To Have Or Have Not

I have the most fabulous kid on earth, and that's a fact. And I hope she never reads this.

I have read that the highest rate of divorce occurs between people with children, when their children are age four. I'm fairly sure that this is strictly an American statistic, and that would make sense to me, since "family" means something a lot "looser" here than in just about any culture on Earth, except for maybe Canada. Please see future post, "I Just Don't Know What The Hell To Think About Canada."

My experience in this potential marriage-breaking endeavor, this bringing forth of progeny, pretty much holds true to this statistic, except that the actual breakup of my marriage occurred six years later than the norm, even though it was over long before that. My own specifics will not be gone into here, but suffice it to say that upon questioning my divorced and not-divorced-but-fantasize-about-it-regularly peers, this theory appears to hold some water.

Let me give you a random situation in a nutshell: let's say...Jancy and Mavid meet. They go out for about a year, move in together and live happily together for another year, they get engaged and a year later they get married. Mavid says to Jancy one day, "Hey, what say we try to have a kid?" Jancy, thinking, what the hell, I've never been pregnant even by accident, says, "Uh, yeah, sure, why not?" I have found that the majority of married couples I know put exactly that much thought into the creating of another life. Because, what the hey, our parents did it, right? How hard could it be?

And wouldn't everyone like to have a little onion bun that looks just like them and has their funny expressions and blows bubbles and wants to play and help you keep your fun, youthful spirit hopping about for as long as it can? I mean, besides the mandate that that's what your supposed to do after marriage and besides the ongoing nudging of your parental units claiming, ad nauseum, "But I want to be a Grandma!!"

You know why she wants to be a grandma? She'll even tell you this one: Because I get to be the good guy and have all the fun and then send them home when I'm done with them. "Grandma loves you! Bub-Byeeeee!!" And the door goes, "Slam."

And won't your so-far loving and satisfied husband love you even more once you've pushed that big bowling ball out of your tiny little pin hole, right there in front of him, with all the attendant blood, sweat, bodily functions and the exclamations of sheer hatred that pop out during hard labor? Okay, maybe everybody's not quite that bad, but I'm trying to build my theory here. Childbirth can be thoroughly disgusting. Beautiful and gross all at the same time. I have photos if you want to see them.

You bring this little sweetie pie home and voila! It sucks and cries and poops and vomits and sleeps every once in awhile, and then it sucks and cries and poops and throws up and doesn't sleep for a couple nights straight. And on and on. And for a woman, your hormones are whacktastic and other-worldly anyway, but now you're not sleeping, even though your husband helps you as much as he can but he doesn't produce milk so...and even if you pump, your screetching child will not latch onto a bottle so he can't help you anyway...zzzzzzzz.

This part goes on for a couple of months, which feels like a couple of years because you're not sleeping and even when you're sleeping you're programmed to be listening. And you really do have some beautiful times, especially when your kid gets gas and you imagine that she/he's smiling at you when really they just need to fart. But it's cool anyway.

All of this said, this is not even touching upon what's happening to your All-American romantic relationship. Your husband asks the doctor, while you're still in the childbirth recovery room, "So how long til we can DO IT again?" If he's lucky, you don't hear him because if you do, there could well be hell for him to pay. Even after a couple of weeks, after the episiotomy heals and you stop the non-stop bleeding, you haven't slept in...forever. This phase is not unlike psychoses. And it's not that you don't love your husband anymore, but your needs have become very, very simple, primal and, quite frankly, unimportant. Your body is no longer your own, it's become breakfast and lunch - and a picker-upper and a bender-overer and changer. And unfortunately you haven't even thought about the fact that his needs have not altered in this profound way at all. He still wants to DO IT. And once y'all DO IT again, he will assume that y'all will again resume your regularly scheduled impromptu sexing. But you can't. And it's going to be awhile before you can and even then, you're going to be DOING IT as a mom. If that kid cries, you're stopping the show, regardless of what scene you're on.

I remember a pregnant friend once saying to me, "Well, nothing will change for us. We will still hike with little Harold on our backs and travel and ski and everything else we've always done. He'll just come with us!!" Right. What if your kid doesn't like sitting in that backpack and throws a fit until you take him out? What if your kid doesn't like to sleep anywhere but home? What if your kid finds the cold too irritating and the hot too crabbifying? I mean, they're not born little blobs who can be molded into whatever fits your lifestyle. My kid decided she was a vegetarian at age 4 and announced it at the dinner table while I was in the middle of cutting up my prime rib. At 13, she still is. I have to cook two different meals. Oh, you say I don't? I bet you don't have a kid.

But I think the bottom line on the maintenance of a good, loving relationship while being parents is not really any of this. I think it's more of a psycho-spiritual roll of the dice than meets the eye. I think there are a lot of factors at play, physical, mental and spiritual, and so many of us didn't take the time to examine our own personhoods before we so glibly stopped the birth control. So much of what happens to form a good and loving relationship has to do with the unconscious and the subconscious. It's not all about what we think or decide. Most times it's decided for us by something much bigger than us. Isn't that what real love is?

And what I have found for myself, and from what I've studied of other newly parental relationships, is that a profound shift occurs that we have no control over, in parts of our psyche that we are not able to steer in any direction - we don't even know they're there! Something happens to a man when his woman starts being called "Mommy" and to a woman when her man starts to be "Daddy." Sounds warm and fuzzy, but that's not always the case.

We owe it to ourselves and to our potential children to perform great, painstaking personal reflection with major internal housecleaning before we go pitching the condoms. Did we have wonderful powers of example in parenting? Did they? Are we really willing to amend our full-disclosure intimacy with one another or our satisfying lifestyles just to do what people may think is right or that we'd be "good at?" And what would make us "good" at it? Because we're childish and haven't even grown up ourselves yet? Do we really feel like relinquishing our cherished child-likeness to an actual child for whom we now have to set a power of example? Most of all, do we realize, fully realize that the spiritual life of this little blue-eyed bumpkin is going to be our responsibility 24/7, 365 days a year, really, for the rest of our lives? Because even when they leave home, we will still think about them all the time and wonder if they're happy.

I don't know about you. Your experience may differ, and more power to you, for sure. But these are my thoughts tonight, and they're not fully coherent, even to me. What I do know is that almost every single day, I see evidence of more and more heartache and hearts breaking over what seems to have been a couple's easiest decision to make. And none of them seem to know why they hurt, or where the pain started.

And yet, here again - I have the most incredible daughter a person could want. I couldn't have designed a better kid, even if I were given all the options I could have dreamed up. But this has come at a huge, tremendous personal price to someone without a prayer or a clue or a handbook.

Today I am humbled with the gratitude I have for my Sasha and for my survival as a now single mother - but I am grateful most of all perhaps, that I realized just in the nick of time that it really DOES take a village to raise a child well - and that I am able to avail myself the help of that village. Let's spread that love, right?