Bulletproof (7 page)

CHAPTER 9:

CHANGE OF HEART

For the first few weeks, there was no clear picture of how our family life would be. For one thing, it was all incredibly new and exciting. For another, we had our moms there helping us. My mom stayed with us for a week, and then his mom stayed with us for a week. They were an enormous help. Without them I would have had a much harder transition into the difficulties you have to get used to as a mom. And I was as in the dark as Ryan when Bentley was born. I had never changed a diaper or fed a child. I wasn’t even a big fan of kids, to be honest. But I managed to adapt to my role and rejoice in it. It wasn’t like everything was perfect and fun all the time. Changing diapers isn’t a hobby. But as a mom, I found there was intense satisfaction in knowing that I was the one who calmed down my baby and made him feel better. There was a deep feeling of reassurance in that. It steadied me to know that I was providing someone with that feeling of peace.

Young dads may not have the same instinct. I couldn’t guess either way. There’s a commonplace attitude that they just aren’t as driven to nurture as women are. And maybe science can back up that theory someday. But in the meantime, in the real context of parenting, those low expectations can sometimes seem like a convenient cop-out. There are plenty of men with children who are good fathers and don’t seem so agonized by a lack of parental instinct. It doesn’t matter, anyway, whether they feel the same internal drive that mothers do. They can still invest in the family, and keep investing in their relationship. If a father doesn’t have the same automatic natural feelings about parenthood, he can still be willing to help. Because even if the mother might be more instinctively compelled to jump out of bed automatically when the baby cries, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t get just as tired as anyone else. Nothing stops any father from taking on his fair share of the responsibilities, and even learning how to find satisfaction in it.

After our moms left and things slowed down, it was just me, Ryan, and Bentley at the apartment. Almost right away, I knew that I was going to be kind of on my own in the whole parenting thing. Ryan was a provider in the sense that he went to work every day and paid the bills. But I was getting up with Bentley every single time in the middle of the night and every single morning. Meanwhile, it seemed like Ryan always had some sort of reason not to be in the house. If he wasn’t at work, he was at the gym or at dinner with friends, and by the time he made it home, he would just go right back to sleep without even spending time with Bentley.

I didn’t know if he was overwhelmed by the thought of figuring out what to do, or if he just wasn’t interested. Maybe he was afraid of messing up, so he decided not to try. Or maybe it was because I wasn’t asking for help, so he thought I didn’t need it. And it was true that I didn’t express my frustration to him when I could have. But I didn’t want to be that person. It was just a bad mixture brewing between young parents.

Once the hustle and bustle following the birth had faded, Bentley was my only company. My friends were making their ways through senior year. My parents had stepped back to let me settle into motherhood. And Ryan was always working or doing his thing. Slowly but surely, unhappy feelings began to creep in. For one thing, I was no longer quite as okay with that whole concept of being on my own. It was great when I was just a typical teenage girl with a healthy sense of independence. But now I was a teen mom in an adult life with a fiancé and a baby, and I couldn’t make it all work by myself. I needed support, communication, and company. I believed that Bentley needed a good relationship with his father. And when the reality of what was really happening snapped into place, it felt like my wheels spun out.

From that first moment in the shower when I knew I was pregnant to the moment Bentley was born, a million fears and doubts circled the edges of my mind. But I never thought I’d be raising Bentley without a father. We were engaged. We lived together. We had our families supporting us, our moms helping us, our friends excited for us. And we had this amazing child who needed us both to be there with him. It wasn’t just that our circumstances could have been worse. We didn’t even have it that bad. We actually had it pretty good. There was no reason for me to think we wouldn’t be able to make it work and be happy as a family.

***

While things between Ryan and me looked worse by the week, things between Bentley and me were great. I got lucky. Bentley was really chill. Apart from when he was being a normal newborn, needing a bottle every three hours and crying when he didn’t get what he wanted, he was never a big whiner. In fact, he showed no interest in any of the usual baby quirks that drive new parents crazy. He never had tummy aches. He liked the first formula I gave him. No allergic reactions to soaps or laundry detergents. Even his teething phase barely made an impression on my memory, because somehow it never drove him to the kind of meltdowns you’re taught to expect.

People make a big deal out of a baby’s first words. For me the big moment was when he started cooing. For a month or so, babies don’t really make any noise except for crying. So when you catch them making their first attempts at the kinds of sounds that will someday turn into words, it’s almost mind-blowing. There was something so amazing to me about watching him go through those first increments of growing and developing. I could look into his eyes and see his little brain starting to work things out. I’d talk to him, and he’d reply to me with his little sounds. It was so incredible and sweet. I could actually see him transforming from a crazy baby to a real person. That had more of an impact on me than his first words did. There was a lot of wonder involved in parenting. It was fascinating in all of these ways I hadn’t expected. I loved watching him pick up on things. It’s so interesting to watch them learn the most basic things from scratch, just through instinct and adaptation.

And yet for all the wonder and whimsy in the house, the tension between Ryan and me was still just creeping deeper and deeper. To my complete shock and confusion, I just couldn’t figure out how to share that joy and excitement with him. Bentley was like this amazing, special energy in the house that was so easy to tap into. But I just couldn’t seem to get his father to see the appeal. And each day he found a reason he couldn’t spend time at home, I started grappling with the ugly possibility that he just didn’t want to be there.

If I was honest with myself, the doubts had started to creep in during the pregnancy. I wasn’t blind. I’d seen the hints of disinterest and the gap between our attitudes toward the baby and about what would happen next. But at the time, I had no idea what to do other than to wait for the craziness to die down and then get to working on it. I didn’t know what to do when it got worse. And it really did.

We started arguing all the time. If we weren’t arguing, we weren’t around each other. And I know my personality was part of the problem in that I didn’t want to ask him for help. I still didn’t consider myself that type of person. I wanted to be strong and composed and calm. Even though I needed him, I didn’t know how to let him know without sounding needy or weak. And frankly, I never thought I would have to spell it out. Forget about whether or not I could expect him to love parenthood as much as I did. There was a baby in the house. It was our baby. We were his parents. There were obvious things that needed to be done, and it was way too much to expect one person to handle.

I could have said that outright. But I didn’t. And maybe that was why he seemed to think it didn’t matter if he was around or not. Maybe he just didn’t know what to do, or he was afraid of screwing up, so he decided not to try. Maybe that was what fueled the distance between him and me and Bentley. It was possible. Unfortunately, we were both people who didn’t express our emotions freely. We didn’t communicate as well as we should have, and if that didn’t make it worse, it definitely didn’t make it better.

My parents had stayed together when they’d been in this situation. I thought Ryan and I could do the same. We were struggling, but they’d struggled, too. They had made it, so there was no reason we couldn’t come out the other end. It seemed simple enough to me. If anybody else could do it, couldn’t we do it? Wasn’t that obvious? It didn’t matter. I started to worry that I’d pushed all the fear and negative emotions aside for so long, I hadn’t been entirely realistic with myself. I wasn’t prepared for how much of a change having a baby was. I wasn’t ready to see it cause such an ugly reaction. Certainly not from the father.

There were a few months after Bentley was born and things had gone south where we had both acknowledged we weren’t in a good relationship, but we agreed we were going to work it out for Bentley. Unfortunately, things never got better. Eventually there wasn’t even enough of a connection for us to rescue. If we had still felt a bond and were still in love, I could have fixed things he didn’t like and he could have fixed things I didn’t like. But there was no mutual desire to build on.

It got to the point where I didn’t recognize our relationship anymore. I didn’t recognize him. He seemed to be a completely different person. And I had changed, too, drastically. Both of our lives had changed drastically. But no matter what, I was still Maci. Where had Ryan gone? Where was the nice, easygoing, courteous guy who’d shown so much respect and interest? I didn’t understand what had fundamentally changed between us, or within him. But we were miserable together. And when Bentley was asleep and I sat down on the couch to zone out in front of the TV, I felt so alone. It started to settle in: Now it’s just you and this baby, and you don’t have anyone else.

Whatever Bentley was doing, I was doing. I’d wake up and feed him, watch TV, and we’d just sit around. Babies sleep a lot. So it was just days full of feeding him and watching TV. I tried not to let myself get really depressed about it, but it was very, very lonely. Even when I did manage to see my friends once in awhile and hang out and do things, I just felt lonely. I had no one to share my experience with. I had someone I was supposed to share it with, but he was always somewhere else. There were times when I just sat there at night and thought to myself, “How did you get here? Why is this happening?”

I had no idea how things had gotten so toxic. But it was getting to be time to face the facts and deal with it. There was no getting around it: Something had to give. I got to a point where it was bouncing back and forth in my head. It was awful. I could either leave and be out of it and not have to deal with it anymore. Or, I could accept that this was just how it was, and hope that it would get better, hope that maybe when Bentley was older, his father would be more emotionally available. I didn’t want to give up. I didn’t consider failure an option. I didn’t want Bentley to have parents who weren’t together. I didn’t think that it was serious enough for me to leave, but I also worried that I’d lost perspective.

We were just miserable together. We fought, and that was it. That was literally it. That environment wasn’t good for me, or him, or anyone. It wouldn’t be good for Bentley in the long run. Pretty soon I went from not wanting Bentley to have separated parents, to not wanting Bentley to have parents who argued all the time. And on a different level, I knew I could do better for myself, too. It got to a point where I thought to myself, “You can’t live like this forever. This isn’t you. You’re not going to settle for this.”

A failing relationship is the kind of weight that builds up so gradually you don’t even notice it until it’s completely dragging you down. It’s almost an unpleasant shock to lose that burden, as freeing as it is. Giving up on that relationship was a difficult decision. It was the first point in my life when I realized that no matter how hard I worked, things weren’t always going to go the way that I had planned them. I had to swallow my pride and accept it.

In December, when Bentley was a little more than a year old, Ryan and I finally called it quits.

***

Maybe if Ryan and I had communicated better, it could have worked. But I came to believe that we wouldn’t have lasted anyway. The most we could have hoped for was to keep it alive longer, patching it up and dragging it along until there wasn’t even a dead horse left to beat. But in fact, it felt like we’d done that already. Even if we had turned around and started doing everything perfectly, there was no love left to back it up. We had grown too far apart, and we didn’t like each other anymore. I did miss the person I knew before everything changed, and it was hard for me to understand how we went from being so in love and obsessed with each other to literally hating each other. But I’d almost forgotten what the good times were like. All I knew was misery with him, and I’m sure that was all he knew with me, too.

At first, before it all sank in, there was a huge sense of relief when that weight fell from my shoulders. It was time for the next chapter. The sun was shining and the air was fresh. But that happiness didn’t last for long. A few days later, I started to feel uncertain about the whole thing. Maybe I didn’t believe we would be broken up forever. A part of me hoped that the breakup would jar him into realizing what he was giving up. I hoped he would miss me and want us to be back together. I hoped he would realize he wanted to be a part of Bentley’s life and start to make it happen. So I wasn’t happy when I saw him move on as quickly as he did.

Then, of course, I started to hear things. About the girls he had been talking to, and the places he’d been. I didn’t seek the information out, but I didn’t have to. Sometimes when you break up with someone, that stuff starts to trickle into your hearing range whether you want it to or not. There were many things I heard that I didn’t care to hear. I wasn’t shocked, but it wasn’t fun.

Still, I knew I’d made the right decision. Life didn’t get easier in general, but I was glad to lose at least one painful problem. The biggest improvement that came out of the breakup was not having to fight anymore. Not just in terms of arguing with him, but in terms of pouring so much of my energy into saving a doomed relationship. I didn’t have to worry about what he was doing anymore. I didn’t have to worry about asking him for help and dealing with his anger. I didn’t have to worry if we got along at all. I was glad to be back in the light after spending so long in that tunnel of anger and sadness.