Repent? At Leisure
11 November, 2010
This is going to be the kind of blog post I had lost the ability to write because everyone and their goddamn dog knew about the old blog. So let me start by saying this:
if you are related to me, this blog is not for you. Show some fucking respect and go read something else.
Thank god that’s out of the way.
So there are certain truths about midlife and long marriages that no one talks about in public. For obvious reasons. But frankly, not talking about them is bullshit: in private, we have these whispered conversations but in public we all pretend that Everything is Fine. Like all situations where people are busy pretending that Everything is Fine, this strikes me as kind of fucked up.
Let me start with the necessary reassurances. Yes, by and large, my marriage is “pretty good.” Yes, by and large I like my husband. Yes, by and large we get along.
Yes, I think it is important, where kids are involved, not to foster anxiety and insecurity. Yes, this means that we focus on the postive, for the most part. Yes, it means that I do a lot of tamping down of things that piss me off and that I make a concerted effort to turn the other cheek, to turn aside wrath with soft answers, to be a Good Mama and Wife to the best of my ability. Yes, I believe that my husband does the same.
None the fucking less.
(Scuse me a moment. Seriously. If you are a relative, and you are reading this, you are being an asshole. Go. Away.)
I wonder how many people in my situation, more or less–almost 20 years of marriage, kid halfway to college–feel, a lot of the time, as if they are biding their time until the kid is gone and they can reassess whether or not they want to stay married without that element dominating the calculations.
And I hate the feeling that we can’t, as a couple, really discuss the problems *too* honestly, lest it turn into a fight, because keeping the peace is really important. Because of the kid.
I suspect that this is really pretty much the norm of midlife for most couples. And that a good portion of the time, people figure out a way through and by the time the kid is off to college they answer turns out to be that they want to stay together after all. And I can see us doing that.
But I can also see, with vivid clarity, how nice it would be to be free of this.
Nah, I don’t want out.
That hasn’t been my experience (albeit only 10 years in), but it sounds like it may have been my mom’s. I know that she had plenty of frustrations that she felt obligated to keep tamped down (and I also know that my dad was being kept from doing a lot of things he would have liked to do).
I don’t know The Rest of the Story, because, in my second year of college, my mom was in a car accident and had a brain injury that kept her hospitalized the rest of her life. So it’s impossible to project what would have happened. But I do know that, once I was off to college (second of 2 kids), my parents went and spent a couple week in Europe, which my mom had been wanting to do for years and years. I think that they were starting to live the cliche of empty nesters finally free to live independent adult lives – and I think that, when a relationship has underlying strength*, the removal of the kid from daily life has a lot of impact on the parents’ ability to rebuild the relationship in this new context. More freedom may be part of that rebuilding, but the point is that it can happen without being driven by having to be the Good Parent or to play the Good Spouse.
* both in the sense of having been a good match in the first place and in the sense of operating with a functional level of honesty and intimacy
Ugh, Jroth, that’s sad about your mom. I’m sorry.
I think you’re right that the kid’s absence lets the adults re-lead “adult” lives. I think part of the problem is that, precisely: our cultural sense of “adult” lives = single lives, which for me and the Mr., meant a lot of independence and autonomy. It feels like, to some degree, I’ve sacrificed more autonomy than he has, and while I don’t mind *this* version of adulthood (the parental role, which is less about independence than about responsibility or somesuch), I do find myself frequently minding his attempts to act as though he/we are still that other kind of adult.
I dunno, it’s kind of muddled. I may or may not use this blog to think through some of it. Would like to, but for obvious reasons it’s risky.
Thanks. It was a long time ago (almost 20 years), so it’s just kind of a fact now. Aside from missing her take/input on parenting stuff, I very much wish I could have had an adult relationship with her (and I suspect that she would have headed off my 6 wasted years with my Bad Old GF with a single, innocuous yet effective comment). But anyway:
For my purposes, I’m looking forward to post-kid life as a time to be a couple – for biological reasons, we had #1 just 4 years after we met, less than 3 years after we married. Given our druthers, we would’ve waited 5 or even 10. We have (intentionally) childless couple friends, and damn, they seem to enjoy themselves.
I might add that kids chew up vast amounts of time; once they’re gone, there’s a lot of surplus to accommodate both “single” life *and* a rekindling of “couple” life. Right now, with 2 little ones, it seems like we each have 3 moments a week to be neither parent nor worker – that’s not a lot of moments to parcel out to either single or couple pursuits. That will rearrange itself radically once none of our moments are dedicated to baths, picking up toys, buying school uniforms, or reiterating that poop talk is not suitable at dinner.
All that said, it probably helps, in terms of future prospects, that we’re both basically homebodies – there won’t be some tension at age 55 between one of us wanting to knit while the other goes clubbing.
I definitely feel that ‘waiting for the kids to grow up’ moment in our relationship right now. We are definitely in a kind of tense period, as landisdad (who has been the primary caregiver for the children for the last four years) is about to change jobs. And his new boss is fairly confused by the fact that landisdad is the primary caregiver for our children–because I travel a lot, and am not always home when a) a kid gets sick at school, b) school randomly closes for a day, c) there is a game/performance/awards assembly/whatever to attend.
And at the same time, landisdad is like, “hey, shouldn’t you be the wife for awhile?”
Um, no. At least, not while I’m still the primary income-earner, anyway.
I think marriage is a relationship that has to be renegotiated constantly. I think it’s healthy for the idea of divorce to always be on the table. Both partners should be staying in the marriage by choice, not necessity. But definitely, when you’ve got kids, they are a big factor in the negotiations. I think most couples feel way more pressure to work things out, get therapy, compromise, suck it up, whatever it takes, if they have young kids.
I noticed a wave of divorces amongst my friends when the youngest child went to kindergarten. Now I’m noticing another wave of divorces amongst my friends because the youngest kids are going off to college.
I’ve been married for 25 years, and my kids are mostly grown-up. I do notice that when my husband and I talk about our relationship and what the future holds, the conversations are very different because the kids are no longer such a big part of the discussion. I can’t say that it’s easier or harder — it’s just different.
Okay, just did the math. I guess I’ve been married for 26 years ….
Bizarrely, Heather Havrilesky (of all people) kinda summed up what I think makes me the tiredest, in her tv column this week: “taking pains to politely tolerate each other’s flaws and sidestep conflict.” I am so, so tired of doing that.
I am not sure. I have been married 30 years, one child who left the nest to go off to school five years ago. Our marriage has certainly changed since he left and largely for the better. It did result in extensive renegotiation of roles and goals however and was by no means painless. In my opinion “polite toleration” and sidestepping conflict is draining and a recipe for disaster. Seems to me that waiting for your life to start at some indefinite time in the future is just avoidance of a critical current issue. It does not get any easier later.
Yeah, I think maybe I’m making things sound worse than they are. I don’t mean “polite toleration” in the “gritted-teeth-that’s-nice-dear” way. I just mean in the way of accepting that one’s partner has certain habits that one dislikes but that aren’t likely to change, or that trying to change would just introduce more conflict than it’s worth. Which on the one hand is surely the mark of maturity, but on the other, can be really annoying….
[...] and hours on the phone to resolve and led to a fair bit of stress between me and my husband (and this blog post, actually). The upshot was that there’d been some “supplementary tax” (thanks, [...]
I’m with you.