Things I'd Never Tell My Friends
By Charles Tanowitz
Things I'd never tell my friends:
Recently, my wife and I brought our couplehood to an end and started on the road to parenthood. But this cute, noisy, joyous, and expensive little thing-to-be started affecting us long before it, or even the idea, was conceived.
For years it seemed that everywhere I turned a member of the baby police felt it was his/her duty to remind me that I should be a father. After all, when you're married, in your late 20s, a homeowner and have a dog, there's something missing, right?
I don't agree.
Every once in a while, my wife would get a look in her eye and become a BP agent; usually it came amid bouts of "baby lust." Early in our marriage she felt only the mild symptoms: wanting to comfort a screaming child and cooing at babies with an abidance of oohs and ahs. But later she developed the added needs to crochet baby blankets endlessly and to drag me into every Baby Gap in every mall to show me how girl clothes are cuter than boy clothes. Luckily, her bouts were generally short lived. But even if the pressure didn't come from her it came from everyone else.
It all started around the time that my wife said to me: "I think there's a baby boom going on."
"No," I replied. "It's just that everyone we know is having a baby."
This was all fallout from the marriage explosion we weathered a few years ago. We watched many friends, who knew each other for less time than did my wife and I, get married before us. We just weren't ready yet. Our summer weekends were packed with trips all over the north east. [We can find our way around any one of a dozen airports and have dealt with at least as many bridal registries.]
Then came the aftershock. All those young friends started having their own cute bundles of joy. Rather than going out to dinner and catching a movie, they spent weekends setting up their nurseries, studying their new bible -- What to Expect When You're Expecting -- and figuring out how much lox they'd need for the Bris.
The pressure hit us like a mega-pack of diapers falling from the top shelf of the wholesale club. Those new moms and dads, who just a few months before were in the throws of couplehood, started asking when we'd tackle our own Lamaze class. Others just let the question hang there like that cute new mobile with the teddy bears and stars.
The pressure continued even when we tried to join our friends for a quiet dinner at our home. "Here," the grinning new mom would say, "can you hold the baby while I set the table?", which was not much of a question, considering the word "here" was followed by a baby landing in my lap long before I could say "no, you sit, I'll set the table." And as the baby sat awkwardly in my lap and my thigh became warm and wet, the mother would automatically utter the next line: "oh, doesn't that look natural." It's a comment I promise I will never say to my friends.
The pressure didn't just come from our friends, it came from every direction. While house hunting, each home seemed to have a room that the real estate agent told us would be just perfect for a nursery. Shortly before closing on our small house, the agent told us she usually brings a house warming gift, and a few months later she was back with a baby gift. I hadn't realized that the house came with a child.
Even my dog felt the pressure. We got him because we wanted a dog. Why do people think he is a surrogate child? "You know what comes after a dog," our friends and coworkers constantly tell us. Yes, we would respond, dog food, dog toys, dog training and the kennel.
Not only is it simply rude to try and force one's values on someone else, but the questions and implications alone are simply painful. For all anyone knew, my wife and I could have been trying to conceive since our wedding day and each question, each comment, each look, was like a knife ripping into our gut, reminding us of our inability to follow one of the most sacred commandments: be fruitful and multiply.
But that was not, in fact, the case. For us, the question was never "if we will have children," but "when we will be ready for them?" I enjoyed spending the first few years of our marriage getting used to one another. Why bring another person into a relationship that was just getting off the ground? If we were going to be "Mom and Dad" for the rest of our lives, we wanted to be just Us for a while. People have children well into their 40s and even in their 50s. So what's the rush?
After watching some home movies of my 5th birthday party, I wondered how my mother did it, how did she managed to raise two children less than two years apart. All those kids in the house, all those mouths filled with cake, singing, talking and gabbing. The noise must have been deafening.
"That's why you have kids while you're young," she told me.
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