Today when they were out I got to thinking. It seems pretty obvious now, and it really doesn’t mean anything, but I’m holding it as something basic, a truth underlying my overall impression of the way of the world.
I know for many couples--and I admit my sampling of the population is restricted to what I’ve witnessed within my own family--they know each other for a while, then get married, and get to know each other for a while there before starting to have children.
I can say that I’ve known Ethan for 7 years; we met at school that long ago and have been friends since. But I can also say that I’ve only known Ethan for 4 years…since his life-altering surgery that made him a perhaps nicer person, but one that is also lacking in confidence, self-esteem, and hyper sensitive; he is in essence, so vastly different from the man I met those 7 years ago.
So I’ve tried to get to know this new man, in the last few years, but I never got the chance to know him really one on one. What I mean by that is that when I got him, I got everyone else too. His son, the ex-wife. Looking back, I must have thought it wasn’t much, I could handle it all. Now, I realize that I put myself in the middle of a lot of potential turmoil, a lot of which became kinetic.
Back to basic enlightenment, I understand where I become anxious about the future. We didn’t get a peaceful courtship and we don’t have a real peaceful marriage at this point. I don’t get to peacefully enjoy my husband; besides the usual constraints of his general health and tiredness levels I compete with work. And when those two influences aren’t present, the third major one is: the eow visits with Holden. So no, I don’t really get that much time with him. Other couples (again looking at my personal examples) don’t have medical issues that get in the way of enjoying life to the fullest. They don’t already have children competing for the attention of our spouse. If I want to get to know Ethan, do I wait until we have time alone—really alone, without the distraction every other weekend—which will come in 6 more years? When he can stop paying money to his son and can start to manage his life on his whole income? Make some progress to get out of debt, so we can see how far we can go together to make our life comfortable, beautiful, and rich? Then what? We learn what our projected lifestyle could be, we take weekends at B&Bs downstate, we make home improvements and grow cozy? What about family? The family I’ve always wanted, the one I’ve always been working towards? Well shoot, by the time we make up getting to know each other and at that level where couples who aren’t 6 years behind are, I’ll be 35 and he’ll be 44. I don’t want to be 35 and starting to work on having babies, carrying them inside, being sick, labor, and recuperating…just to start chasing after them. No offense to women who started having kids at that point, but it’s not my choice. It’s more like what I’m left with.
So Ethan thinks I’m silly for worrying about this stuff. It’s silly for me to think of starting to have kids at 35. But what else is there? Do I want to pursue my own personal goals of starting a family before I’m 30? With a husband who doesn’t have the money to afford another child? Granted, I don’t have the finances on my own either to raise a baby, but that’s another thing: I’m no longer ‘on my own’. I am married. I do file my taxes jointly. I supposedly have someone supporting me, financially and emotionally just as I am to him. But why is it then he has all he could want (if he never had another child he would be fine with just me, he says) and I have only him? Should he really be enough for me as I am for him? Can we strip him of his career and his child and see if being with me is, in fact, enough for him? I’ve already been stripped of everything else that has made me, all of it is a ghost in my memory of how I came to be and I am living on his plane now, a ghost myself in his dimension. I just want something solid, tangible, that I can grasp, hold to me and ground me. Give me body and shape again, a presence, a purpose.
Am I really selfish? Am I asking too much? I didn’t realize I’d be asking for the whole world. Is this what happens to a dream deferred?