better now
Our life together began long before children, but you wouldn’t know it by stepping into our house. The only photos lining the walls are professional shots of newborns and a few family sessions in between. There’s nothing to document a life before the babies came. That life did exist, and it was both troubling and glorious, but all you’ll find here is proof that we’ve procreated. There are the Brian Andreas prints we bought when our children were born, one poem for each. There are the Lore Pemberton prints, inspired by our own little ones toddling down into the woods. And then there’s their own artwork, either framed or stuck to the walls with masking tape.
The undocumented years have blurred together. They are not unimportant. But, often, they’re forgotten. Stashed away, because there’s conflict tangled up with joy, hurt and anger and bitterness snarled with love and attraction and delight. We’re busy now. Dragging out the past is unproductive when I don’t have time enough for the life we live now.
The office is a sad, sorry room: a broken bookshelf leaning and sagging with the weight of our homeschool supplies and stacks of paper; a fan but no light fixture, only a window with the blinds raised and a lamp with a torn shade; a little nightstand stuffed with charging cords, a stapler, sticks of incense. The walls are smudged, chalky, rental-house beige. And I have great ambitions to transform this discarded office into an inspiring, warm, organized homeschool room.
I’m sifting through old tax documents while my children drag boxes out of the closet. And then Dean uncovers a treasure: a picture of us on a beach in Jamaica over a decade ago. The frame is shiny and turquoise, like the water behind us. We’re kissing, so you can’t see our faces, but you can tell we have the bodies of twenty-somethings.
Dean shows me, like he’s discovered a gem I didn’t know existed. He’s thrilled. At what, I’m not sure. But he goes around the house, propping the frame up in every room, trying to find where it fits best. Eventually, he leaves the picture on our dresser. Because it’s us. But he keeps returning, just to look at it.
They ask questions now. Who were we, before them? They want to know about our wedding. They want to know where we lived, how we met, when we met. They want to hear stories. We sound so adventurous: in the five years we were married before I got pregnant, we traveled around the world. Australia, England, a handful of trips to the Caribbean, a two-week jaunt around South Africa. And now we’re in the suburbs, with a Goldendoodle, toys cluttering the backyard, and an office that will become our homeschool room. Maybe we’re less exciting, post-children. Maybe that picture Dean found of two barely-out-of-college newlyweds tells a story of a magical life that dried up and wilted when I morphed into a stay-at-home mom meal-prepping and lusting over Dyson vacuum cleaners.
But it’s better now.
We weren’t the best, then. We’re not the best now, either, but the seismic shift that occurs after childbirth has, in some ways, whittled us down into different people, sloughed off some of our oblivion and sloth. That childless couple that Dean was excited to discover fought without resolving conflict. They were in love, but they were selfish, impatient, and incompatible. They were untried, untested, unrefined. They wrote more love letters, but they withheld forgiveness. They went on more dates, but they lacked a deep and rich intimacy. They were in and out of therapy, waffling between hope and despair. They did not want to make sacrifices. They did not want to compromise. They wanted to win, and they left a trail of carnage in their wake.
I study the picture Dean found. We look like babies: round, soft, well-rested. We’re harder now, but it’s because we’re stronger. Our eyes are heavy-lidded, and the corners are creased, but it’s because we’ve born witness to a life that is blessed. We’ve smiled, and we smile more now than we did then. When we married, he was scrawny and slouched. He’s now graying, wears glasses, and (thankfully) has more wrinkles than me, but he’s worked hard on his posture and squeezes a few trips to Crossfit every week. He’s older, but hotter. He stands up straighter and moved up a size in shirts to accomodate the muscles bulging in his chest and arms. Meanwhile, there’s me: I’m droopy in places I wasn’t before, and the skin on my belly, like so many other mothers’, crinkles like crepe paper when I bend or twist. I have an autoimmune disease I didn’t have ten years ago, and anxiety that I didn’t battle when I was younger. But I’ve built muscle. I exercise, like him. My body isn’t the body of that bikini-clad girl in Dean’s coveted picture, but I’m grateful. My marriage isn’t that marriage, either.
Love now is a lot like us: harder, but stronger.
Having children didn’t save our marriage, not directly. But we’re more responsible now, because we have to be. Less selfish, because it’s required. We’re intentional with our time because we know it’s fleeting and precious. The people we were then could not have continued on, living in unresolved conflict and intense emotion, and also raised healthy, stable children.
I may not be a good wife yet, but at least I’m a better one.
Before we became parents, our lives had no rhythm. What was the need? We were free. But we need it now. Our children need it. We have to have something grounding our weeks. So we have the same playdates, the same homeschool co-op, the same morning we grocery shop, the same night we attend small group, the same evening we go to church. And date night, one night each week.
These are not the adventures of our youth. These are not blips in the charts of our lives, great jagged marks followed by a plunge toward the bottom. These are gentle rolling lumps, the touchstones of a marriage a dozen years after its inception. These are nights spend at the same restaurants, ordering the same sushi rolls or the same lamb korma or the same spicy drunken noodles. These are sometimes even the same conversations: what do we do with this parenting issue? How do we handle these questions? What do we do with this weekend or that one? How do we finish this argument?
But this is a life that is being lived, not a marriage that is being forged.
Dean often asks me what I love to do. And I usually respond with something like “reading, hiking, drinking wine, drinking coffee.”
He says, “What about travel? I love travel.”
“Oh yes, me too,” I say. And it is true, for both of us. There is a love for adventure that has not shrunk, but there are other loves that have swelled and pushed it a little out of the way, now. I love to explore, but I love this house and the people in it, too. I love who I have become, who I am becoming.
Maybe our love isn’t soaring, but it’s not plummeting, either. There’s no fluttering, because we’re sturdier now. We can take a long car ride without arguing. Fights are few and far between. The conflict between us simmers; it doesn’t boil. It pokes and snaps, but it doesn’t surge or throttle.
I wouldn’t go backward, to that time before kids, and it has nothing to do with how much I love my children. It’s because the simple act of procreating, of plunging into something as deeply transformative as parenting with another person who’s bound themself to you, lifts you to a different plane of existence. Is it possible to give birth and remain unchanged? To completely alter your life, and you, yourself, stay unaltered? For me, it was not. I had a family, and I was hurled into another life. I even had a different body, proof that I’d been irrevocably changed.
We’ve lived our life together. We are raising our children together. And maybe we aren’t perfect, and we’re definitely not exciting. But there’s more love now than we’ve ever had. There are more laughs in this house. And I wouldn’t trade that, not for smooth skin and a long weekend to Jamaica. I’ll take a night sprawled on the floor in Barnes and Noble. I’ll take this life, this hard but strong life. It is, in the end, anything but mundane.
