I asked for a sign, but…

I did.  I asked for signs from God.  And He may have sent one, but it’s not the one I wanted.

Yesterday I wrote that I might not be happier if I had a second child.  Today, I learned belatedly about this article.

I’m not sure that I’m pleased about being right.  I’d kind of rather God said, “Oh, wait, sorry, I’m a little slow on the draw here, but sure, of course, you can have that second baby.”  His indication that “Yes, sweetie, you’ll be okay with what you have now” is less satisfying.

In other news, today I have been a good mom, a yes mom.  I said yes to things that normally I would say no to, because no was somewhat more convenient for me.  I enjoyed Milo’s company tremendously.  Milo is reading a book about houses and how all the systems in them work, and he wished aloud that he could see how the toilet tank functions.  So I said, “Okay, come see,” and we peeked inside one of the toilets.  I medicated a freak-out about bug bites (Milo is a major hypochondriac, which he inherited from his father and my father) with root beer.  All this happened because I took the afternoon off and decided not to worry about work.  Maybe I don’t need more children, maybe I need less work.

A glimmer

Tonight was an end-of-session shindig at Milo’s camp.  These things are among the hardest for me to navigate, because my one-childness (only-childness?  What’s the parental analog of being an only child?) is so obvious to me then, when every other adult has two or three kids clamoring around them.

But it wasn’t so bad.  It wasn’t so bad when a completely delicious little boy with blond curls passed me a dozen times as he ran with that pell mell toddler gait up and down the center aisle and reminded me so much of Milo at that age.  It wasn’t so bad when I spotted a couple and thought for most of the night that they, too, had only one child, but then saw them with both their daughters.  It wasn’t so bad when even the hippy-dippy, living-on-a-shoestring artist couple behind us in the ice cream line were there with their two kids.  (Maybe because Milo admitted to having a crush on their lisping little girl and offered to buy her an ice cream.  She declined, because she had her own money.  I was smitten — I do so love a gal who pays her own way.)

I’ve felt okay before, and it’s always been temporary, so I’m sure another crash is imminent (eminent? Yes! Certainly not transcendent).  But it’s nice to believe for now that this genuine feeling of okay is a good sign.  It’s progress.  I adore progress.

It occurred to me as I sat through the endless program (Milo’s bit only took up 10 minutes) that maybe I am as happy as I would be if I had two kids.  People now study these things.  They find that people who win the lottery generally go back to being as happy as they were before they won, unless of course winning the lottery completely wrecks their life.  Apparently people who become paraplegic in accidents also eventually achieve the same level of happiness or life satisfaction as they had before they were hurt.  That’s very hard to believe, just as it’s hard to believe that having another child wouldn’t make me happier.  I mean, it certainly would make me happier, because I wouldn’t be sad about not having another child, but maybe once it got worked into the rough rhythms of daily life, I wouldn’t be happier than I am now.   Well, not exactly now, as in this period in which I’m dealing with the end of a dream and the hard work of learning, finally, how to be a nice wife.  But now-ish.  Now as in some kind of life continuous present.

How can that be possible?  There’s no way to check it.  I can’t imagine that any mother would say, “Yes, I can imagine that I’d be as happy as I am now without Elena/Rebecca/Asa/Asher” (those were names I’d weighed for my second), although my God I would love her if she did.  I love love love mothers who can get some distance on their own mothering, who can say, “yes, it’s great, but there are other great things, too.”   She wouldn’t be able to imagine life without Elena/Rebecca/Asa/Asher.  There would be a big hole where E/R/A/A is now, and that would be intolerable.  But if she could rewind it so she didn’t know better, what would the outcome be?   What would she be doing with all the energy and love that’s going to E/R/A/A, and could she perhaps not imagine her life without that thing?  This blog, my life, is playing out that experiment.

Ceci n'est pas une post about Daniel

I chose to blog about the aftermath of infertility rather than writing a journal because blogging makes me more disciplined.  I write every day, because someone might come and see.  I try (try!) not to ruminate on the same subjects (try!) because readers would find it boring.  And I thought that by blogging, rather than writing in a journal, I would not keep coming back to Daniel, which is what I certainly would do (have done)  in a journal.

Well, we see how well that’s worked out.

Surely it was unrealistic to think that I could write about rebuilding my marriage without writing about the other person who is in it.   But I am trying to get past a chronicle of daily life and slights and who didn’t take out the garbage (Daniel!) and the rest of it.  I am trying not to write a slam-book about my husband.   I think one of my failings is that I think too much about Daniel, good and bad.  I need to think more about me, not selfishly, but in a spirit of self-examination.  What do I need to do differently, regardless of whether Daniel is gracious or difficult?  How can I improve our marriage under my own steam?

I can think about parenting in the abstract, kind of.  I can think of principles and approaches that aren’t entirely bound up in the singularity (no pun intended, really) of Milo.  But there’s not even a comparable verb for being a wife or a spouse — wife-ing, spousing — espousing doesn’t mean that.  Playing it out in my head, determining what it would look like, I can see why there’s not a word for it.  Daniel is even more singular than Milo (not like quirk-free me, no sir).   I like parenting because I can sense the expectations, the hierarchies (I am deeply comfortable with hierarchies.  It’s how I order the world.  How else does anything ever get done?  Cooperatively? Who has the time?), the patterns, the rules.  Marriage is so open-ended, unstructured, individualistic.  The expectations, even after we’ve been together for so long, aren’t transparent to me.  I still don’t know what I’m doing, and we will celebrate our 10th anniversary this year.

So I’m rebuilding but befuddled.  I don’t know what it will look like when I’m done.  I find myself studying other couples, intensely.  We had lunch on Shabbat with a truly lovely pair, married 30 years,  so easy in each others presence.   Ultimately, even if we had been blessed and had another child, and even another after that,  Daniel and I would be left to our own marriage.  That will now happen sooner than otherwise.  I look at couples and I think, I want that.  But I don’t know how they got there, and even knowing that might not help.

Save some for Wednesday!

At the rate Daniel and I are going, heartbreak Wednesday will be nuclear winter.

Another fight last night.  Who knew I could scream so loud?  I’ve never done that in life before, only in dreams.

We fought, again, about trying to try without really trying.  Daniel finds the concept revolting, promise-breaking, reality-denying.  So tonight I called my oldest friend, who is pregnant, and asked her to come on Saturday to pick up our old baby stuff, which I’ve been hoarding.  I think this will be a very good thing for me.  It will be easier for me to let go of my dream if it’s in the service of hers.  All the tools and clothes and kit that helped me be a mother to Milo will help her mother her own son.  I think this will be a good thing.

Maybe Daniel will see this and relax (and then we can try-without-trying without him knowing!).  Maybe then feng shui and karma and other non-Jewish pop-cosmologies will open a door for me.  Or maybe I’ll just have a lot more room in my basement and closets.   This very final letting go of all hope and effort is no small undertaking.

I will regret these fights, these lost days, weeks, years one day.  I will want these days back, even though now I want them only to be over.  How do I know this?  Because I want Milo’s infancy back.  Desperately.

I was not great as a mother of an infant.  I was exhausted, nervous, jangled.  I didn’t have close friends nearby with babies, nor did I have peers.  I felt entirely alone.  Daniel, who now adores Milo ravenously, was befuddled by this new demanding entity.  I didn’t enjoy it enough.  I was so lost, so confused, so worried about absolutely everything.   I wasn’t patient enough.  I didn’t treasure all the things I could have treasured.  I carry so much regret and guilt about that.

I wasn’t significantly better when Milo was 1 or 2 or 3.  I still wasn’t patient enough.  I didn’t want to play.  I just wanted relief or sleep or quiet or some other cool adult life that I wasn’t having.  Milo was and is a super-high-energy, very intense kid, and I struggled with that.  The family I came from was on a very low flame emotionally.  I didn’t understand being so needed, so in demand.

Finally, when Milo turned 4,  I understood what people meant when they said the time goes so fast.  Four was a magical age for my Milo, and things have been on an upward trend since then.  But I think it’s not the difference in Milo (although a beloved friend and mother of four once confessed, “I don’t love the baby stage”), but the difference in me.  I got it, finally.  I slowed down.  I have a journal from that time that I used to document that I was slowing down and how I did it.  It was an emotional/temporal accounting.

I know (more) how to pay attention.  I know (more) how to slow down.  So can’t I have a do-over with another baby?  I promise I’ll do it right this time.  I will be so attentive, so grateful, so loving, so patient.   Mothers of more than one will read this and shake their heads sympathetically.  I have an inkling that the demands of the earlier child or children keep you from savoring all the moments with the later ones.  There aren’t do-overs, ever. My do-ing over has to happen in the present.

Tumult, tears, and trying

(I know I need to get off this alliterative T thing.)

My emotions of late look like the lie-detector printout of a guilty person on a bad TV cop show: highlowhighlowhighlowhighlowhighlow.  Last night another bitter fight with Daniel.  I sobbed the whole time and he so clearly wanted to be anywhere but next to me.   I was fine when I got home this evening — without my favorite mood-elevator-in-a-glass (two glasses actually, or rather one glass twice).  But then another tailspin and now I’m vexed.

This week is the first significant test of not trying.  I want to try, surreptitiously, sneaking up on a miracle.  Daniel sussed me out last night, hence the bitter fight and tears.  Daniel doesn’t want a miracle.  He wants it all to stop.  Now.  Cold turkey.  He is upset, deeply, by my attempts at the nicotine patch equivalent of trying-while-not-trying.  He doesn’t know that I foreswore the clomid refill this cycle.  He does know that I haven’t touched the ovulation test strips, but he’s entirely unimpressed by it.  It’s just another way that we are so far apart on this issue, even now.

His behavior should be a screaming siren, a flashing red light, a horror movie audience shouting “Don’t go in there!”  It should tell me that not getting pregnant was probably necessary for the smooth running (eventually — I hope) of our marriage, and that I have averted wrecking something pre-existing and important for us and for Milo.  He made soothing noises two weeks ago when it came to an end, but he didn’t mean them.  What he really means is fear and panic and rejection of what I’d hoped for.  He can’t help it.  He’s not young,  he feels radically overworked, and flayed by life’s incessant demands.  It sounds like run of the mill life to me, but Daniel feels it’s an attack.  He avoided this harried normal state for a long time, and now it mocks and insults him.

It makes me very sad and angry (again) to type this, but I need to.  I need to stop avoiding it or pretending it’s not real.  It’s the most real thing.  I do wish, though, that the most real thing for him was understanding just how hard I’m trying (or not trying, or trying not to try), and how I’m handling this rather well, I think.  But neither one of us can quite see past our own feelings.  And no amount of words or tears will help him see how I feel and what I need, which, right now, is to keep trying in this futile way just to take the edge off the big sadness till I’m strong enough to absorb it.

TIME and time

The Time magazine story on only children is, to put it charitably, crap.  Daniel saw the magazine on the newsstand and brought it home.  The writer believes that the reason people think only children are oddities is that 120 years ago, an influential author called them maladjusted, giving rise to all kinds of nasty and persistent stereotypes.

Really?  One guy, 120 years ago?  Do we still think the same things about Asians, African-Americans, women in the workforce, homosexuality, religion, family, and cities ( I could go on ) as we did 120 years ago?

And to me, the article is painfully beside the point.  I’ve seen enough of sibling relationships to know that they are fantastically variable in quality.I know Milo will be fine without siblings, although I do worry about him having the sole burden of my care when I am old  (I will care for Daniel, barring something wildly unforeseen, because I’m a good deal younger than he is.).  I wanted more children because I WANTED THEM.

As for the other kind of time… It is not healing all wounds.  I am resisting the temptation to erase my previous post because it seems so stupid and facile and false.  I am not not not not not feeling better now.  I am not not not not feeling okay.  I am not sleeping well.  I am angry-in-my-head at Daniel, even as I know that being loving to him and repairing the damage infertility did to our marriage is the most important thing I have to do.  I went to yoga class this morning to feel better, but I just feel all worked up and agitated (note: when you’re feeling like hell, Iyengar yoga is a bad choice.).  There is nothing I want to do now.  I don’t want to sleep, although I’m tired.  I don’t want to read anything.  I don’t want to be with Daniel or Milo.  I just want something to go away — me, Daniel, my feelings, something.  I realize this is within spitting distance of the definition of depression.  I don’t want to be depressed — I don’t have time for it.

How do I get back to my marriage?  How do I treasure Daniel again when I am so angry at him?  I blame him for my unhappiness.  I think that if he had wanted a second child (which he didn’t), things would have been different.  This may not be true at all.  It also ignores that for three years he went along with the effort to have a second child.  But I am not interested in reason or forgiveness.  When I am not with him, I set my intention to loving him more and better and I mean it.  Then I come home, or he comes home, and it curdles.   I am furious at him for thinking that now, now that we aren’t trying anymore, everything is just fine.  For me, not trying means it never will be fine.

This puts me right on track — I’m in the anger stage.

Y'know what's weird?

So, about four hours after my previous droopy post, I’m feeling weirdly great.  The aforementioned Jewish event was a barbeque, so I didn’t have to cook tonight.  The visiting family members absorbed Milo’s considerable attention and energy.  Daniel was occupied.  So I goofed off on the computer, reading my favorite blogs, dabbling a bit in email.  I did nothing productive, nothing work related, nothing educational.  And I had two-ish glasses of wine.  All of this is unwise, considering that I am deeply stressed at work and not putting in nearly sufficient hours (I just got a promotion.  It’s a mixed blessing.  Perhaps it’s even a lesson in being more careful about what I wish for), and there’s a stack of  forms from Milo’s school to fill out, which are due tomorrow.   (And won’t be turned in, at least not till later.  I have never in my life ignored a school-imposed deadline.  Tee hee.)

This amazes me.  Who knew that acting like a 13-year-old, um… except for the wine part, could be so restorative?

Bad wine induced joke: being unproductive helps me deal with being un-reproductive.  I’m hitting “publish” before I realize how awful that sentence is.

The rebuilding may be extensive

Quickly, because family is visiting.

Today we went to a family event hosted by a big Jewish organization. The mother of one of Milo’s classmates works there, and we got to talking, and she mentioned her middle child would start at Milo’s school in the fall. And I was thrown again. I knew she had two, but suddenly the idea that she had three made me weak in the knees. This is illogical, inexplicable, and yet…. I was sad again.

And I looked around and saw all the fat babies and wobbly toddlers and thought, will I not be able to enjoy Jewish organizational life anymore? It’s been hard for a while, because, as I’ve written previously, Jews who are involved in Jewish institutional life (schools, organizations, synagogues) tend to be Jews who have two, or as commonly, three kids. And it makes me feel so left out and awkward and sad. “How old are your kids?” “Just one, just one kid.”

I love Jewish institutional life. I don’t want it to make me sad.

I think this is where I am now. Mostly fine, but vulnerable to these darts of sadness (I wanted to say missiles, but that seems awfully strong. Maybe lawn darts? Firecrackers?), that don’t make any sense, that surprise me.

So there’s more rebuilding called for than perhaps I thought, or wanted to admit.

Heartbreak Wednesday

Trying to conceive happened in two stages: the regular trying to conceive, which didn’t work, and the earlier stage of trying to convince Daniel that we should try to conceive at all.  That did work, but it took a very, very long time.  I can’t think about how long too often, because I’m pretty sure that during that time my fertility expired, and it’s hard to manage that.

But all the time we were trying, Daniel was worried that it was a mistake.  It was mistake because we might succeed, and the thought of another child was overwhelming to him.  It was a mistake because we might fail, and there would be an eternal cloud over our marriage.   Trying itself put a cloud over the marriage.  Thus, to D the marriage was mostly cloudy.

Anyway, today Daniel said “I’m glad we tried.  I think it would have been worse if we hadn’t tried at all.  Then it would never have gone away.”  It’s a lovely sentiment.  It’s also what I was telling him for years and years and years — before trying, while trying.  Whenever it came up (often!), I would say, however hard this was, not trying would have been worse.  I could get over not having a second (right?  I can, right?  I am, right?  I’d damn well better) but I might never have gotten over the resentment of not being allowed to make the effort, of D exercising a veto over something so important to me.

And for all those years, he wasn’t listening.  I was talking and crying and urging and fighting and saying this all the time.  And he didn’t hear it.   So, and this is what breaks my heart, what else wasn’t he hearing during those years?  Was he not hearing that I could be and was often being happy even when things were so hard and awful?  Was he not hearing something that might have made him genuinely at ease with having a second child — and was that thing he didn’t hear the thing that might have made some cosmic-psychological-biological difference, and I’d be pregnant or holding my baby right now?

The baseline

Daniel thinks our family is perfect.  Specifically, he thinks Milo is perfect, complete, the apotheosis of boyhood.

So why was I so hell-bent on having another child?  This was one of our most wrenching quarrels (actually, they were all wrenching, wearying, soul crushing, repetitive and they usually happened late at night.)  How could I look at Milo and our life and think that something was missing?  How dare I suggest, by pining for another child, that Milo was insufficient.  Why isn’t Milo enough for you, he would ask.

There was, is, no answer to the question when it’s put that way.  Milo is more than enough, but I want(ed?) more upon more upon more.  I wanted my family in life to match, in numbers at least, the family in my imagination.

But Daniel never imagined our family before it happened.  Daniel never imagined having children, or yearned for them.  His life before meeting me was a series of choices in the opposite direction.   So all that we’ve built together, all our life together is a bonus for him.  If I became a movie actor at this point in my life, I probably wouldn’t care if I won an Oscar, or made the cover of People magazine, or earned $40 million per picture.  (Although knowing me, maybe I would…. I’m like that, unfortunately.  I’m more grateful than I used to be, but not quite grateful enough.)  I’d be just glad to be there, to have this entirely unforeseen adventure.   That’s how Daniel feels about our family.   He can delight in what it is without comparing it to anything else.

Actually, when he compares it to the family he came from, it looks even better.  Partly that’s the difference between being a parent and being a child — being a parent generally feels better.  But Daniel’s family was and is complicated and emotionally very demanding.  That’s perhaps why he never aspired to a family of his own.  His dreams for himself were different, outsized, gorgeous, and grand, and they were largely realized before Milo was born, or even before he and I had even met.

I, on the other hand, always knew I would have a family.  In college people would ask me what I wanted in the future, and I would start with, “Well, I want to be a mom.”  And I wanted children, plural.  Not just one.   The family that lived in my head had more than three people in it.   So where Daniel sees something perfect as it is, I see something that’s imperfect for what it’s not.   We start from very different baselines.

Milo, bless his heart, talks regularly about his family and children.  He has already decided who he’ll marry (and I worry — I don’t think she’d indulge my Grandma-as-Mary-Poppins fantasies.  I expect her to be independent and prickly).  He talks about when they have children, and he has already started identifying family heirlooms, such as the giant cardboard stereo he made for a class project.  Daniel finds this charming beyond words, as he finds most of what Milo does.  I try, especially now, not to say, “See, children!  Plural.  More than one.  Everybody, even an elementary-schooler, knows you’re supposed to have children.  Milo wants a bigger family.  Don’t you see that?”  Daniel doesn’t see it, never did, never will.

I can understand, intellectually, that Daniel’s baseline of no expectations (for family life, anyway.  He had, as I said, huge expectations for his professional and public life) is better.  It allows for more joy and delight and appreciation.  But I can’t quite make it my own.  A baseline is where you start, and I didn’t start there.