How did it get this messed up?
When I look back on it now, I wonder if I got married for the wrong reasons. Maybe I shouldn’t have forced the issue, maybe I should have let him make the decision on his own. I know I was feeling pressure. 6 months after renewing the romance my father asked if there was going anywhere permanent. A year later my brother asked if we were ever getting married or if we were going to wait to be 35 to have our first kid. My mother reminded me at my 26th Birthday “I was your age when you were born”. All my friends were married or engaged, some were having babies. I was living at home at 26 after boomeranging back there. I spent 2 years out of my parents house only to have my father ask me to move back home, but in doing so I gave up so many freedoms. Did I just miss the freedoms? Did I just feel the peer pressure to do what everyone else was doing?
In the private session before the marriage counselling started the Doctor asked “Why did you get married?” 18 months later and I still don’t know.
I look at him now and I wonder maybe we were right to break up in high school. He once said “I couldn’t marry the girl from high school” but on several occassions he mentions how I looked back then or acted back then that he found attractive. If he couldn’t marry her and 8 years later I was the person he could marry, then why remember that girl at all? Yes, she was skinnier, had smaller breasts and was painfully shy. The woman he married could use to lose a few pounds, needs a bra with double letters and hasn’t been accused of being shy in 20+ years.
On the subject of being shy, my shyness turned into submission. I don’t mean the kinky kind of submission, that’s for another post, I mean the kind of submission that allowed me to give up things I wanted to make the man I married happy. I know we are supposed to do that to some level but it got to the point where I resent him for making me or letting me do that. The big one is we don’t have children.
I asked almost every month for 8 years “Are you sure you don’t want kids?” he said either “Where would we put them? Hang them from the ceiling?” or “We’re comfortable. Let’s not mess that up.” or “I like being selfish and doing what we want when we want.” The kicker was when I was 35 and I asked because that was by personal cut off, after 35 I would be an “older mother” and while I didn’t want either of us to do anything permanent I was going to do something to get off the hormones, specifically get an IUD if he was sure. His answer “I have seen what motherhood has does to my friends’ wives and I don’t want you to change like that. I love you the way you are.” He didn’t mean the physical changes, he meant the mental. He heard enough of my tales about going to “Girl’s Day Out”s only to spend the time hearing stories about childbirth, potty training or first days of schools as the years progressed. I complained that they never talk about anything else and I never had anything to add to the conversation. I felt left out. I always smiled and said “We don’t want kids.” My close friends knew I was lying. But my submission and desire to make him happy won out and we didn’t have kids.
Once we were in couples counselling, the first meeting she asked about the kid issue and I was in tears for 45 minutes. She said “How was he to know you wanted kids if you never told him?” It was all my own fault. All my friends, and some who I wouldn’t call close, knew I wanted kids or have uttered the killer line “You would make a wonderful mother”. How come the guy I married couldn’t see that? What could every other person on this planet see in me that he could not? I wasn’t expecting mind-reading but I was expecting he knew me a little before marrying me.
Do I blame myself for not being assertive and saying “But I do want them!”? A little. But in my mind if the person you want to spend forever with says he doesn’t want something, that gives you little wiggle room. I wasn’t going to “oops” a baby only to have him being a father in genetics only. If a man doesn’t want to be a father, he doesn’t want to be a father. And I believe a baby needs parents who both want to be parents.
