On my 14th anniversary, my husband called me selfish and cold, not to mention a lousy lover, wife, and mother. Granted, I had just told him that I felt like a little kid running to keep up with him, exhausted before we’d even gotten to the fun part yet, and that maybe I would be happier without him. Needless to say, 14 years of marriage require celebration for a reason: people can change a lot in that much time. And when you get married pretty much right out of college, and pretty much after only dating each other for the past six years, it can be tough to stick it out sometimes.
I’ll be the first to admit that of all the things I aspire to be, a good wife was never one of them. I didn’t want to get married, didn’t believe in monogamy, and thought the institution was archaic. And I’ll be honest–I never wanted to have kids, didn’t believe in giving up my own life for my kids if I did have any, and would still rather spend Mother’s Day not being a mom than with my kids. I’ll admit (proudly, I might add) that my definition of a good mother, albeit supported by myriad self-care manifestos, is not typical. I believe the best moms are the ones who pursue their own goals in addition to fostering and supporting their children, even if it means putting their children in daycare, leaving them home with a sitter or their father, and bringing them to spectate at events their parents are participating in instead of to play at the playground.
Thing is, I don’t think this makes me selfish, and I know that I’m a good lover. I also know I’m not always the wife my husband wishes he had. But none of these things makes me a bad mother. Although I may not put my children’s desires above my own, their needs are always first. The fact that my husband’s are not is what causes strife in our marriage. Compounding this problem is that for the seven years we were married before starting a family, his needs did come first–only, he never realized this and still doesn’t believe it to be true. Regardless, I had manufactured our lives so that he could pursue the things that made him happy: skateboarding, rock climbing, surfing, bicycling, traveling, drinking–whatever -ing he was into, I trailed along behind him. I ran circles around skate parks so that I could get some exercise while he skated, I sat around mountain crags for days on end so he could send his latest boulder problem, I paddled out and attempted to chase waves or waited on the beach while he caught them, I bought a mountain bike to ride with him, I took road trips or let him travel solo when we couldn’t both afford to go, and I said little when his drinking went from something he enjoyed to something he couldn’t not enjoy. For seven years, my friends were other skateboard and climbing “widows” or weekend warriors I only saw because I tagged along on my husband’s latest adventures, people I would see every weekend for a year and then not again for another year because my husband’s interests had changed or he had gotten injured and we were no longer traveling every weekend.
Our savings dwindled, our debt multiplied, and my frustration with the life in which I’d been an unwittingly unwilling participant metastasized like cancer. And like cancer, it had to be treated. So, I made friends of my own, after seven years of woefully mourning the friendships I’d left behind when we moved to the east coast (albeit for a job I’d been offered, it was a move that would provide my husband easier access to all of the things he loved to do). First, with my coworkers, then with moms in our birthing class, then moms in my La Leche League group; as my babies grew up, I started introducing myself to moms in the neighborhood, at yoga classes, and in the gym. I joined a book group, started my own book group, and searched out writing classes. I made plans with these friends, plans that meant I had less time to chase my husband around, less of a need for his 24-7 companionship, and less interest in what he wanted to do in his spare time.
This kind of paradigm shift is difficult in the best of situations; in ours, it was downright catastrophic. As I became outright unwilling to participate in the adventures he concocted, we began to drift apart. Rather than share our separate adventures with each other, we stopped talking to each other. We started arguing about who got to do what when. We disagreed over how to deal with parenting issues. We stopped appreciating each others’ strengths and instead harped on each others’ weaknesses. As we scrambled to hang on, this slippery slope kept forcing our relationship in a downward spiral, until we found ourselves using the “D” work in every argument. This, I have learned, is not a productive way to save a marriage.
I wish I could say that patching up the jagged edges of our tattered relationship was easy, or that it happened overnight, or that we even did anything particularly useful to start the endless work. For us, it took admitting that no matter how bad things had gotten, we couldn’t stand the idea of not being together. No matter how much we hated the way each of us had been acting, no matter how hurt we both were at things the other had said, done, or would continue to do, neither of us could bear not being in bed when our kids came running to us in the middle of the night. It took admitting that we parented better as a team than as individuals, that we liked the idea of our life together more than the idea of a life alone, or with anyone else. And once we’d faced that reality, we found something in common, which was all we needed in order to begin working together again, even as we found ways to support each other as individuals.
(mostly) full disclosure 