Monday, April 18, 2005

Modern Love: Truly, Madly, Guiltily

Well, in my opinion, Ayelet Waldman should be Mother of the Year. The best thing I think a mom can do for her kids is love their father. How many of these other moms will be divorced (or, even worse, have a nonexistent relationship with their spouse) when their kids turn 18 because they neglect their husbands?

March 27, 2005
MODERN LOVE
Truly, Madly, Guiltily
By AYELET WALDMAN

I HAVE been in many mothers' groups - Mommy and Me, Gymboree, Second-Time Moms - and each time, within three minutes, the conversation invariably comes around to the topic of how often mommy feels compelled to put out. Everyone wants to be reassured that no one else is having sex either. These are women who, for the most part, are comfortable with their bodies, consider themselves sexual beings. These are women who love their husbands or partners. Still, almost none of them are having any sex.

There are agreed upon reasons for this bed death. They are exhausted. It still hurts. They are so physically available to their babies - nursing, carrying, stroking - how could they bear to be physically available to anyone else?

But the real reason for this lack of sex, or at least the most profound, is that the wife's passion has been refocused. Instead of concentrating her ardor on her husband, she concentrates it on her babies. Where once her husband was the center of her passionate universe, there is now a new sun in whose orbit she revolves. Libido, as she once knew it, is gone, and in its place is all-consuming maternal desire. There is absolute unanimity on this topic, and instant reassurance.

Except, that is, from me.

I am the only woman in Mommy and Me who seems to be, well, getting any. This could fill me with smug well-being. I could sit in the room and gloat over my wonderful marriage. I could think about how our sex life - always vital, even torrid - is more exciting and imaginative now than it was when we first met. I could check my watch to see if I have time to stop at Good Vibrations to see if they have any exciting new toys. I could even gaze pityingly at the other mothers in the group, wishing that they too could experience a love as deep as my own.

But I don't. I am far too busy worrying about what's wrong with me. Why, of all the women in the room, am I the only one who has not made the erotic transition a good mother is supposed to make? Why am I the only one incapable of placing her children at the center of her passionate universe?

WHEN my first daughter was born, my husband held her in his hands and said, "My God, she's so beautiful."

I unwrapped the baby from her blankets. She was average size, with long thin fingers and a random assortment of toes. Her eyes were close set, and she had her father's hooked nose. It looked better on him.

She looked like a newborn baby, red and scrawny, blotchy faced and mewling. I don't remember what I said to my husband. Actually I remember very little of my Percocet- and Vicodin-fogged first few days of motherhood except for someone calling and squealing, "Aren't you just completely in love?" And of course I was. Just not with my baby.

I do love her. But I'm not in love with her. Nor with her two brothers or sister. Yes, I have four children. Four children with whom I spend a good part of every day: bathing them, combing their hair, sitting with them while they do their homework, holding them while they weep their tragic tears. But I'm not in love with any of them. I am in love with my husband.

It is his face that inspires in me paroxysms of infatuated devotion. If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.

An example: I often engage in the parental pastime known as God Forbid. What if, God forbid, someone were to snatch one of my children? God forbid. I imagine what it would feel like to lose one or even all of them. I imagine myself consumed, destroyed by the pain. And yet, in these imaginings, there is always a future beyond the child's death. Because if I were to lose one of my children, God forbid, even if I lost all my children, God forbid, I would still have him, my husband.

But my imagination simply fails me when I try to picture a future beyond my husband's death. Of course I would have to live. I have four children, a mortgage, work to do. But I can imagine no joy without my husband.

I don't think the other mothers at Mommy and Me feel this way. I know they would be absolutely devastated if they found themselves widowed. But any one of them would sacrifice anything, including their husbands, for their children.

Can my bad motherhood be my husband's fault? Perhaps he just inspires more complete adoration than other husbands. He cooks, cleans, cares for the children at least 50 percent of the time.

If the most erotic form of foreplay to a mother of a small child is, as I've heard some women claim, loading the dishwasher or sweeping the floor, then he's a master of titillation.

He's handsome, brilliant and successful. But he can also be scatterbrained, antisocial and arrogant. He is a bad dancer, and he knows far too much about Klingon politics and the lyrics to Yes songs. All in all, he's not that much better than other men. The fault must be my own.

I am trying to remember those first days and weeks after giving birth. I know that my sexual longing for my husband took a while to return. I recall not wanting to make love. I did not even want to cuddle. At times I felt that if my husband's hand were to accidentally brush against my breast while reaching for the saltshaker, I would saw it off with the butter knife.

Even now I am not always in the mood. By the time the children go to bed, I am as drained as any mother who has spent her day working, car pooling, building Lego castles and shopping for the precisely correct soccer cleat. I am also a compulsive reader. Put together fatigue and bookwormishness, and you could have a situation in which nobody ever gets any. Except that when I catch a glimpse of my husband from the corner of my eye - his smooth, round shoulders, his bright-blue eyes through the magnification of his reading glasses - I fold over the page of my novel.

Sometimes I think I am alone in this obsession with my spouse. Sometimes I think my husband does not feel as I do. He loves the children the way a mother is supposed to. He has put them at the center of his world. But he is a man and thus possesses a strong libido. Having found something to usurp me as the sun of his universe does not mean he wants to make love to me any less.

And yet, he says I am wrong. He says he loves me as I love him. Every so often we escape from the children for a few days. We talk about our love, about how much we love each other's bodies and brains, about the things that make us happy in our marriage.

During the course of these meandering and exhilarating conversations, we touch each other, we start to make love, we stop.

And afterward my husband will say that we, he and I, are the core of what he cherishes, that the children are satellites, beloved but tangential.

He seems entirely unperturbed by loving me like this. Loving me more than his children does not bother him. It does not make him feel like a bad father. He does not feel that loving me more than he loves them is a kind of infidelity.

And neither, I suppose, should I. I should not use that wretched phrase "bad mother." At the very least, I should allow that, if nothing else, I am good enough. I do know this: When I look around the room at the other mothers in the group, I know that I would not change places with any of them.

I wish some learned sociologist would publish a definitive study of marriages where the parents are desperately, ardently in love, where the parents love each other even more than they love the children. It would be wonderful if it could be established, once and for all, that the children of these marriages are more successful, happier, live longer and have healthier lives than children whose mothers focus their desires and passions on them.

BUT even in the likely event that this study is not forthcoming, even in the event that I face a day of reckoning in which my children, God forbid, become heroin addicts or, God forbid, are unable to form decent attachments and wander from one miserable and unsatisfying relationship to another, or, God forbid, other things too awful even to imagine befall them, I cannot regret that when I look at my husband I still feel the same quickening of desire that I felt 12 years ago when I saw him for the first time, standing in the lobby of my apartment building, a bouquet of purple irises in his hands.

And if my children resent having been moons rather than the sun? If they berate me for not having loved them enough? If they call me a bad mother?

I will tell them that I wish for them a love like I have for their father. I will tell them that they are my children, and they deserve both to love and be loved like that. I will tell them to settle for nothing less than what they saw when they looked at me, looking at him.

7 comments:

the Joneses said...

It's a strange world we live in, when you feel silly admitting that you've slept with only one person in your life, and only then after vows; but then you can feel odd-one-out for enjoying a happy and sexual marriage.

But her point is dead-on. Darren asked his dad for advice for being a good father, Mr. Phil replied, "Love Sara."

-- SJ

Anonymous said...

A couple of comments:

1. "Good Vibrations"? Are you endorsing sex toys in the marriage bed?

2. I don't want to make love to my kids. That doesn't mean I love them less than my husband, just differently.

The author talks about the physical characteristics of her newborn children as if she's supposed to be in love with them because of how they look. Huh? Am I missing something?

Lastly, she would have no joy if her husband died? I guess her children would give her no joy. That's sad.

Queen of Carrots said...

Maybe I know the wrong people, but . . . I have never really encountered the attitude she describes. Perhaps it's a product of people still having some idea that parenting requires us to put something into it, whereas they think marital love is magic that just "happens" (or doesn't).

I recall before D1 was born being slightly concerned about the whole "being touched out" idea I'd read people complaining about. It makes no sense to me now--like saying one has had too much popcorn to be thirsty. I am coming to the conclusion that DOB must be right that there's something wrong with the way their husbands are treating them if they see their husbands' touch as just another demand on them. But I'm sure there's blame on both sides.

On the other hand, I can identify with a Baby Blues cartoon once where the parents are both collapsing into bed and the one says to the other, "Tell you what, you think steamy thoughts about me and I'll think steamy thoughts about you." :-P

Anonymous said...

On the whole, I think her article is beautiful...I hope that after we've been married for twelve years and have a couple more children, I still have the same kind of passionate love for (and love life with) my husband that this lady is talking about :-D. Although I love my baby very much - even yet increasing since he was born - he has neither taken over nor supplanted the love that I have for my husband; and I can't imagine that he ever will take over that supreme love.

- DC

Anonymous said...

I think we certainly had those goals when we married almost 33 years ago now...but may you never be faced with all the challenges we were. For one, ill children and I was ill as well...for years. And being my husband had not finished his degree before we married (the Viet Nam war interferred), he finished after all 3 children were born...NOT RECOMMENDED!! Plus even when he could have been helpful, very often he was not. I see my son taking a MUCH LARGER part of the child rearing process with his family. I think one thing that also nearly destroyed our marriage was my husband's intense partiality of one child...a nasty carryover from his family of origin. If I had to do over, I would have drug him to a counselor!! But after a huge amount of sorrows in our lives, God got ahold of our marriage and today it is healthy. As my youngest child told the favored child recently..."no, things were not perfect, but mom and dad are still together too". The favored child has already been married, divorced and now living with her lover...an atheist to boot. Yes, this can happen even in a homeschooled family...we all carry the scars from our raisings and sometimes it takes years to work things out. Unfortunate when anyone travels our path...but the illness was one factor we had no control over...and by the way, we supported doctors EXTREMELY WELL...my husband made good wages but now and nearing when one should be able to retire, we never will be able to. We are trying to catch up for all those years of hardship. Amazing it can take so long! The good news is that we recently have been able to get hubby off diabetes meds...controlled by diet and juicing! You cannot know how much that will save in money, much less in toal on the body! So there can be good news later too! But blessings on you as you begin your family and may you never face such adversity in your life as I did! But if you do, God can use it too...He never wastes anything in His economy!
Elizabeth

Amy K said...

Anonymous:

Regarding #1, why not?

Regarding #2, from what I've read, heard and observed, husbands need to be wanted by their wives and they feel both wanted and loved by physical intimacy (in addition to other things, of course). Obviously, loving both your husband and your children (in the different ways we show love to each of them) is the best thing. I think it's sad, though, that many women neglect their husbands while they are consumed with motherhood. What they fail to realize, despite their good intentions, is that they're only HURTING their kids.
_________

Angela:

You bring up a very interesting point. Our culture immerses teens in sexuality, whether parents like it or not. It seems a reasonable argument to me that parents should be a role model to their teens in this area of life (just like all other areas) ... so at least their teens can see sexuality portrayed in the proper context (for a change).
_________

Elizabeth:

Sorry to hear about all the difficult times. None of us can choose our trials ... and some seem a lot harder than others. I'm glad that you are honest about it and seem to have come through it well, considering.

God bless,
Amy

Rachelle said...

While I don't agree with everything the writer says (e.g. I think losing a child would be just as devastating as losing a spouse and I wouldn't want to have to choose), I agree with the conclusions you draw from the article. You are right--loving (not just tolerating) your spouse is the best thing you can give your kids. MJR and I both had parents where the spouses agreed not to divorce but nevertheless had a rough time of it for a long time. We both sensed that and our childhood fear was that our parents would divorce. The stability and love of our parents defines our identity as children. Fortunately for us (MJR and me), the loving part seems to come easy but no doubt that had a lot to do with the examples of permanence in our homes, good premarital counseling (including sexual) and maybe (Sara touched on this), we remember that premarital sexual tension when we were mad about each other and couldn't have it. I occasionally find myself saying to my husband that I am SO GLAD we are really married and all this is legal for us now. And to be enjoyed. I've no doubt our son (and any other(s) that might follow) will benefit from our passion for each other and will hopefuly be better prepared for their own marriages someday.