Choice

One of N's friend's moms emailed and later called me tonight, asking if N would like to join her and her son at a restaurant for a back-to-school lunch tomorrow.

Sounds like fun, right? Except N doesn't do well with last-minute plans. And he's not comfortable in restaurants. Especially since he doesn't eat much in the way of 'unusual' foods. (It's a Japanese restaurant of the Benihana type.)

So he said he only wanted to go if I could go. And I can't go, because I have to work tomorrow. Oh, let's not even go THERE. (Nutshell: My one-year anniversary at work was today. It's a great job, and since I have to work, it's where I want to work. But I don't WANT to have to work, and when it comes down to my kid needing me and me not being able to be there, well...Guilt and resentment. A fine combination, no?)

Despite the three paragraphs just spent on it, the story above isn't going anywhere, really. I emailed the mom back and declined, explaining briefly that N was a little anxious about a lunch date, but we should definitely get the boys together to play soon, maybe go bowling, something like that. The end.

Except.

The problem with these situations is that there are a lot of ways to handle them. The problem with these situations is that none of those ways is necessarily THE way. And the simultaneous problem and blessing in my life is that my husband, with his own way of thinking about things, doesn't always agree with my way, the road I choose. Nor I his.

Which is the literary way of saying that we fought about this decision. I could hedge and say we discussed it--there were no raised voices, and there was certainly no name-calling, because that's just not anything we DO, so it could be called a discussion. But it was a fight. What I call a fight, at least--where we disagree and never do find a common ground, and despite an ultimate agreement to disagree there's resentment in the air, if only for a short while. (And then, within an hour, we're on to something else--talking about politics, analyzing So You Think You Can Dance, laughing at the dog. Our marriage isn't perfect, but it's fine. For some reason, whenever I talk about this sort of thing, I feel the need to make that point. Otherwise, I always worry that it looks from the outside like we're on the edge of complete implosion, when really, we're mostly on the edge of giggling.)

We could all discuss the relative merits of choice--of letting kids have a choice, of when choices should be given, when they're not appropriate--until the cows come home (and have babies, and those babies come home, and so on). And, for a while there, it looked like that's exactly what Baroy and I would end up doing. Instead, I threw up my hand and said, "When the ball's in my court, I do what I do. And I'm not going to second-guess my instincts by wondering what YOU would like me to do."

Which, in retrospect...I think I would hate hearing if the tables where turned. But I also think it's true; I think it's the only way to actually make sure-footed decisions. When *I'm* the one with the ultimate decision-making ability, that is. But when he's the one? I know it would drive me nuts to think he was doing the wrong thing, only to have him basically say, "Tough noogies. It's my choice. Live with it."

I remember when people talked about marriage being all about compromise, and god, no matter how closely I listened, I had no IDEA what that really meant. It's like that whole "yeah, childbirth hurts" thing that is simply NOT POSSIBLE TO FATHOM until you find yourself so fully and completely terrified by the weight of the pain--having never known before that pain could, indeed, be heavy--that you can't even draw in a breath. Marriage and compromise are the same thing: There are times--and, for me, they've all been since I became a mother--when the mere idea of compromise becomes something breath-stealingly, absolutely massively heavy. When it's painful. When, as is too often the case with me when talking about Em and N, it's impossible.

But that doesn't mean I can't see Baroy's side. That's what's so painful. Because if he's right, then I'm wrong. And if I'm wrong, my kid has been, at best, slighted, not given the chance to grow and stretch. And if I'm wrong, my kid has been, at worst, stifled, not given the chance to grow and stretch.

And so while I stood my ground tonight, and while I stand it most nights like this one, I also have to consider the other choices, and what those roads not taken could have, might have, meant to me, to Baroy, to our son. My mind wanders down those roads, some of which are dark and lonely and scary, and I realize that maybe this is, in the end, where he'll wind up. Maybe this is, in the end, where I'll have led him. Or maybe, with my help, he'll find the clearing. Or maybe, it'll be his dad's help that gets him there, despite me. Maybe.

It's enough to paralyze a person, it is. Enough with the choices. Bring on the certainties.

Thirteen

It's hard for me to think of myself as a person who does anything for 13 straight years, including being married. But, apparently, I am a person who does that...and so is Baroy. Our 13th wedding anniversary was on Tuesday, St. Patrick's Day.

[What? It was the perfect date for two Jews to marry. Before the 'wedding season,' so much cheaper. Took the whole 'color scheme' decision right out of my hands...we even signed our marriage license and our ketubah in green ink! And, most importantly, the place we wanted didn't already have a wedding planned for that day. Sold.]

It was last Sunday, amidst the bustle of serving food to all 18 members of our Sunday gang, that Baroy looked at me and said, "We haven't even thought about our anniversary and what we're going to do, have we?" And I looked back at him with pleading eyes. "If you love me, your present to me will be that we won't do presents or cards or ANYTHING, because I just...can't...right now. It's too much. There's too much going on."

"Done," he said. And so it was...aside from the his-and-hers Facebook status updates announcing our pleasure at finding ourselves still married, still happy, 13 years later.

We're hoping to get out to dinner one of these nights soon. It's hard, though. I'm not quite ready to leave Em to watch N for several hours at night; we do an hour or two during the day on rare occasions, but that's it. And the thought of paying for a babysitter sort of takes all the momentum out of us to actually do this thing. So we'll wait for a convenient night, one where one of our friends (TC waves at Susanna, Ambre, Deb) is home and wouldn't mind an extra couple of kids. Or we'll just not get around to it. Which is OK, too. Because, really, aside from feeling like other people would think it's a sign that there's something wrong with our marriage for us to care this little, to make this little of an effort...it really doesn't bother me.

After all, our marriage was never about candlelit dinners at a steakhouse. It's always been about making a home together, raising our children, just being. It's always been about dinners in a well-lit, warm, spicy-smelling kitchen...which is exactly how we commemorated it. Thirteen years from the day we took vows to do just this.

Twofer!

We went down to Marc and Glen's theater last night to see an LA-spoofing cabaret show they'd put together. (N did NOT belong there; taking him was our bad. But other than wanting to kill him when he asked to go to the bathroom for the third time during the first act, we had a wonderful time.)

Before the show, we went out to get something to eat with Marc. At some point, we were talking about where Em got her newfound love of the theater from, and Marc commented, "Hey, maybe you got it from me. Maybe *I'm* your father."

I laughed and said, "Well, if I'd have taken you up on your offer that time..."

Em looked at me quizzically. "Uncle Marc once proposed to me," I confided.

"He DID?" She looked confused.

"I did," Marc confirmed.

"Uh-huh," I said, moving in to stage whisper in Em's ear so that Marc could hear, but N couldn't. "He told me that he would have married me...if only I'd had a penis."

The look of shock on BOTH of their faces. The red that rose to all four cheeks immediately. SCORE!

[For the record: It was at a piano bar, where we were celebrating Marc's 35th (I think) birthday many years ago, before Baroy and I were married, though we may have been engaged. Pretty much every guy in the place knew Marc, and pretty much every one of them had bought him a drink. He was HAMMERED. A woman selling roses wandered through, and Marc bought me one, handed it to me, told me he loved me, and then made his 'if only you had a penis' proposal. Glen, who was sitting next to Marc, rolled his eyes. I swooned...and then, later, helped Glen and Baroy carry Marc to the bathroom in our shared apartment so he could, um, get rid of some of the alcohol he'd consumed, while he kept telling us, "I don't trusssshhhhhhht you." It was a brilliant night. And it's totally going into the novel I plan to write one day about our little cohabiting foursome.]

Go Away and Leave Us Alone

Note to self: Don't ever again promise to write a post a day during your anniversary month, lest you find yourself

• dropping the kids off with the lovely friends who offered to keep them overnight
• going out to dinner and stuffing yourself full of as much smelly and delicious garlic as you could possible even consider ingesting (including a very dirty and very scrumptious garlic martini)
• driving home to your empty home, laughing and holding hands
• running to the computer so you can get a post in before midnight.

It's all about priorities, people!

And now I am done with you all for tonight. My husband is downstairs on the couch, waiting for me to come watch The Ten Commandments with him. (Garlic and Moses. We are bringing sexy *back*!)

Oh, and in case you were wondering...Of course I'm leaving my bra on the coffee table for Em to find tomorrow. How could I possibly pass up such a golden opportunity to mess with a 10-year-old's mind?

Reunion

Twelve years ago tomorrow, Baroy and I were married by a rabbi (my uncle--more specifically, my stepfather's brother) in a really lovely ceremony in New York. Two weeks later, for a variety of reasons, we had a second ceremony in Los Angeles, in Marina del Rey. That ceremony--and it was an equally lovely if less traditional ceremony, at which we exchanged rings again and said different-but-no-less-meaningful vows--was officiated by the brother of one of Baroy's friends, a truly wonderful man who is properly ordained to perform such rites of passage. Of course, within just a couple of years, life had done what it does, and we lost direct touch with him, though his sister--Baroy's friend-- has kept Baroy up to date on significant events in his life.

Last night, we went out with our havurah to celebrate our upcoming anniversary (as well as to celebrate another member's 50th birthday next week, and another's successful participation in a 100-mile bike ride for the second year in a row). We went to a place that holds a lot of memories for us: It was the restaurant that our friends M and G took us to the night before Em came home from the NICU, six days after she was born; it was the restaurant to which we took my father on one of his two or three visits to the area. And so we were sitting there, 14 of us in all, talking about all these milestones in our lives, when all of a sudden I noticed Baroy leap up from his seat, a huge smile on his face; seconds later, he was hugging the very man, M, who had done our second wedding ceremony a dozen years earlier.

I of course joined Baroy, laughing and exclaiming over M and his wife, and wondering how it was that they came to be in this restaurant, which is nowhere near where they live (and not so near where we live now, either). We re-introduced them to Em, whom they'd last seen when she was around two years old, and to N, whom they'd never met.

When they left, soon after (they were on their way to a theatrical performance and couldn't stay to catch up), we'd pledged to get together for real, real soon, and I fell back into my seat, shaking my head in amazement. Our friends, too, were open-mouthed over this coincidence. There we were, celebrating our marriage, only to have one of the men who put an official stamp on it walk right past our table, and back into our lives. That, we decided, called for yet another l'chaim. And so we drank to coincidence and love and fate and the people who play roles both large and small in making our lives what they are today.

Strange and mysterious ways, my friends. Strange and mysterious.

The Poor Widow

You know those stories you always used to hear--back in the day of the Husband Who Worked and the Wife Who Stayed Home Because No Wife of MINE is Going to Work Damnit--about the woman whose husband either died suddenly or left her for his secretary, and the woman didn't know how to write a check or even where the checkbook WAS?

That would be me. If Baroy dies, I am so screwed. (In ADDITION to being bereaved, I mean. I would care! Really I would! Don't look at me like that! I'm just making a point here.) Luckily, being chronically unemployed means he doesn't have a secretary for whom he can leave me. I knew there was an upside to his job situation if only I looked long enough.

I realized this today when I needed to find my passport in order to fill out a bunch of paperwork I have to redo for no reason for ParentsConnect. (Don't ask. No, really, don't. It just makes my head explode in anger and frustration, and then the walls get messy.)

The good news is that I know where the Super Secret Hiding Spot for Important Papers is. (Well, OK. I knew about where it was, and I only looked in three wrong places before hitting the right one. Don't burst my bubble, people.) The bad news? Is that there's a lock box in that location. And that lock box requires a key. And I hadn't the faintest idea where that key was or might be. I didn't even know what KIND of key it was. And since my head was already exploding from the frustration of having to fill out this paperwork in the first place...well, let's just say that then having to try to track down my husband (at the gym/not answering his cell phone for the first hour I tried it over and over again) to find out where the key was made me just the eeeeeeeeniest bit angry. Angrier, I mean. The walls, they are plenty messy now.

I hate feeling like a stranger in my own home. I've abdicated responsibility for most financial/paperwork/legal stuff to Baroy, for very good reasons, most of which fall either under "He's really good at it" or "I'm exceptionally bad at it." But that's no excuse for me having let things get so far away from me that I'm not sure what banks we do business with or who holds our mortgage or how much we have in our investment accounts. (Or is it account, singular? I'm not sure.) And there's no excuse for me not to know where the frickin' key is. Any frickin' key, to any part of this house or our lives.

He just better not die, is all I can say. At least not until I make a copy of that key.

That man makes me laugh

It's Sunday-night get-together with the gang. Eight adults, nine kids. The youngest four or five boys are running around with various gun-like toys, shooting at each other. S, the mom of the house, stops them. "Hey, you guys know the rule! No shooting at people!"

"But Mom," says one of her sons, "Dad said we could."

Looking over at said Dad, I roll my eyes disbelievingly. "You didn't really tell them they could shoot at people, did you?"

"Actually, I did," the Dad replies.

S makes a face in his direction that pretty much says it all. "Ooooh, you're in trouble," I say.

"Well," the Dad says, "I thought it was assumed that when I said they could shoot each other, I only meant they could shoot each other until their Mom saw them and put an end to it."

My kids are destroying my marriage

I'm not going to go all universal on you all, because hey, maybe having kids actually made your marriage better, and who am I to say it didn't? (I mean, it didn't. There's just no way. But if you want to believe it did, who am I to burst your bubble?) Over here in the land of the Temporarily Confused, however, not so much on the better as a result of the kiddage.

And so I state: After nine days of just me and Baroy--after nine days of candlelight dinners at home where I got to try out recipes the kids wouldn't consider touching, after nine days of sex in places without a bed and movies and talking and just sitting together--it's quite clear that, at least in my household, the kids are destroying our marriage.

This isn't news to me, mind you. I'd always pretty much assumed that was the case. I often talk about how Baroy and I didn't have a single fight--not even a single significant argument that I can think of--until approximately three weeks after Em was born, which has become known as The Night When Baroy Threw Me Out of the House. (The story, in case I haven't told it ad nauseum: I wouldn't let him try to soothe a crying Em, because I knew I could calm her down more quickly and every single mommy hormone in my body freaked out whenever she cried...so he screamed at me to let him take care of it, put my car keys in my hand, shoved me out the door and locked it behind me. I drove around for 40 minutes, bawling my postpartum eyes out, but came home to a sleeping kid. I realized how right he was, and what an ass I was being, all SuperMommy and condescending, but I never really have forgiven him. Especially after he admitted to me, a few weeks later, that she'd cried for 37 minutes of the time I was gone and had only JUST passed out, exhausted, when I walked in the door. I'm sure she was permanently damaged by the experience, even if she does seem to be nothing but fabulous and brilliant and sweet and such at the moment. I'm sure there's a psychiatrist in her future who will back me up.)

In the ten years since, there have been too many skirmishes to count. Which is not to say we have a lousy marriage, because we don't. And it's not to say that we despise each other, because we don't. But it wasn't until somewhere around Day 5 of No Kids In The House that I realized...not only do we still really like each other, but when we're childless, we STILL don't fight. Because there's nothing to fight ABOUT. If Baroy wants to sit down in the front of the TV from the time dinner's over until the time he comes to bed, what does it matter...if there are no kids around whose baths need supervising or whose homework needs checking or who need a parent to help them floss, read them a book, tuck them into bed. When there are no kids, neither of us needs to give the other one a look that says, "Why are you being so hard on them?" or "Why are you being such a doormat?" or "What is WRONG with you? That's not the way to handle it." The bottom line: Neither of us needs a break from the constant demands of parenting if there is no one to parent. And that is what we fight about most often. Or at least it's what *I* get pissy about most often. I won't speak for Baroy.

But even the "we don't fight except about the kids and things related to the kids" wasn't the most interesting revelation about life in a kidless house. The most interesting revelation was how much TIME we spent with each other. On purpose. Because we wanted to. As if we enjoyed each other's company.

Frankly, it was almost creepy. Except for how much I enjoyed it.

So why don't we hang out together when the kids are home? Because there's tension. (See above.) But mostly because there's no alone time, and alone time is the most precious thing in the world to me. So, instead of hanging out together, we hand the kids off to one another. I'll take them to the park to give Baroy a chance to do whatever he needs to do, then come home and expect him to watch them while I go for a walk. Or he'll leave them with me while he goes running for a few hours, and then he'll take them to the movies while I catch up on some work. We do stuff as a foursome, but not as often or as enthusiastically as I would have assumed in my idealistic pre-kid world. And when there's down time at home, well, it's every man for himself. The first person to say, "Keep an eye on the kids while I..." is the one who gets to take a nap/watch an inappropriate movie/run to the store without taking a kid with him or her. Do stuff together? Well, sure, it sounds fun in theory. But in reality, it usually means that there's one more parent around than absolutely necessary, giving up the chance to work on his or her book/read/watch something the kids aren't interested in on TV/do crafts/fix stuff around the house/make some phone calls/send out some resumes/run errands/get in some exercise/etc., etc., etc. And that stuff is so precious. Even if it does make me a Bad Mom to admit it. I love my alone time. More than I love my kid time, quite often. There, I said it.

Which is not to say that I'm not deliriously happy to have my kids home. I am. Truly. Deliriously. I love those kids. They rock. They crack me up, and make me feel needed and important, and I love watching them live their lives and grow and learn and all that cool that's-why-I-had-kids stuff. It's worth it, even if my marriage does suck, relatively speaking, because of them.

In the end, here's what I realized: Despite all the doomsday psychologists who proclaim that if you neglect your marriage, there will be nothing left when the kids leave home, my marriage is doing fine...even great...despite the neglect. It's just not obvious right now. But when the kids are gone, and the nest is empty, and I'm desolate without my babies to cluck over (and trust me, despite it all, I will indeed be desolate), I have time with my husband to look forward to. We'll do just fine as empty nesters, in terms of our relationship. In fact, desolation aside, I'm looking forward to it now, having seen--in just nine days--just how nice it can be.