Posted on 03/30/2005 8:13:49 PM PST by paulat
March 27, 2005 MODERN LOVE Truly, Madly, Guiltily By AYELET WALDMAN
HAVE been in many mothers' groups - Mommy and Me, Gymboree, Second-Time Moms - and each time, within three minutes, the conversation invariably comes around to the topic of how often mommy feels compelled to put out. Everyone wants to be reassured that no one else is having sex either. These are women who, for the most part, are comfortable with their bodies, consider themselves sexual beings. These are women who love their husbands or partners. Still, almost none of them are having any sex.
There are agreed upon reasons for this bed death. They are exhausted. It still hurts. They are so physically available to their babies - nursing, carrying, stroking - how could they bear to be physically available to anyone else?
But the real reason for this lack of sex, or at least the most profound, is that the wife's passion has been refocused. Instead of concentrating her ardor on her husband, she concentrates it on her babies. Where once her husband was the center of her passionate universe, there is now a new sun in whose orbit she revolves. Libido, as she once knew it, is gone, and in its place is all-consuming maternal desire. There is absolute unanimity on this topic, and instant reassurance.
Except, that is, from me.
I am the only woman in Mommy and Me who seems to be, well, getting any. This could fill me with smug well-being. I could sit in the room and gloat over my wonderful marriage. I could think about how our sex life - always vital, even torrid - is more exciting and imaginative now than it was when we first met. I could check my watch to see if I have time to stop at Good Vibrations to see if they have any exciting new toys. I could even gaze pityingly at the other mothers in the group, wishing that they too could experience a love as deep as my own.
But I don't. I am far too busy worrying about what's wrong with me. Why, of all the women in the room, am I the only one who has not made the erotic transition a good mother is supposed to make? Why am I the only one incapable of placing her children at the center of her passionate universe?
WHEN my first daughter was born, my husband held her in his hands and said, "My God, she's so beautiful."
I unwrapped the baby from her blankets. She was average size, with long thin fingers and a random assortment of toes. Her eyes were close set, and she had her father's hooked nose. It looked better on him.
She looked like a newborn baby, red and scrawny, blotchy faced and mewling. I don't remember what I said to my husband. Actually I remember very little of my Percocet- and Vicodin-fogged first few days of motherhood except for someone calling and squealing, "Aren't you just completely in love?" And of course I was. Just not with my baby.
I do love her. But I'm not in love with her. Nor with her two brothers or sister. Yes, I have four children. Four children with whom I spend a good part of every day: bathing them, combing their hair, sitting with them while they do their homework, holding them while they weep their tragic tears. But I'm not in love with any of them. I am in love with my husband.
It is his face that inspires in me paroxysms of infatuated devotion. If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.
An example: I often engage in the parental pastime known as God Forbid. What if, God forbid, someone were to snatch one of my children? God forbid. I imagine what it would feel like to lose one or even all of them. I imagine myself consumed, destroyed by the pain. And yet, in these imaginings, there is always a future beyond the child's death. Because if I were to lose one of my children, God forbid, even if I lost all my children, God forbid, I would still have him, my husband.
But my imagination simply fails me when I try to picture a future beyond my husband's death. Of course I would have to live. I have four children, a mortgage, work to do. But I can imagine no joy without my husband.
I don't think the other mothers at Mommy and Me feel this way. I know they would be absolutely devastated if they found themselves widowed. But any one of them would sacrifice anything, including their husbands, for their children.
Can my bad motherhood be my husband's fault? Perhaps he just inspires more complete adoration than other husbands. He cooks, cleans, cares for the children at least 50 percent of the time.
If the most erotic form of foreplay to a mother of a small child is, as I've heard some women claim, loading the dishwasher or sweeping the floor, then he's a master of titillation.
He's handsome, brilliant and successful. But he can also be scatterbrained, antisocial and arrogant. He is a bad dancer, and he knows far too much about Klingon politics and the lyrics to Yes songs. All in all, he's not that much better than other men. The fault must be my own.
I am trying to remember those first days and weeks after giving birth. I know that my sexual longing for my husband took a while to return. I recall not wanting to make love. I did not even want to cuddle. At times I felt that if my husband's hand were to accidentally brush against my breast while reaching for the saltshaker, I would saw it off with the butter knife.
Even now I am not always in the mood. By the time the children go to bed, I am as drained as any mother who has spent her day working, car pooling, building Lego castles and shopping for the precisely correct soccer cleat. I am also a compulsive reader. Put together fatigue and bookwormishness, and you could have a situation in which nobody ever gets any. Except that when I catch a glimpse of my husband from the corner of my eye - his smooth, round shoulders, his bright-blue eyes through the magnification of his reading glasses - I fold over the page of my novel.
Sometimes I think I am alone in this obsession with my spouse. Sometimes I think my husband does not feel as I do. He loves the children the way a mother is supposed to. He has put them at the center of his world. But he is a man and thus possesses a strong libido. Having found something to usurp me as the sun of his universe does not mean he wants to make love to me any less.
And yet, he says I am wrong. He says he loves me as I love him. Every so often we escape from the children for a few days. We talk about our love, about how much we love each other's bodies and brains, about the things that make us happy in our marriage.
During the course of these meandering and exhilarating conversations, we touch each other, we start to make love, we stop.
And afterward my husband will say that we, he and I, are the core of what he cherishes, that the children are satellites, beloved but tangential.
He seems entirely unperturbed by loving me like this. Loving me more than his children does not bother him. It does not make him feel like a bad father. He does not feel that loving me more than he loves them is a kind of infidelity.
And neither, I suppose, should I. I should not use that wretched phrase "bad mother." At the very least, I should allow that, if nothing else, I am good enough. I do know this: When I look around the room at the other mothers in the group, I know that I would not change places with any of them.
I wish some learned sociologist would publish a definitive study of marriages where the parents are desperately, ardently in love, where the parents love each other even more than they love the children. It would be wonderful if it could be established, once and for all, that the children of these marriages are more successful, happier, live longer and have healthier lives than children whose mothers focus their desires and passions on them.
BUT even in the likely event that this study is not forthcoming, even in the event that I face a day of reckoning in which my children, God forbid, become heroin addicts or, God forbid, are unable to form decent attachments and wander from one miserable and unsatisfying relationship to another, or, God forbid, other things too awful even to imagine befall them, I cannot regret that when I look at my husband I still feel the same quickening of desire that I felt 12 years ago when I saw him for the first time, standing in the lobby of my apartment building, a bouquet of purple irises in his hands.
And if my children resent having been moons rather than the sun? If they berate me for not having loved them enough? If they call me a bad mother?
I will tell them that I wish for them a love like I have for their father. I will tell them that they are my children, and they deserve both to love and be loved like that. I will tell them to settle for nothing less than what they saw when they looked at me, looking at him.
Ayelet Waldman is the author of the novel "Daughter's Keeper." This essay is adapted from "Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race and Themselves" to be published by HarperCollins next month.
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Apparently it has.
I could sit in the room and gloat over my wonderful marriage.
Instead, I will write about it and publish it in the very paper that all my Mommy and Me friends read. That's better than mere gloating any day. Ha!
I could think about how our sex life - always vital, even torrid - is more exciting and imaginative now than it was when we first met. I could check my watch to see if I have time to stop at Good Vibrations to see if they have any exciting new toys.
Sex toys, now that's imaginative. If you need battery-operated orgasm aids, and it seems like you've run through a few of them, well...
This is what happened to me. My first marriage died because of it.
She is right that a good marriage is a good example for the children, but she's hardly the first to experience that blinding flash of the obvious.
I had two sets of grandparents that reached their 50th wedding anniversaries (one pair made it to their 60th). My mom and dad are going to celebrate their 50th in three years. I didn't need Ayelet to hand me the key to a lasting marriage. :D
Wrong attitude.
Ulysses is right.
"beloved wife?"
soulmate?
mate for life?
You don't know what you are talking about.
I guess I don't read the article the same way a lot of critics of this woman on this thread do.
Let me tell ya about "Mommy and me" and a neighborhood female kid worshiping culture that does exactly what the author of this article says it does.
Bunch women complaining about their husbands and taking offense that he's a healthy male.
I've seen it.
I have a book I read to my kids called "I Love You the Purplest". It's about a couple of boys who ask their mother which one she loves the best. Her answer is that she loves one child the purplest and the other child the bluest -- the point being that she loves each of them equally but differently.
I think the same thing applies to the love for my children vs. the love for my husband. Both are infinitely precious to me, but in completely different ways. I think that is as it should be.
I don't know anything about the author or her motivations in writing this piece - she may be just as cajungirl has described her. But as a general rule, any woman who doesn't put her husband ahead of her children (and vice versa) is 99% guaranteed to end up divorced and bitter at forty.
Florence King wrote a great column in National Review about ten years ago on this subject of "child worship" and how it has taken over in America and poisoned many formerly loving relationships. She had the dialogue of the offenders down pat too: "I'd do anything for those kids, you hear me? Anything!" The kids are going to move away and do all sorts of things you don't approve of - if you are too invested in them, that will crush you. My own mother was like this, and never recovered psychologically when my brother moved to England to attend graduate school, at the age of 26.
Trying to smother and live every second of their childrens' lives for them (which seems to be the norm in Soccer Mom-land these days) leads to intense resentment - happy parents who stay a little more interested in building their own lives together than they are in orchestrating their childrens' every move will produce well-adjusted adults in the long run. I think a hundred years ago this principle was common knowledge, but in this as in so many other social norms America has gotten way off track.
I've seen it too, though admittedly from a childless perspective.
I think most people "put their children first", especially women with very young children (that's instinct), but then there's a type who becomes a martyr to her children even when it isn't necessary.
Freezing out the husband makes it possible to tell themselves "I gave up EVERYTHING for my children" and that strokes their ego.
Same way gloating about her sex life and her great husband strokes the author's ego. Sorry, she does come off as a know-it-all even if I agree with her for the most part.
And, remembering that pride goeth before a fall, I'd be wary about making my personal bliss so damned public. They could be in bed five times a day and he could STILL leave her for another woman; wonder what she'd write about then?
You have to read the spoof of this, in the link in #89; it's a hoot.
That's what I was trying to say, but she said it better. Guess that's why Florence King gets paid for her writing, and I don't. :D
Thank you for the informational post, but I am a man. ;^)
I think this is an oversimplification of "love". Her attachment to him is the very best thing for them. All children will bask in the warmth of their parent's mutual true love. No child ever suffers for it. I think this woman has the proper states of affection for her family. She's a very very good mother and wife.
Dead on.
I agree...she is SO MUCH better than the rest of us....
I don't know about that.
It's pretty clear to me however from reading this article that she is currently missing her 12 step meetings.
Ulysses, I am definitely with you. My wife and I understand that our boys get a great sense of stability and confidence from seeing that my wife and I are first in each others eyes, as God is first even before us.
I agree. It's not that you love your spouse "more" so much as "differently" as I see it. If a woman fails her husband while raising kids, that INCREASES the chance for marital strife and divorce later. A healthy relationship (that includes but is not limited to a satisying sex life) is more beneficial to the kids than ignoring Dad while taking care of them.
Disclaimer: Currently I'm unmarried and childless.
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