HAVING KIDS WON'T SAVE YOUR MARRIAGE
Moment of pure vulnerability:
For most of my life, I have been wildly, wholeheartedly resistant to having children. I wanted nothing to do with them. In my English classes, I often referred to babies as tapeworms, parasites latching themselves on and sucking everything good from their mothers.
Harsh? Maybe.
I just couldn't understand why anybody in their right mind would actually choose to have babies. That's like, eighteen years of constant sacrifice (more in this economy). And for what? Teen angst and a million arguments about how you don't understand them? No. Nope. Huh uh. Can't do it.
My reasons weren't all selfish. I'm also aware that I'm very direct, which isn't always the best way to talk to children. I mean, I'm the guy that will actually tell you when the yellow sweater washes you out or that your new poem is...not good. So really, I had a moral obligation to avoid children. Life with me would be an endless cycle of honest conversations, total breakdowns, followed by lots and lots of apologies on my part.
Plus, who wants to spend years cleaning up someone else's poop? Gross. And the vomit? Hell no. I can't even clean up my own vomit. Really. I have to leave the room when people even talk about it. And kids are wells of body fluids. Ick factor to the nth degree. No, I definitely did not want kids.
I wanted, like so many twenty-somethings, to understand "who I was" and "what I cared about." You know, I wanted to give space to all the existential crises of adulthood just like the movies taught me. And, just as I had been trained, I did find myself. Then I met someone, fell in love, and forgot all about it.
Well, most of it. The one thing I was clear about from the beginning is that I didn't want kids. My shiny new love interest was 19, so she was perfectly fine with that. For a while.
Though I have many reservations about marriage as an antiquated, government-sanctioned institution, I lost myself in the swoon of young love and proposed. After just 6 weeks. We set a date for the following year, which had the benefit of giving us space to see if we really wanted to get married.
The thing is, in the month or two before we got married, I didn't want to do it. Marriage felt so...suffocating. She was an extrovert who loved to go out. I hated alcohol and couldn't bear to be around my friends when they drank, while she enjoyed it. I craved stability. She rearranged the house constantly and wanted to move a lot.
When I thought about the rest of my life, I wanted to live in the same city and have the same job for forty years. She wanted to live in a dozen cities or, better yet, live on the road.
Looking back, we were headed in opposite directions almost from the start.
I can't tell you why I followed through. Maybe I just convinced myself that I was getting cold feet. Maybe I thought that it was my only chance at a lifelong, committed relationship. Most likely, I did it because it was the next logical step in a long-term relationship. Meet, marry, procreate. Right?
Whatever the reason, I ignored my instincts.
Over the next two years, we struggled mightily. I got laid off, certified to become a teacher, then couldn't land a job. We decided to return to Arkansas so that she could finish her degree, which she had stepped away from when we met. I finally landed a teaching position in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The downside was that my wife and I would have to live apart while she finished her degree. For four months, we saw each other mostly on the weekends. During the interstate drives, I routinely fantasized about a life where I was no longer married.
I had only ever slept with my wife. I'd been in only two relationships since my 16th birthday. We still clashed over my desire for stability and her desire for spontaneity. Our time apart only highlighted how little we had to talk about. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was happier alone.
Yet again, I dismissed the feelings as entirely normal. Everyone wonders what life is like on the other side, right?
That Christmas, after living separately for a semester, my wife moved in with me and my roommate in Tulsa. Though I'd had no issues at all with my roommate, the sudden presence of my wife caused tension. She was quite unhappy with the situation, eventually convincing me to move out. A few months after that, she started to get more insistent about having kids.
Side note: I have this tendency to assign arbitrary earmarks, or goals, to tasks. Mostly, this is a way to prolong things I'm not motivated to do. When it came to kids, my list was brief: I wanted to own a house, have a steady job with good insurance, and stop having kids before my 30th birthday.
The problem with these ear marks is that they're reasonable, so I can rationalize that I have to meet them before I can have kids. The bigger problem is that they weren't difficult to meet. Less than a year after I set the criteria, they'd all been met. Damn.
Happily, I was almost 29. I just had to find a way to avoid children for one more year. Bonus: my testicular torsion had made it nearly impossible to get anyone pregnant. Huzzah!
Nope.
Four months shy of 30, we found out we were pregnant. A week later, we found out we were having twins. Twins?! I didn't even want one kid. What the hell was I going to do with 2?
Turns out, I was going to be crazy excited. That's right. Excited. I didn't freak out in the doctor's office. I didn't freak out at the Arby's afterward while we tried to calm my wife. I didn't even freak out when I told my students a few weeks later. I was inexplicably over the moon. My wife came around, too.
We lost ourselves in crib sheets and big books of names. We moved out of the master bedroom to make room for both cribs. We also went to countless doctor's appointments due to the various complications that can arise with identical twins. Everywhere we went, the conversation turned to our twins. It was all we talked about, even at home.
When they arrived, we were filled with joy. For a few months, anyway. Slowly, though, our differences bubbled back to the surface. We were going to have to move in with my mother in order to support my wife staying at home with the babies, which made me realize that we'd had 13 addresses in the 6 years we'd been together. Thirteen?!
I also realized that our house was filled with things we'd picked up at various garage sales and vintage furniture stores. We had - count 'em - four vintage sewing desks. Who needs four sewing desks?
We tried to distract ourselves with caring for the girls, but tensions rose. We bickered behind closed doors. I was bitter about never finishing my Master's. She felt trapped. I wanted to live near my family until the girls graduated high school. She felt more trapped.
Eventually, she admitted that she had pushed so hard for kids because she thought they would fill the void. Turns out, that's a terrible idea. The void between us had nothing to do with kids and everything to do with the fact that we'd been walking separate paths for almost six years.
We had grown so far apart that we didn't even know how to talk to each other.
The thing about kids is that they don't solve anything. Raising children is hard. It's exhausting. It's time-consuming. And for most parents, it's the highest priority. Therein lies the issue. A marriage has to be impossibly strong to survive the first year or two after a baby.
Think about it - when you have a baby, baby becomes priority number one. In the best scenario, your partner is number two. Then, if you're dedicated to self-care, you're number 3 on the list. Then medical issues and bills and basic needs. The list goes on but, for most, a healthy relationship queues pretty close to the bottom.
We were no different.
Even when we tried to make each other happy, we neglected our marriage. The focus was not on successful partnership but individual joy. That's simply not sustainable.
Analogy: Imagine marriage is a tree. The longer it grows, the stronger the root structure. When a new branch splits off, all the nutrients are siphoned into that branch until it's strong enough to hold itself up. If the roots are solid, if the soil is rich and the tree gets enough sun, then the tree grows.
We were the tree on the side of the house. The one that's always overshadowed. The one that loses its leaves a month too early and never turns green again.
The week after our daughters' first birthday, we separated. The month before their second birthday, we signed the divorce papers. Standing before the judge, the phrase irreconcilable differences hung in the air like a funnel cloud.
We'd heard the howling and driven on. Dismissed the sirens as just another test. Now our house and furniture and baby girls were spread across two cities.
We had seen the storm. But we had never seen shelter, at least not in each other.
