Growing up

Recently, I’ve started admitting something that I’ve tried to hide (unsuccessfully) for many years now.

I’m having a hard time growing up.

I like to think that just admitting that will help me to, you know, get up in the morning and go to the same place. Every. Day. And work. And come home. And not eat a sandwich over the sink, but actually make a real meal.

But probably not.

One of the things about having children is that it forces you to grow up. Well, at least it should force you to grow up. This doesn’t always work. Sometimes parents skip out or check out. Sometimes they end up fighting with their kids…like kids. But, I think that for most people, there is a realization that, essentially, the party is somehow over, and there is the tiny being that now depends on you and nobody but you. This is a horribly difficult thing.

We don’t like to talk about it. I went to parenting classes when Ben was about a year old and nobody there raised their hand and said, “You know, I really would just rather not be a grown-up.” But that was, essentially, where everyone was. We wanted to know how to do it, and how to do it right. To find the formula that says, “Good responsible adult and parent” and take it and be able to get up and go to church on Sunday mornings. To have table manners and not swear at bad drivers and to stop wishing, on Friday nights, that we could just go to a freaking movie without paying a small fortune to a babysitter. Oh, for the days!

I was 26 years old when I had Ben. Twenty-six years old. While my time in Yoron, Japan greatly helped me to grow up, I was still pretty immature when I married Marti at 25. Now, plenty of my friends had babies at 18 or 19, and I knew it, but I was of the crowd that expected to wait until my 30s to have kids. In fact, I just turned 30 last November, and at least half of my friends still don’t have children, and only a few have children the same age as mine. It’s just not common to have kids in the mid-20s anymore. Either it’s an, “oops! they’re here early,” or a “let’s wait until we’re established” thing. At my childbirth class in Washington, D.C., Marti and I were the youngest couple there by at least 5 years.

I remember blurting out, during that class, that I was so terrified, that I felt like a stranger was coming into our home. Everyone stared at me like I was crazy (of course, they also thought I was nuts when I said I didn’t care if I had a C-section as long as the baby was safe and healthy. It wasn’t PC to say such a thing, of course). But Ben was an unplanned pregnancy. This is not to say he was an unwanted child. There’s a big difference. He was the seed of the love of my life, the baby I created with the one man that I was brave enough to love and who loved me back. Ben was a miracle and I knew it. Sure, he came years before I expected him, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t wanted. It just meant I wasn’t as ready as I’d hoped. I planned on growing up a lot more before he came. I planned on becoming a better person. It just didn’t turn out that way. He got me just as I was — immature, terrified, young, poor — the whole nine yards. And I felt bad for him. I wanted him to have the best chance he possibility could — and still do — but I knew there was a limit to how much I could fix before he showed up. And I was right.

Ben will always be the child of my youth. He’s had to help me grow up, a lot of times against my will. After I had him, I was really, really angry at Marti for not being safer, for getting me pregnant. And Marti was angry back. How was he to know that Ben would cry whenever we tried to be alone together? We called it “the sensor.” If Ben was asleep, and Marti tried to touch me, it was as if an alarm went off and Ben would erupt in tears, even if he was on the other side of the house. We were still newlyweds, but I was worn out, depressed and bitter. We moved four times before Ben was six months old. It wasn’t an ideal situation.

It took three years for me to stop being angry. I don’t know how it happened, really. I was still out of work except for an extremely part-time position (in my mind, I was not a stay-at-home mom, I was unemployed). Ben went to visit my sister, and through a fluke, was gone for two weeks. At last I had the time I had been craving since Ben’s birth. I could sleep in. Nobody woke me at night with a nightmare. There was no little mouth to feed 3-4 times a day. We could watch all the movies we wanted. If Ben’s sensor went off, he was in another state and we couldn’t hear him.

I was the most miserable human being alive.

I wanted my baby. I wanted him to crawl in with us in the middle of the night and spend the night kicking me in the back. I missed his voice, his eyes, his curly hair, his arms. I was frantic with missing him, and so was Marti. We hardly knew what to do with ourselves. It was as if the very life had gone out of us. I spent my days moping around. We saw some poorly done movies in the theater. I called my sister constantly.

All along I had been afraid to let myself love Ben completely. I was paralyzed with fear when he was little; I loved him so much, I knew if anything happened to him, he would leave me and take my heart along with him. Now, I haven’t chosen the easy path in life. I’ve had some hard knocks, and lost bits of my heart in the process. But Ben, I always knew, was my very best thing. If I lost him, I felt like I wouldn’t have anything left. And so I lived in fear and terror, and tried not to let myself care so deeply, which did nothing but make me seem aloof to a lot of people. But those weeks without him…I could see it wasn’t any use. Finally, I was on the plane to see him, and the flight seemed interminable. My sister greeted me at the airport…without him. He was in the car. I rushed out to see him. When I held him in my arms, I knew he was the most precious thing I would ever have. I stopped being bitter that I was home with him, and realized it was really a blessing. After that, I prayed that all my job applications would fall through and I would get to stay home with him by default. I finally accepted that it was okay I wasn’t a huge financial success. I accepted that I didn’t need to continue learning and improving myself in the working world; now it was time to concentrate on Ben. Of course, my prayers were not answered — three months later I had two full-time job offers. My time at home with Ben was over.

All of this coincided with the end to my depression; I realized that I was blessed to have been able to watch him grow up, and I let my anger go and felt young again. Last summer was a sort of final “hurrah!” to my youth. I made friends, I went out, I pretended I wasn’t grown up. It didn’t last. It’s just not who I am anymore, and that, too, I had to let go.

Now I am 30, and this is when I thought I would start having children. You know, after I’d paid off my debts and we could live in a nice neighborhood and not be torn with worry. After Marti had finished college and we had job security and I’d seen as much of the world as I wanted to. Then, we would have our family. It hasn’t worked out that way. I still haven’t seen China or Turkey. We routinely hear gunshots in our neighborhood. The neighborhood school is sub-par. I am, again, new at my job, and on probation. Marti is grinding through undergraduate classes and we are taking out more student loans as my peers are paying theirs off. If I had it all to do over again, would I have chosen this road? It’s hard to say. Maybe — okay, probably — it would have done no good to wait. What are the chances I would have grown up to be a better person without Ben? Would it be better if he, like some of his peers, lived in a household that never needed to think about money? Would he be better off if I had an established “career” and more job security? The true question is the word “better.” It’s hard to judge what’s truly best for a child. If it were easy, there would not be the cottage industry of parenting books and classes out there. So I’m not a real grown-up. So I still like to eat dinner over the sink with a book in the other hand. So what?

I do know one thing. I am damned lucky. I get to have my cake and eat it too. I get the adoration of not just one man, but two. I get to cuddle up with Marti on one side, and Ben on the other. Tonight Ben fell asleep with his arm slung across my neck and one foot propped up on my hip. I watched his gentle breathing and saw his long lashes as they brushed his cheek and the tears came to my eyes. “That’s my baby,” was all I could think. “That’s my beautiful, beautiful baby.” For now, anyway. After all, he’s growing up too.

Next week Ben will be four years old. It may not be perfect, but we are growing up. Together. Above all, I think that’s what matters.