changed.

Perhaps it was because of the depression, perhaps because of the weight I gained when I was depressed, or perhaps because of who I was (I’m guessing it was an intricate combination of all three), I never found myself in a romantic relationship of any kind, despite pining unproductively after many people over the years. Sure I never really put myself out there, but nobody tried to start a relationship with me either. For that reason, at 24, I was sure I not only was never going to find a partner, but that I was basically unloveable.

So when I met my husband I felt like I’d won the lottery. Not only did someone love me, but he was a smart, interesting, hilarious guy who could make me laugh my ass off. I pretty much immediately started planning our life together.

The problem was, he didn’t want kids.

This obviously was a deal breaker for me. But I was so terrified that my husband was some kind of unicorn, possibly (probably?) the only man on earth who would ever love me, I pushed us toward parenthood, instead of realizing I should probably just leave.

By this time I was 28. Even when I could be level headed about finding someone else again, I was pretty damn sure it wasn’t going to happen in the next two or three years. I was so sure I was going to have problems getting pregnant, I was panicked to get started. I was running out of time. I literally had conversations with myself in which I considered two distinct possibilities: leaving my husband and finding someone who actually wanted to have a family with me, but then not being able to build that family because we’d missed our window, or having kids with my husband and leaving him if he really hated parenthood. I was so fixated on having kids, I couldn’t fathom ever being happy in the first scenario. It felt like a death sentence.

Continued tomorrow…   {Sorry, it started getting REALLY long.}