First comes Love, then comes Marriage...
When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a writer. I also wanted to be an artist, a kindergarten teacher, a ballerina, an astronaut (but only if "Star Trek" came true), a lawyer, and, for a long time, an archaeologist. But writing was what I always came back to, in the end. So now I return to it, in an attempt to share some wisdom, humor, and normalization of the struggles that I know I am not alone in dealing with.
Motherhood and marriage are fucking hard.
I mean, no shit, right? Life is tough in general, and in the current political and social environment (not to mention the actual environment), it's even harder. And I know that there's a million and one people out there shouting about how tough it is to be a mom, and trust me when I say that I'm aware that it's easier for me than for a lot of people out there in the weeds of parenthood - but we all know that your struggles don't negate mine, and vice versa.
Backstory: I was chronically single for most of my adult life. I've had three long-term relationships and a whole lot of one-night-stands. My longest relationship, before I met my husband, was about 8 months and I think that we were drunk for most of it, so I'm not sure how much that counts.
When I was 26, I met my husband and within a couple of months, I knew that this was a different sort of relationship and that I had met the man I wanted to commit to. He was handsome, brilliant, had a grown-up job, and three beautiful kids from his first marriage who lived far away with their mom and stepdad, but who he spoke with nightly and visited as often as possible. He was a good man, a good dad, and he made me happy. We got engaged within a year and married a couple of months later (and as a result of getting married on a Friday in February, people were "casually" checking my waistline for months thereafter, despite my insistence that I married him for the health insurance 😂).
So I became a stepmother officially in 2011. Hubby and I had discussed children at length and, though he was content with his three, he was willing to have one more with me. We agreed we would start trying for a baby when I turned 30. I always expected to become a mother one day, although I had never expected to get married. I remember horrifying my parents once when I announced that "I promise I'll give you grandchildren, but I can't say the same about a son-in-law."
Unfortunately, I had also been struggling for a long time with untreated anxiety and depression, and had been a heavy drinker since college. By the time we were married and moved into our first apartment together, I was easily drinking a bottle and a half of wine every night. My husband has never drank; it wasn't something he minded when we were dating, but as often happens once you move in with someone, it became an eye-opener when he realized just how much I was drinking, and how disconnected from the world it made me. Of course, I didn't even realize that I was drinking in order to be disconnected, to hide from my feelings and dull the sharp senses of a world that was too real and too frightening to be a full member of.
All of this led to turmoil in our marriage. In 2013, when I was 30 years old, we revisited the children discussion. At that point, I was really spiraling - hiding the extent of my drinking, lying to my husband about quitting smoking cigarette, and we were fighting constantly. He suggested we table the kids topic for a couple more years and talk about it again then - if we were still together.
I was devastated, but I also understood where he was coming from. This wasn't the way I wanted to have a baby, and if he wasn't ready then we weren't ready. And I knew, though I hated to admit it, that I was an absolute fucking mess. I questioned whether I'd be capable of caring for my own body well enough to carry a child to term safely. I had also had surgery earlier that year that meant my doctors wanted me to wait at least a year before thinking about pregnancy. Everything lined up to say "wait until you're ready."
Little did we know, I was already pregnant when we had that fateful conversation. I had been on birth control for years and took it like clockwork every night at 9pm as directed. I was vigilant. But I had gotten a bad stomach bug that had me vomiting everything for days, including my pills.
To be continued when I'm not supposed to be doing work instead of writing my life story....
Motherhood and marriage are fucking hard.
I mean, no shit, right? Life is tough in general, and in the current political and social environment (not to mention the actual environment), it's even harder. And I know that there's a million and one people out there shouting about how tough it is to be a mom, and trust me when I say that I'm aware that it's easier for me than for a lot of people out there in the weeds of parenthood - but we all know that your struggles don't negate mine, and vice versa.
Backstory: I was chronically single for most of my adult life. I've had three long-term relationships and a whole lot of one-night-stands. My longest relationship, before I met my husband, was about 8 months and I think that we were drunk for most of it, so I'm not sure how much that counts.
When I was 26, I met my husband and within a couple of months, I knew that this was a different sort of relationship and that I had met the man I wanted to commit to. He was handsome, brilliant, had a grown-up job, and three beautiful kids from his first marriage who lived far away with their mom and stepdad, but who he spoke with nightly and visited as often as possible. He was a good man, a good dad, and he made me happy. We got engaged within a year and married a couple of months later (and as a result of getting married on a Friday in February, people were "casually" checking my waistline for months thereafter, despite my insistence that I married him for the health insurance 😂).
So I became a stepmother officially in 2011. Hubby and I had discussed children at length and, though he was content with his three, he was willing to have one more with me. We agreed we would start trying for a baby when I turned 30. I always expected to become a mother one day, although I had never expected to get married. I remember horrifying my parents once when I announced that "I promise I'll give you grandchildren, but I can't say the same about a son-in-law."
Unfortunately, I had also been struggling for a long time with untreated anxiety and depression, and had been a heavy drinker since college. By the time we were married and moved into our first apartment together, I was easily drinking a bottle and a half of wine every night. My husband has never drank; it wasn't something he minded when we were dating, but as often happens once you move in with someone, it became an eye-opener when he realized just how much I was drinking, and how disconnected from the world it made me. Of course, I didn't even realize that I was drinking in order to be disconnected, to hide from my feelings and dull the sharp senses of a world that was too real and too frightening to be a full member of.
All of this led to turmoil in our marriage. In 2013, when I was 30 years old, we revisited the children discussion. At that point, I was really spiraling - hiding the extent of my drinking, lying to my husband about quitting smoking cigarette, and we were fighting constantly. He suggested we table the kids topic for a couple more years and talk about it again then - if we were still together.
I was devastated, but I also understood where he was coming from. This wasn't the way I wanted to have a baby, and if he wasn't ready then we weren't ready. And I knew, though I hated to admit it, that I was an absolute fucking mess. I questioned whether I'd be capable of caring for my own body well enough to carry a child to term safely. I had also had surgery earlier that year that meant my doctors wanted me to wait at least a year before thinking about pregnancy. Everything lined up to say "wait until you're ready."
Little did we know, I was already pregnant when we had that fateful conversation. I had been on birth control for years and took it like clockwork every night at 9pm as directed. I was vigilant. But I had gotten a bad stomach bug that had me vomiting everything for days, including my pills.
To be continued when I'm not supposed to be doing work instead of writing my life story....
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