JOE: “You’re never finished with your call. You just call someone else.”
ME: “Then I guess I’ll never talk to you again. It was nice knowing you.”
It pisses me off that he gets prickly when I’m on the phone because to me the implication is that I should be sitting around waiting for the moment he is available to generously grace me with his presence. He can’t multitask, so therefore I shouldn’t. (Actually when he’s on the phone he paces back and forth the entire time—typically in whatever room I happen to be occupying at the moment—which is super relaxing to watch and doesn’t make me want to trip him or anything.) Perhaps the most ironic bit is that when I eventually wrap up my conversation and hang up the phone—and I know you saw this coming—he has absolutely nothing to say to me.
ME: “What did you need?”
JOE: “Nothing specific, I just wanted to talk to you.”
ME: “So shoot.”
JOE: “Never mind.”
ME: “Are you serious? I hung up because I thought you needed to talk to me.”
JOE: “Well, now I don’t.”
ME: “You are absolutely impossible, do you know that?”
JOE: “I can’t help it. I’m a guy.”
“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
My husband has a gas problem. I don’t know where it all comes from and if this is normal, but he will pull one butt cheek for these releases of trapped air—maybe to increase the chances of it being silent? It’s not like you can’t see what he is doing.
LYNN
Even though my husband is a blameless, testosterone-driven being, I really do love him a lot. And also sometimes—in particular when I’m trying to send him a sly, subliminal message—I wish he would get a fucking clue.
Once again, evidently it’s not his fault. Studies have shown that women experience significantly more “communication events” per day than men do, referring to those subtle body language gestures we use to convey volumes to one another without saying a single word. A gal can lift her eyebrow a millimeter and wordlessly convey to her friend, Holy shit, I cannot believe that skank had the nerve to show up here with him wearing that when everyone knows what she did without even a smirk. Being a man, my husband is utterly unable to give or receive anything resembling a covert message. It would be bad enough if he chose to simply ignore me when I’m trying to telepathically communicate something urgent like, Oh my God, check out the huge fake boobs on that chick over there or You may or may not have a large visible booger in your left nostril. Instead, he has this thing he does whenever I try to whisper something to him or give him a knowing look or heaven forbid attempt to employ some other sly way of catching his attention in public.
“Did you just kick me under the table?” he’ll ask full volume, a mere second after I have done precisely that, even when I’ve gone to the great trouble of looking elsewhere and appearing utterly spellbound by a lint speck on the tablecloth.
“What?” I reply, trying to sound shocked and feeling a band of sweat beads popping out above my upper lip that I’m certain are visible from the next zip code. “Of course I didn’t kick you under the table. Why would I kick you under the table? I mean, if I did kick you, it was purely accidental, so if you felt a kick I’m sorry if I accidentally did it.” At this point, I have a great urge to kick him, although his shin wouldn’t be my first target.
When we are finally alone, it’s the same exchange every time.
“I can’t believe you called me out!” I shout at my husband. Needless to say, I have never had to have this conversation with a single girlfriend.
“You know I hate it when you kick me under the table,” he says, not even the tiniest bit contrite.
“What is the big stinking deal? I was just trying to get your attention,” I try to explain. “It’s not like I’m round-housing you with a pair of golf spikes or anything.”
“Well, I don’t like it,” he pouts. “It makes me uncomfortable. Whispering makes me uncomfortable. Your horse ears make me uncomfortable.”
“I thought we were supposed to be a team,” I remind him. “What is so wrong with me wanting to share a little secret look or an inside joke with you sometimes?”
“Jenna, can’t you think about something—anything—and then just enjoy that thought and keep it to yourself?” he asks.
“Well, of course not!” I reply. “The whole point of having a thought is to share it.”
“Oh my God,” he says, and I can practically see the lightbulb going on above his head. “You really think that, don’t you?”
“Well, of course I do,” I huff.
He looks at me with genuine bewilderment, a mystified Martian stumbling across unfamiliar, rocky Venusian terrain.
“I can’t help it,” I add. “I’m a girl.”
“I noticed,” he replies with a lecherous leer, all thoughts of shin kicks forgotten. “Can I see your boobs?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
You’re Merely the Sperm
Donor, Dear
It sometimes happens, even in the best of families,
that a baby is born. This is not necessarily cause for alarm.
The important thing is to keep your wits about you
and borrow some money.
• ELINOR GOULDING SMITH •
Few would argue that raising children is a challenging endeavor. As a parent, you have to keep your spawn relatively clean and regularly fed, and make sure they are breathing and that they stay out of jail and don’t get (or get anyone else) pregnant. You have to teach them to read and to swim and to ride a bike and to wipe their own asses and that very bad things can happen when you stick metal bobby pins into electrical outlets. (Thanks a lot, Mom and Dad.) You have to outfit them with car seats and soccer cleats and braces and bras or cups and occasionally, regrettably, casts and crutches. You’ve got to clip their tiny fingernails and remember to get all of their shots and help them write 1,497 papers and make 892 dioramas and craft at least one working papier-mâché volcano out of chicken wire without poking anyone’s eye out. (Good luck with that!)
And will the brood you beget be born oozing sportsmanship, able to be graceful in both winning and losing? Hell, no. Courtesy coaching is but one of your countless parenting jobs. You will be responsible for modeling kindness and empathy and generosity and compassion, and because your kids will be far too busy imitating every move you make to listen to a word you say, you might want to start watching that potty mouth. You’ll remove splinters, resolve arguments, and pay good money for clothes and shoes that will never get worn and eventually get donated to Goodwill with the tags still on them. You will become proficient at administering Tylenol and timeouts and declarations of “We don’t like tattling” in your sleep. You’ll chauffer your progeny to Texas and back every week, dry a river of tears every month, and prepare them for that bittersweet day when they move out of your home and into their own, which will look a lot like yours because they’ll take half of your furnishings with them. Trying to juggle all of these highly complex tasks is hard enough in and of itself, but when there’s another person constantly getting in your way, the whole thing is almost enough to drive a gal to drink. Or at least, drink more than she normally would.
For me and Joe, the custodial debates started long before we even considered tossing caution—and birth control—to the wind. You see, Joe couldn’t wait to have kids, whereas I was decidedly on the fence about the whole issue. It’s not that I dislike children (only some of the more annoying ones); I just could see myself being happy with or without them, and I sort of felt that if you were going to create a new person inside of your very body and then squeeze it out of your vajayjay and into the world where you then were going to be responsible for its every need, you should really, really want it. Plus kids were expensive. And defiant. And very, very messy. Judging from my own childhood, parenting was a tiresome, thankless gig that had very little payoff. Why anyone did it was a bit of a mystery to me, frankl
y.
“It’s just that I know that the bulk of the child care responsibilities will fall on my shoulders, and I guess I resent the idea of being the primary caregiver,” I explained to the stranger we were paying $150 an hour to mediate this impossible debate and in effect, decide our future.
“Well, you will be the primary caregiver, so you’ d better get over the resentment,” the rat-faced counselor replied dryly. I kid you not, that’s what she said. I couldn’t decide which one of them I hated more: Her or the asshole sitting across from her whom I had obviously made the great mistake of marrying.
“He’s the one who wants to have kids!” I shouted, pointing at my smug bastard of a husband.
“It doesn’t matter,” the sexist, overpaid analyst informed me with just a little too much blasé for my taste. “You’re the mom. Details like dentist appointments and sleep schedules and how long to breastfeed and what sort of child care you’ll have typically default to the child’s mother. That’s just the way it works.”
“Well, if that’s the way it works, then it isn’t going to work at all,” I replied, storming out of her picturesque office and thinking she could have made at least a grand off us if she’d waited a few more sessions to drop that invariable little bomb. It would be several years before I acknowledged the fact that not only was she unequivocally right, but even given a dozen or so alternative options, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
Why don’t dads move when the kids say they need something? When our children say “I want some water” at the dinner table or “I need to go potty” in the backyard, my husband just stares off and continues eating his dinner or whatever . . . Hello? Why assume I’m going to answer the call of the wild every single time?
ANNA
By the time we brought our first newborn daughter home from the hospital, Joe and I had discussed and debated and deliberated every hypothetical parenting situation we could imagine. We knew where she was going to sleep and how we were going to co-manage her midnight feedings and had decided not only where we would stage the first family photo but what we were all going to be wearing in it. I actually thought we had it pretty dialed in. Of course, trying to envision what your life with children will be like before you have them is sort of like attempting to picture yourself at ninety. It’s just not possible to factor a zillion unknown and frequently unpleasant variables into a mental image. Just as you’d never visualize your ninetyyear-old self being completely infirm or dead (two distinct possibilities), no woman fantasizes about the far-off day when her lap-held child has an exploding poop—the kind that results in crap up the kid’s back and down her blouse—on an airplane or her preschooler’s pristine skin gets stuck in the zipper of his snowsuit, even though both of these things are bound to happen. In my carefree, childless days it would never have occurred to me that I might one day find myself routinely referring to my husband as Daddy or issuing ridiculous ultimatums a thousand times a day (“If you do this, I’m gonna do that!”). I pictured tea parties and pedicures and Nobel Prizes, not a jam-packed family production starring Mom in the roles of chauffeur, Sherpa, referee, and ATM. And let’s get one thing straight: Even my darkest, most frightening pre-parent nightmares never featured a single lice comb or bottle of Rid.
At first most of the child-related disagreements Joe and I had were based on subjective data. He wasn’t holding her right. I overdressed her. He wasn’t doing enough around the house. We never had sex. I didn’t think watching TV together should “count” as bonding time. He thought I should “shut the fuck up.” But once we lowered our respective expectations and got more comfortable and confident in our own parenting roles, we began having tiffs that looked like this:
JOE: “Want to go out to dinner tonight?”
ME: “Sasha didn’t take a nap today so she should go down by six o’clock.”
JOE: “Says who?”
ME: “Say the sleep books.”
JOE: “Do you believe everything you read in that library of parenting books you’ve accumulated?”
ME: “Well, if you ever read anything, maybe you could—”
JOE: “I could what? Quote some idiot’s totally unproven theory about something I don’t really give a shit about?”
ME: “How can you actually sit there and call people who are far more educated than you idiots?”
JOE: “It’s easy. I don’t need a Ph.D. to know when I should put my kid to bed. I have instincts and a brain, and I am pretty sure that when she’s tired, she’ll fall sleep.”
When the kids were little and hadn’t yet mastered any discernible language, at this point in the discussion I would simply smile sweetly and unleash a string of impolite profanities, delivered in the most syrupy voice I could muster and punctuated with the appropriate, corresponding hand and finger gestures.
Now that our daughters are older and mobile and speak English so they can tell us when they want a snack or need a ride to Nola’s house, they are fodder for an entirely new breed of marital discord, namely over those things we don’t just disagree on but over which we sit at diametrical, polar opposites of the spectrum. For instance, he thinks I’m overprotective, and I think he’s reckless. He accuses me of spoiling them; I’m constantly berating him for being too hard on them. I think they should make their beds; he feels that if they’re going to do chores, they should be chores that matter. I don’t make them listen. He refuses to apologize to them, even when he’s patently wrong. I let them walk all over me. If he spent one eighth of the time with them that I do, he’d be singing a totally different tune so I don’t really want to hear it, thank you very much. And then there is the massive distinction between what I now refer to as Daddy rules and Mommy rules.
More often than not, the difference between my policies and Joe’s boils down to hygiene, decorum, or some combination of the two. Allow me to illustrate Daddy rules in action with a handy example: We have a hot tub outside, and most nights after dinner Joe takes the girls for a soak while I clean up the kitchen. If it sounds like he’s getting off easy here or forcing me to play some dreaded retro-hausfrau role, let me assure you that I relish this quiet time by myself to scrub and scour and load the dishwasher using my preferred and undeniably superior method without anyone getting in my way or asking me for a single blessed thing. I can talk on the phone and check my e-mail without any dirty looks or an ounce of guilt. Plus I don’t have to put on a swimsuit or get my hair wet. I live for this hour.
Anyhow, one day Joe was out of town and the girls begged me to take them in the hot tub. Why not? I thought. They usually seem to be having a lot of fun out there. I could be the cool pool mom for an hour or so.
No sooner were we submerged than they began an exciting game that involved gulping large quantities of murky, chlorinated water and spitting it at each other.
“Girls, stop that!” I demanded. “That’s disgusting! Our filthy feet not to mention our bottoms are in this water, and it’s filled with dirt and bugs and all sorts of toxic chemicals.”
They looked at me in confusion, murky ass-water dripping down their chins.
“But,” they stammered in unison. “Dad lets us do it.”
I shook my head sadly. Of course he did.
“I have to pee!” one of them announced next.
“Okay grab your towel and walk carefully—don’t run—to the back—” I didn’t get to finish my sentence because she was already standing spread-eagle on the deck, her bikini bottom pulled expertly to one side while she emptied her bladder right there on the deck.
“What are you doing?” I shouted, aghast.
“Peeing!” the fruit of my womb replied with a what-do-you-think -I’m-doing look.
“On the deck?” I moaned, wondering what on earth else went on out here when I was inside scraping macaroni and ketchup shrapnel off the table.
“What?” she asked back. “Dad lets us do it.” Her sister nodded in confirmation. I had found
out just the week before that Dad also sometimes lets them ride in the back of his truck—only on our street, but still—which about gave me a heart attack (even though I grew up riding in the back of my dad’s truck, frequently perched back there on a folding lawn chair, because it was a different, safer world back then, and you and I both know it).
It must be nice to be the good cop. What fun that would be! You could teach your kids to make obnoxious armpitbarking sounds and let them stay up until midnight watching Weeds. You could agree with them that if they promise to brush their teeth “really, really, super good in the morning” then it probably won’t kill them to skip brushing them tonight. They’d like Sprite and brownies for breakfast? Well, hell—who wouldn’t? Fizzy chocolate bombs for everyone, coming right up!
Alas, I feel strongly that kids should only be allowed to have one laid-back legal guardian who lets them drink chlorinated water, shun sunscreen, and sleep in their wet bathing suits when that bizarre urge strikes, and Joe clearly rocks that job. As the self-appointed guardian of my children’s little lives and limbs, I spend most days detailing the many things they can’t do and cataloging the gruesome consequences that will most surely befall them if they ignore my sage advice and do it anyway. It’s exhausting and they often call me the meanest mom ever because of it, but seeing as they are both still alive and boasting the same number of digits they were born with, I will continue to wear my bad-cop badge with pride.
If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon Page 23