Thank God, a baby will not tolerate or entertain parental inflexibility. In the beginning of us, we had originally planned to have a few years together before starting a family. Six months after getting married, I clearly remember being at a Christmas party one night, unable to understand why the hummus and cucumbers I was eating at the table of hors d’oeuvres were so delectable. The woman standing next to me was pregnant, and we introduced ourselves. A few minutes into our conversation, I asked how she had the first inkling she might be pregnant. I love asking people about their lives; I had no underlying reason to ask other than the fact that the cucumbers just then tasted so fabulous. When do cucumbers ever taste fabulous? Some of the oddities she described seemed vaguely familiar to me, and on the way home from the party I asked my husband to humor me by stopping by the store for a pregnancy test. I was sure I’d take the test, see the negative result, and carry on with life.
Back at home, he was sitting on the couch watching sports while I watched the white wand’s color change in the bathroom. He didn’t accompany me because we were both so sure of the result. It matched the color that said “positive.” Oh wow.
I quietly padded into the living room, trying to decide how to break the shocking news. His back to me, thinking I was still in the bathroom, he yelled up, “Well, I guess it’s negative or else I’d hear you screaming in there.”
I walked over and calmly sat down next to him with feigned blah- ness to make him think it was nothing. In a normal tone of voice, I said, “Actually, it’s positive.”
We were both equally shocked. I guess the method we thought worked was rubbish. At least it had worked in previous relationships, thankfully. We sat there silently, mouths agape, for a minute or two—but what felt like a lifetime.
Some girls grow up dreaming about getting married and having babies. While they were busy playing house, I was out catching grasshoppers in the alley. When those girls became women, they had the births and names of their children all charted out before ever finding the right husbands. I, on the other hand, was out riding my bike across the country and traveling through Chile and Africa. I wanted a big family someday because I had grown up in a big family and loved it, but it was a far-off notion I never got any more intimate with.
Because my husband was single for a long time before he met me, he had resigned himself to the fact that he might never be married or experience fatherhood. Now, all of a sudden, it was happening.
My pregnancy was quite smooth. I walked an hour to work and back every day up to the day before I gave birth. My husband was a pretty caring companion throughout those nine months, and with the different hormones circulating through me, it was the first time I was actually thankful that he wasn’t the type of guy who needed constant intimacy. Spooning me at night with his hand draped over my tummy felt just right.
Despite our natural birth classes and the doula we had at the ready, our beautiful baby boy came into the world via C-section after 12 hours of unproductive laboring. Though my husband slipped out of the hospital here and there to take a fast run or go for a quick swim, he was nevertheless a very loving and present father and supportive spouse from the get-go. During those five days of recovery from surgery in that little hospital room, he accompanied us for as many hours of the day as possible and slept in the bed next to us at night. He’d go off to teach in the day and come back to comfort me and my fierce longing in the night when the baby would be taken from my arms to sleep in his little jaundice-ridding lightbox.
We brought this sweet gift into our home and I began a new life of loving a little human being all day and all night. Freely and fully. No rules, no balancing a tightrope, no walking on eggshells.
Because he worked late into the night, teaching classes and then preparing for the next day, my husband came home every afternoon to cuddle with the baby, change his didies, and sweet-talk with him until his next class, giving me a much-needed break to make some dinner, hands-free. When he got home at night, it often coincided with the third or fourth hour of my trying to get the baby to sleep. We knew right off the bat that this boy had important things to do in life. He was not at all interested in sleeping his night away when he could continue to learn about the world. My husband would open the front door, I’d stand up utterly spent from hours on the bouncy ball, wait for my husband to strip down to his underwear and hang up his work clothes, and hand the baby over to him so I could finally lie down and rest.
My husband got lucky. This boy was a tidy dreamboat—a tidy eater and a tidy player. But when life happened and things got crazy, love kept perfectionism at bay. A baby can’t be held responsible for messes. A baby can’t be reasoned with or asked to align with rigidity. When the baby lost his grasp on the nipple of an over-full breast in our bed in the early morning, my husband had no recourse but to join my laughter at milk spraying around the room. When we saw that look on the baby’s face and knew we couldn’t pull the car over in time, there was nothing to do but laugh at the malodorous overflow that suddenly oozed from every direction all over the car seat.
What he couldn’t control, my husband released. And what he could control, he did. Kindly. I did, too. While I’m not a control freak, I do prefer living spaces that are clean and organized. I’m a clean cook, I’m a constant purger of unused stuff, and everything I own is well-organized. I wasn’t necessarily born that way. I helped my parents down-size several times, and the process of de-junking for a mom who never throws anything away indelibly burns simplicity and organization into a person.
While watching the Tour de France with his dad in the living room, our toddler learned to eat popcorn one kernel at a time, so it wouldn’t spill all over the place. He learned to take his shoes off every time before coming in the house. As he got older, he knew the pinpointed spot his dad preferred for him to carve a pumpkin, and to put down newspaper first. He knew his dad’s rules for everything, inside and out. And all the things he did, he learned how to do them neatly, with a little bit of forethought.
Our son grew up with a very present dad, who loved every second of time he got with him and set ever-responsible examples. We still had a man who would walk in the house and immediately comment on what wasn’t quite right about something, and I would cringe at the thought of his first moments back at home with us because they were so predictably superficial. But I got to spend every minute of my day with our son in the way that I wanted to—loving him, reading endlessly to him, and exploring the world with him. He spent most of his babyhood in my arms, on my back, or in a sling. He looked inquisitively over my shoulder from his comfy backpack for hours while I explained what I was cooking. Once he could walk, he ran, so we covered miles of territory every day. We scoured the beach and talked geology; we analyzed flowers; we caught insects; we sought out job sites so he could gawk over tractors; we talked in depth about every topic that came into our world. I never dumbed anything down, and his voracious appetite for knowledge never hit a limit because we never had a reason to stop learning. We gathered towers of books every few days at the library and read about the world in our beautiful, white-but-cozy little home. My life went from tolerating tedium to wallowing in fulfilling and all-important child-raising.
I felt sad when we walked by the daycare place a few blocks away from our house, as women dropped off babies and young toddlers so they could spend their days and years working in an office and missing the universe of love and depth that existed in the life of their child.
At the beginning of our son’s life, my body was so exhausted from carrying, feeding, entertaining, and protecting him that I had no extra energy for intimacy with my husband. Again, I was thankful that he didn’t need it. But as time slowly changed what our son needed from me, and I got more sleep, I longed for times of affection with my husband. Even just snuggling. Somehow, there was never time in his life for it. He didn’t throw little love exchanges into the daily things of life. No quick looks, no quick pats on the buns, no quickies behind closed doors. He was always afraid we’d be interrupted, so he never even tried. I didn’t pass many loving nuggets his way because he never seemed to receive them when I did. He didn’t seem to know what to do with little love exchanges, so he did nothing with them. He didn’t acknowledge them, nor did he even seem to know they happened most of the time. When I’d ask why he couldn’t throw some my way, he said there was no time. “But you’ll take all the time in the world to talk to me about the state of a recycled orange juice carton; why won’t you take the time to balance it off with the good stuff?” No reply. Somehow it just wasn’t in him to interact in any way but clinically.
I didn’t grow up with parents who kissed in the hallway or snuggled on the couch. I didn’t see many love pats or eye twinkles. I only saw loving hugs before and after work. But somehow it’s in me to desire a running dialogue of loving nonverbal exchanges, whatever form they take, with my spouse. So no one can tell me that if you don’t grow up with them, you don’t know how to love. (There is hope for our children!) Maybe it’s an individual predisposition; perhaps either you have the ability or interest in it or not. I know that element was sorely lacking in my parents’ marriage. My spunky, energetic, fun-loving mom longed for more affection and passion from my “engineer-type” dad. He never cared much for closeness, so he didn’t make much effort. I guess I repeated the cycle by marrying someone like my dad, plus the exponential addition of perfectionism on top of it.
Neglect’s Toll on a Wife: Perfection’s Grip on My Husband’s Attention © 2023-2024 Lila Meadowbrook
