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.