In Spite of Everything (25 page)

And we went from the working premise that my propensity to being a chatterbox was an irritant to the two of us barely talking at all. This, too, happened over time. No,
you
set up the playdates—you’re better at chatting with people than I am. No,
you
go to the teacher conference—you’re so chatty, people respond to that kind of thing. Can’t you ever just
walk down the street
without chatting? Do you always have to talk to
everyone
? Uh-oh, look out—Mama’s going to start
chatting
now! (
No chatting, Mama! No chatting, Mama!
) Why should we hire a babysitter so we can go out to dinner—so we can spend a shitload of money just to
chat
? Why should we spend money on a babysitter so that we can go to a movie—can’t we just wait for it to come out on DVD? Plus, if we don’t have a babysitter so we can work, why should we have one just to go out? What are we going to do out that we couldn’t do at home? Can you just let me watch TV? There’s nothing to talk about.

By the time our older daughter was six, we had been out, as a couple, no more than ten times. He didn’t want to. It wasn’t just me. Cal’s friends still invited him out to concerts and parties every so often, but he never wanted to go. He didn’t want to stay out that late, he said; he’d be a wreck for the kids the next day. Then go out for just a little while, I would urge; no one is asking you to go out
until two in the morning. They have nannies, au pairs, rich parents, he’d say; their lives are different, not hard like ours. I countered: But I’ll stay at home—you go out! It’s not hard! And also, our life did not
have
to be hard; we were, at some level, choosing to make it hard. Since we didn’t have a sitter during the workweek, I argued, it actually made a lot of sense to ask someone we knew well—or at least his parents, who lived only fifteen minutes away!—to take care of the children for a few hours just once a month so that we could have a date. Even people who had full-time child care did it; they even went out together once a week. It would be a healthy thing to do, important for us as a couple. We needed a break! He didn’t want to. It was too disruptive to the family schedule, to his rhythm.

He didn’t want to
. My initial thought was that he had fallen into a serious rut—maybe even a mild depression—and needed help shaking out of it. Beyond the communications breakdown, the classic signs were there. He didn’t leave the apartment if he could avoid it. He’d always been a solid dresser; now, he wore the same outfit virtually every day, changing only his undershirt. His threadbare jeans and flapping sandals, and his unaccountable refusal to buy new ones, became a running joke with the few family friends we now saw. Cal and I laughed about it in their presence, but after they left, I would raise the issue more earnestly. Hanging on to those things has become ludicrously symbolic, I’d say. You’re hanging on to a system that no longer functions, and it’s literally undermining you. Bartleby the Scrivener, man! The weird guy in
Office Space
! Come
on
! He was not amused. He didn’t want to change, didn’t want help, didn’t want to talk about it.

Maybe he and his business partner should rent a cheap workspace, just to get out of the house? I found him a rent-controlled one-bedroom in the city, near our subway line, that was laughably inexpensive. He didn’t want to. That was an
outrageous
suggestion, he spat. Not only would it be a waste of
money;
it would be a waste of time
commuting
. Who would make
dinner
? So maybe the real problem was that he wasn’t happy with his job; he should think
about what he would really like to do. He was a phenomenal chef—maybe he should look into the restaurant business, or at least cooking school? He didn’t want to. That was just
crazy
, he said. When would he have the time for
that
? Maybe he was unhappy, depressed—maybe he should see someone. Are you
kidding
? He didn’t want to.

And then there was the matter of sex.

S
ince the first woman gave birth to the first child on earth, the sex lives of the parents of young children have taken a nosedive. But Generation X parents, it seems, are diving headlong into the abyss. In 2008,
The Journal of Sex Research
published the results of a study on “sensual and sexual marital contentment in parents of small children.” Six years prior to the report, researchers had tracked the sex lives of 452 parents whose babies were six months old; they were reevaluated four years later. “Sexual contentment remained low,” the study said. “More parents had changed from being sensually content in 2002 to discontent in 2006, than the contrary.” Even those who hadn’t had a second child weren’t back to their pre-parenthood sex lives: “The average sexual frequency was low both at six months and at four years for both parents with and without additional children.” Moreover, a 2005 study of more than eight hundred parents had discovered that “the majority of parents had sexual intercourse once to twice a month when the baby was six months old.”

Sex, sex, sex. One of the focal points of my ambling thoughts and conversations about marriage in the last year of my own was sex. Not an original theme, but what began to become profoundly clear was that people who had formed a strong sexual union before having children were stronger in their marriages than those of us who hadn’t. Again, perhaps not surprising, but it came as kind of a clarion revelation. This came into stark relief a few years later when I found myself engaged in a surprising conversation with an Orthodox Jewish acquaintance who was describing nuptial guidelines in
the Orthodox tradition. Isaac said that when he got engaged, he had to enroll in the requisite marriage preparation class for men, which is taught by the synagogue’s rabbi. Such classes are essential, since, if you’ve been a “good Jewish boy,” he said, you have never even grazed a woman other than your mother or sister. Since these young men know nothing, practically speaking, about sex, a vital function of the classes is to teach them how to be good husbands in that department. Isaac said that everyone, obviously, feels ridiculous and embarrassed to have to learn the finer points of pleasing your wife from your religious counselor, but, he said, the rabbi emphasized the importance of knowing what you’re doing. In Orthodox Jewish law, a rabbi must issue what’s called a
get
to make divorce official. The rabbi told them that the underlying cause of 99 percent of the
gittin
he had personally overseen was an unsatisfactory sex life.

Ninety-nine percent
. Instinct dictates that Isaac’s rabbi may have inflated that statistic a shade for emphasis. Still, his message is one that any couples therapist would, and does, underscore, and it supports a theory of my own about why sex is so important in a couple’s life now, post-children. In the first three years of a child’s life, virtually every part of a couple’s previous relationship and dynamic is stripped bare. The child’s needs are so urgent, and so constant, that one is almost always in a state of triage, even when happy. There is no possibility of nuanced pillow talk; your brain is just fried. Furthermore, our generation does share child rearing (at least much more than any other), and by the time we have children, both members of the couple have built at least some part of their identity on work. This means that we don’t have much appreciation for each other’s differences and separateness during those early years in our children’s life—and that, I believe, can lead to malaise, resentment, and hostility.

If you, for example, are taking care of the baby and your husband is going off to work, you have a pretty good idea of what his day is like, having gone off to work yourself for a good deal of your life. You are then in a position to compare your day with his, and you decide
that you are resentful because his day does not compel him to be so relentlessly alert and responsive. When your husband watches you feed the fussy baby with some difficulty, he may feel free to criticize your style, having perfected a style of his own that seems to work beautifully. Because everyone knows everyone’s business, there is no respect for each other’s expertise; neither can claim it, because both have it.

Except in the area of sex. This is the one relation at this stage of life in which appreciation of differences and separateness are essential, capable of dissolving resentment and enmeshment. Good sex yields a sense of having been imprinted by the other, even as it lends a sense of mystery. If you don’t have this sense of sexual union, or haven’t had it at one point in your relationship, you end up with what’s left: malaise, resentment, and hostility. This is not to say that you don’t love your child with every vein, bone, and sinew in your body. But unless you have that strong sexual bond, it seems safe to say that having a baby won’t bring you closer together. It will drive you apart.

In light of this theory, that outcome was perhaps even more inevitable for us. For one thing, since we both worked from home, there was zero mystery about what the other was doing with his or her day. We saw it all. No wonder Cal said there was nothing to talk about at the end of the day. For another, it wasn’t that the traditional gender roles were askew, or even neatly reversed, in our relationship. We both behaved as though he was doing everything, and that he should, because I was incompetent to do it. We both believed it. It was not unlike a yuppie, Gen-X egalitarian take on
The Yellow Wallpaper
in which we were both, in our own ways, prisoners of that stifling attic room, isolated and unable to appreciate the pathology of our rapport. To us, and to everyone else, it seemed we had solved the thorny riddle of having it all. But the moment the door first creaked open and an outsider got a peek in, it felt as though a routine police check had stumbled upon bound hostages in a bunker.

I
had been helping out an old friend—a single mother—by picking up her daughter from day care a couple of times a week and taking her, along with my daughters, back to their apartment (the girl felt more secure at her own home), feeding everyone dinner, and playing with all the little monkeys until my friend came home from work. It was fun. One evening, I guess I seemed blue, and my friend asked me what was up. Oh, you know, Cal’s stressed and mad, but who can blame him, I said. You know what an incompetent I am. There was a pause. No, I don’t, said my friend. Well, you know, I said, I can’t even make dinner. My friend put both hands on the table and looked me in the eye. You got a major book deal, are writing the book, and are making your deadlines, without child care; you pick up your own children, and my child, from school; you make everyone dinner; you talk to me about my problems when I get home from work; you are funny and lovable. When I tell my colleagues about everything you do, they laugh. You, she said, are a parody of competence.
Anyone can make dinner
. I stared. Then, I sobbed.

What should Cal and I have done differently? Some would review our decisions and say that in the final analysis, it was the family bed that did us in. Ideally, you’re supposed to sneak out of the family bed to have sex in another room. As the children get older, you’re supposed to work on phasing them out by having them sleep in little nests on the floor beside your bed or moving them into their own shared room (which we had done, with varying degrees of success, depending on the night). It is not supposed to drive a wedge into the fissures in your relationship with your mate. The family bed is not supposed to become an excuse to avoid each other. But polemics are handily plastic, often allowing people to use them as a screen to avoid confronting some other, murky matter of personal discontentment.

It was no fault of the children’s, of our decision to do it, of the
practice itself. I wouldn’t have done it any differently. I loved cuddling with my babies at least as much as, if not more than, they did. I don’t know whether any of their sense of confidence and security can be traced to the family bed, but it certainly didn’t hurt, and I don’t think either Cal or I minded hedging our bets in any case. The point here is that if Cal and I had had a different dynamic—which is to say, an immutable sexual bond—the family bed might have come to symbolize not a gulf but a bridge in our relationship.

Friends tell me that it did in theirs. Some women have told me, for example, that prior to having children, their mates had seen them as sexual, but still in a teenage boy kind of way. But after having children, seeing their wives nursing, having the babies in the bed, their mates’ whole idea of womanhood was expanded. For that matter, some women report that their husbands viewed pregnancy as the ultimate expression of their sexual connection. One woman said that her husband confessed after the fact that he had had an erection during her labor. While she was glad, certainly, that he had waited to tell her this until her stitches had healed, she also thought it was kind of awesome. I confess to being rather blown away by this, but okay. For me, the takeaway here is that sexual relationships are powerful by anyone’s reckoning, and particularly so between a couple with children.