Aug 23 2009
One is enough. Ya think?
It looks like some people are taking the clue:
http://www.aolhealth.com/healthy-living/relationships/having-one-baby?icid=main|main
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%2Fhaving-one-baby
For Some Couples, One Kid Is Enough
A mother of one considers her waning fertility but chooses her life as is.
It looks as if I won’t have another baby. Not for medical reasons (though I’m on the downward slope of my fertility) and not for lack of a loving partner. Indeed, it’s due to the ongoing excellence of my relationship with my boyfriend that I’m hesitant to press the baby issue — even though I count the days when I was pregnant with my daughter, now 14, as among the happiest of my life. I hold the unpopular opinion that having a baby doesn’t necessarily bind a couple together in the way our romantic notion of family claims. The upheaval in a couple’s life is seismic, and the notorious lack of a sound night’s sleep is the least of it.
I don’t mean to be curmudgeonly; I love babies as much as the next person. But their sheer existence doesn’t necessarily spell bliss.
When my daughter was two, her father and I decided that our marriage had come to an end. This isn’t uncommon. While many toddlers are patting the bunny, the relationship that created them is disintegrating.
The husband-now-father and wife-now-mother are so busy peering into the bassinet that they’ve forgotten to look at each other — and when they finally do, they’ve lost interest.
My daughter’s father and I had met in film school. We’d been together more than a decade, yoked not unhappily to one another, compatriots in forging our careers. We were companions who split everything 50/50.
It was all good, if lacking passion. After our girl was born, the inevitable gender differences came — and yes, I’m sorry to report, they are inevitable. Like many fathers, my husband was sidelined until he could relate to our daughter as something more than a miraculous contraption specializing in moving milk through her tiny alimentary canal.
Meanwhile, I submitted to my hardwiring and became her devoted servant. She was an exemplary baby: a champion sleeper, a straightforward eater, and so healthy that the first time she threw up she was old enough to say, “Mom! The Cocoa Puffs were on the inside and now they’re on the outside!” She was — and remains — perfect.
Her father was more involved than many men. He took her for hours at a time, could feed her and change her without needing an audience. (I have a handful of friends whose husbands are happy to do the dirty work of parenting, as long as their contributions are noted and rewarded.)
Soon, he had a relationship with her, I had a relationship with her, but he and I no longer had a relationship with each other.
We limped along, hired babysitters so we could go on proper dates, and spent money we didn’t have on so-called romantic getaways. These were agonizing occasions, because they underscored what we’d never really had: a passionate attachment. In the end, all of our buried passions were directed toward our magnificent daughter.
Our divorce — which I couldn’t help thinking was related to having become a mother — was an incomprehensible life development. It was particularly difficult to grasp in light of my parents’ intact marriage and the dearth of divorced couples in the Southern California suburb in which I grew up.
Back then, “stay-at-home mom” was a classification that didn’t exist. The mothers I knew didn’t work, and if they were dealing with postpartum depression, exhaustion, boredom, lack of interest in sex or their husbands, they kept it to themselves.
For a time, I wondered if I wasn’t a modern day Demeter — one of those women who, upon having a child, find their men to be superfluous. Rather than focusing on their husbands and affectionately tolerating children underfoot, they adore their children and value men for the security they provide, but little else.
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Isn’t it amazing how some women are now just discovering that a baby takes up their space, time, and yes, gets in between their marriage? These tiny third parties have an uncanny way of intervening in a marriage, causing the man to feel pushed aside while the mother loves the child, knowing the baby can’t rebel since the baby knows nothing about rebellion or “I hate you Mom!” (something reserved to the aged 8 and over crowd). Babies are unnecessary in the completion in a relationship - indeed, some people may think a child does not complete a relationship at all, it simply exacerbates the marriage. Most men don’t want to hang around children unless they’re pedophiles. Maybe couples should spend more time bonding with each other in a real relationship, rather than let it go to pot, and waste that time raising babies.
