I think it is better when I just don’t have choices. Then it seems I don’t want too much, expect too much. I don’t dream as much, have such high hopes.
I could live in Chicago forever making ends meet, living in an overpriced tiny apartment. I would not consider starting a family. Not like that, not on those terms. And that would be okay.
What I can’t bear the thought of is living in this house, alone. I say alone because I would always feel alone. Ethan leaves the house in the middle of the night sometimes to go to work; he comes home and plops down in the recliner and falls asleep in front of the tv. I spend most of the weekends puttering about the house, doing laundry, scrubbing toilets, vacuuming cat hair while he puts in a half day at the office. The rest of the weekends I do the same while Holden’s up in his room. I can’t bear the thought that in a few years I’ll have my undergrad loans paid off, my family wagon paid off, and I’ll be very comfortable living in this house, with myself and the cats. It’s very depressing thinking about the time I will spend in that American Four Square waiting for Ethan to come home from his career, waiting for his son to grow up, waiting for ‘our time together’.
The burden of course rests on me; after all, I chose this life completely, right? I mean, if I didn’t want to marry a man with a child already I certainly didn’t have to. Nor did I have to fall in love with him in the first place. I mean, obviously neither of the birth parents had the choice, but by golly they Did The Right Thing and this is their life and the rewards overshadow the strife. So I could not feel all alone if I just put forth the effort and made friends with Holden. To rustle him out of bed in the morning and take him out for pancakes and pony rides, buy him video games and supplement his allowance. Get to know and love him like everyone else.
Here’s where I get lost. I’ve tried that. I used to do that. You might even remember me talking fondly of the boy once upon a time. What changed is that I ultimately had to be honest with myself. Ultimately I formed my own opinion, not based on how Ethan wanted Holden to be perceived, not how Elizabeth and Richard perceived him, but just as me, the outsider that I was and am and always will be to these people. I’m hard on a lot of people, I know. I don’t cut a lot of breaks and I don’t believe it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission. And really, because he was just a kid, and not my kid but Ethan’s kid and a good one at that overall, I didn’t say much about anything. Because, who would care? As Holden used to say, “What difference does it make?”
I truly want to trust Ethan, trust his judgment, trust his perceptions of Holden, but honestly, Ethan has demonstrated what one calls “piss poor” judgment in the past. Example: he really thought it was just a fluke that Elizabeth got pregnant twice before him and that there were still slim odds of getting her knocked up by being careless. Example: even though before Elizabeth got pregnant he claims the relationship was pretty much ‘over’, he married her and got a vasectomy because what, he figured this was going to be his final lasting relationship in life? Example: not taking moot court in law school because that was just not something he was ever going to do as a lawyer (appear in court). I would be ecstatic if I really felt he was right, that Holden would never have an interest in living with him, or that Holden would not want to spend more time with us if we had our own children, and that he simply would go off to college never to be seen or heard from again. But that would make me happy.
I know some people would frown on me, wag their finger at me saying, “You knew what you were getting into!” How dare I feel this way about a poor, sweet, innocent child? What a monster I must be to wish him away from his father forever! But that’s not really the case. I know it is Elizabeth’s fault, not Holden’s, but I’m living in limbo between my world and theirs. People when they talk about relationships talk about the past. They refer to ‘the life before’. Throw in a child though, and that past life, the life before you (me) that for anyone else would have remained in the past, not to rear its ugly head every other weekend, becomes the current life, the present. How can anyone honestly believe that we can move forward—together—like this and forge our—OUR—life? Some would say my husband is part of a package deal, that I married his son as well as the man. So, two lives do not unite to become one, rather 3 lives, plus and ex and her spouse form one gigantic nucleus with a highly volatile charge.
Maybe all it is just that I want something of my own. Like, your life is supposed to be your own, right? No one can tell you what to do when you become an adult. You don’t have to take math, you don’t have to eat broccoli, and you don’t have to tell your parents you stayed up till 3 a.m. last night. If I decide today I want a career or a family, do I go out and do it? No. Why? Because school costs money and we—we—don’t have any to spare. And in my case, I’d need to really coordinate to have a family. I can’t just do what I want because I’m bound to the restrictions that came with getting married to Ethan. Is it really my own? No, it’s ours. Our life means Elizabeth every now and then, our life means Ethan can’t afford to do anything fun for both of us because he has to put away for Holden (and after that pay off his loans for the career he wanted so he could show his kid he wasn’t a failure and be able to relocate wherever Elizabeth may have a whim to move him to).
I have tried to be rational about it. I try to subscribe to any school of thought that would just lay out my boundaries in big fat Sharpie marker so that I don’t have to struggle with the irrational behavior, the scenarios that play out in my head of tragedies that might strike that would really make Holden the center of my life, not just in my imagination. It seems when I do though, I come across the one flaw in any particular theory, and suddenly my survival instinct kicks in and I think to myself, “No way am I going to do that”. And so the downward spiral continues. I can’t seem to (as is the style today according to family experts) blend or fuse my thoughts and principles together to form a harmonious religion I can live by. I would not want to come between Ethan and Holden—I know that would just be so wrong—yet I don’t like the idea of Holden being around. I know that it’s not that likely that he and any future children of ours will bond, but I still can’t get used to the possibility that he or they might want to. Now I see why separation of church and state creates such a hullabaloo.
I am not that close to my family that I can brazenly ask those who have been in situations remotely like mine what they think and feel I should do. My Cousin Ann’s parents divorced sometime during her preteen years. Apparently that was rather ugly, as her father was having an affair and all. I remember she visited him on the weekends until she got older and then I don’t remember her visiting regularly. Both parents got remarried when she began her first year of college. By then her parents weren’t interested in starting any new families, though. Which is why I can’t really justify my waiting around till Holden goes off to college to try. My Cousin Chula’s father remarried when she was fourteen. Up till then she lived with her mother out of state. She moved in to her father’s house, with his wife of about a year and baby nine months old. I know it was a bit harder there, but still my Aunt dealt with it; of course, it was neither her first marriage nor child on the line and she knew how messy relationships could be. As for Chula, she always wanted a sister and she took care of Leah like she was her own. How do I explain to her that in my case, I want Holden no where near my potential children? I do feel a certain shame in all this; again, I just can’t seem to live up to expectations.