Andy Steiner

From the anthology Blindsided by a Diaper: Over 30 men and women reveal how parenting changes a relationship (Three Rivers Press 2007)

By Andy Steiner

The other morning, I was digging around for something in the back of my closet when I found a framed photograph I’d stashed there in one of my fits of manic tidying.

My two-year-old was in the other room, busy pulling all of the books out of her older sister’s bookshelf, so I had a moment to sit on the bed and wipe the dust off the glass with my sleeve. When I was younger, I dabbled in photography, and this was a black-and-white I’d developed and printed myself. I was so proud of my work that I’d framed it. Every time I moved to a new apartment, I hung the picture up in my bedroom.

Later, when my husband and I bought our first house, we followed tradition and hung the picture on the wall across from our bed. It stayed there for seven years. Then, a few weeks before the birth of our first child, we decided to rearrange our bedroom to make room for the bassinet. Somehow my photo looked out of place hanging over a bassinet, so we took it down and replaced it with an old poster print that we deemed more appropriate for an infant.

My husband and I started dating in college. I’d taken that photo one sunny weekend morning. He lived in an apartment near school, and his bedroom was on the chilly converted sun porch. We’d spent the night before on his futon under a pile of quilts, and when I woke he was asleep on his stomach, his arms splayed out across the pillows. I spent several quiet minutes admiring how the late-morning sun cast shadows from the blinds across his bare shoulders, then I slipped out of bed, took out my camera, which I sometimes carried with me in those days, and snapped a few shots.

Later, when I printed the roll, I fell in love with that shadowy picture, the way the light played on his warm skin, the way it reminded me of that particular lazy sunny morning— and of the night before. Because the photo was a close-up, viewers had a hard time figuring out what the image was, but I knew, and I treasured that secret. At first, hanging the picture on my bedroom wall was a public declaration of my love; later when the bedroom wall became ours, the photo was an important reminder of our shared intimate history.

I realize now that we should have been able to read the deeper symbolism when, in less time than it took for me to roll out of bed and grab the camera on that long-ago morning, the imagined needs of our baby-to-be supplanted our lives as lazy, sensual, childless adults and transformed us into parents.

Obviously, we knew — intellectually at least — that the long-anticipated birth of the baby swelling in my belly would officially make us mother and father. But we didn’t fully realize the responsibilities those titles held. Few of our friends were parents yet, but those we knew had already frightened us (intentionally or unintentionally) with horror stories of sleepless nights, diaper rash and colicky cries.

One couple, parents of a then-three-year-old girl, kept saying they hadn’t had a chance to see a single movie since their daughter was born, and the idea sent shivers up and down my still-childfree spine. Under the mistaken belief that a person could bank movie time like spare change, we spent the months leading up to the due date seeing every movie we could stomach. Even if we didn’t have time to see movies right after the baby was born, we figured, we’d see a lot now so we’d have plenty to talk about with our friends later. (Little did we know that for the next several months, movies and their plotlines would suddenly feel trivial compared to the more pressing realities of sleepless nights, diaper rash and colicky cries.)

As “countdown-to-baby” continued, we bought parenting books and took a childbirth class. In the evenings we’d sit in bed together and talk for hours about what we learned, noodling about baby names and planning for the future. I worried (I’m a worrier at heart) about how introducing a child into our lives would change our relationship; my mostly easy-going husband fretted to a much lesser degree. The changes I anticipated were textbook: dried-up sex life, childcare vs. career juggles, body transformation. I kept a journal during that pregnancy, and I scrawled my “worry lists” there. In what has been a typical pattern in our relationship, I showed my husband my lists, and he gently countered my worries, reminding me that a well-lived life is a series of calculated risks.

That was an important reminder for me at a time of such doubt and change.

All this mental preparation took time, but that was okay. Even though our days were filled with paid employment and the distracting busywork of getting ready for a child, we actually had time to spare. Time for my worries ―yes ― but we also had time to touch and admire and ponder each other’s bodies, especially my rapidly changing one. And time to look each other in the eye and talk until we got tired of talking.

Six years and two children later, the idea of talking until we get tired of talking seems incomprehensible to my husband and me. But there were times not that long ago when we did just that — on a regular basis.

When Time Was on Our Side

In the years immediately following college and graduate school, we were rich with friends. We had a tight bunch of buddies, most of whom we met at the small, urban liberal arts college we had both attended. Though life had scattered some of us, a strong core group remained in the city. We formed a family of sorts, supporting each other, sharing inside jokes, watching movies, going on weekend trips, laughing, debating, falling in and out of love. Often, we’d gather at a nearby coffee shop or in one of our homes, and in the winter we had a standing weekly ice-skating date.

As the lone married couple in the group, my husband and I always had each other to fall back on, but our friends — and our relationships with them — were central to our lives. Until we gave into our breeding impulses and became parents, it seemed like our world would always be the same, comfortable and easy and satisfying. But somehow, while we were distracted by our little daily dramas, the wheels of life kept turning, and we were getting older.

Things were about to change.

Before I had children, I thought I was busy, and I was, in the singular, focused way of the childless professional. In the years leading up to the births of our children, I worked as an editor at a newspaper, and, later, at a magazine. At both jobs, I’d often assign stories to free-lance writers, women whose circumstances (children, partner, busy household, ambitious professional goals) now match mine.

These writers were busy juggling everything, I realize now, but I have to confess that at the time I often had to fight the impulse to see them as dilettantes, as “stay-at-home moms” with a bit of extra time on their hands, empty, desperate hours they filled with writing projects. When, occasionally, the sound of these writers’ children crept into our telephone conversations, I’d feel a mix of pity and frustration. I was sorry that they had to spend so much of their days trying to keep children entertained, that their overwhelming breeder impulse had sidetracked their careers, but I was also frustrated that they couldn’t keep their children out of their professional relationships. If kids needed to interject themselves into phone calls, I thought, imagine how quickly they could screw up a marriage. ( When I think back on how I felt then, I realize it sounds crazy that I thought children could be marriage wreckers, being that I am the youngest child of happily married parents, a couple whose relationship remains spicy, romantic and loving after 60 years and six children.)

In fact, for a few years in my mid-20s, I pretty much decided I didn’t want to have children. Change makes me nervous, and children equal major change. I liked the life my husband and I had made for ourselves, I felt busy and happy and mostly satisfied. Children have a tendency to upset the apple cart, to mess things up and make noise when you’re on an important call. I wanted our tidy little life to stay the way it was. I felt safer that way.

My husband, Mr. Change-is-Good, didn’t agree.

I’ll never forget one particular conversation: We had been away on a weekend trip, and the drive home, like all of our pre-children drives, was filled with long, uninterrupted conversations about work, family, friends, future. Somehow the subject of children was raised. I talked (at length, I’m sure) about my free-lance writers, about their marginal careers, about their intrusive children. I said I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to have kids.

My husband is a kind, funny, understanding man, but he can also be passionate. I always knew he loved children, that he enjoyed being an uncle to our many nieces and nephews, but I had no idea just how deep the desire to one day be a father ran inside his heart.

“If you don’t want to have children,” he told me, clenching his jaw, “I want to find another way to be a father.”

We had a friend whose lesbian sister and her partner had asked him to be a sperm donor; we also knew a young man in college who made extra money by making donations at a local sperm bank. On some base, embarrassing level, the idea of someone else carrying my husband’s child made me feel sick to my stomach. I couldn’t imagine this happening. The truth is that even in the earliest, most carelessly passionate moments of our relationship, I’d always felt a biological desire to someday conceive this man’s children, a desire I’d managed to bury under other ambitions and careful plans. And so, a few years and several long conversations later, we set out to make a baby.

I remember when we finally told a group of our friends that I was pregnant. Their reaction was awkward, stunned silence. In that moment, it seemed to me that the earth’s plates shifted, that my husband and I (and our unborn child) stood marooned on one island, while our single, childless friends occupied another. The water relentlessly swirled around us, pushing our islands farther and farther apart.

But the wheels of life kept turning, and eventually the tides shifted back, and in a few years most of our friends started having children of their own or settling down in other ways. The pull of biology was clearly inescapable. Try as we might, our lives couldn’t stay the same forever.

Love, Interrupted

Even if we chose not to have children, we’d still be different at 38 than we were at 28. Our relationship is now almost 20 years old and together we’ve weathered sickness, doubt, death, and, in our daughters, new life.

I could keep bemoaning the fact that parents are so much busier than people without children, that a life that felt fully occupied before babies was nothing, nothing even close to life after birth.

But it’s not that exactly. The truth is that children demand time and attention, and there’s only so much time and attention to go around. Still, life with small children isn’t the same as meeting deadlines and juggling meetings. It’s a series of rude interruptions surrounded by short bursts of trauma wrapped in a blanket of overwhelming love.

This is the truth: Children are living organisms, planted into the earth of your relationship, and, like plants, they need to drain the earth of nutrients in order to survive. Before children, the nutrient that our relationship was rich in was focused time alone. Our own little offspring need focused attention to thrive, and because there’s only so much time for that attention, we have given up most of our spare focused time to our children. What’s left for us are time’s dregs, but we try to make the most out of them that we can ― to stay up late, to talk to each other, to laugh and to make love.

Early in our married life, we used to meet up at home in the evenings after work and talk about our days. We’d make dinner together, discuss our problems, spend hours blowing them out of proportion. These days, because we have very little uninterrupted time to talk, the minutes we grab alone are stripped down to the most important details: How was work? Is your boss still crazy? How is your writing going? How are you feeling? What was hard for you today? What do we have scheduled this weekend?

These days, our intimate moments usually don’t allow time for admiring the play of sun on my husband’s shoulders. But parenthood clearly illustrates that life’s opportunities are brief and therefore must be seized.

At times I fantasize about guilt-free time away from our daughters, about late night talks and long, quiet mornings in bed. I must admit, that while appealing, the idea of being freed from our children’s cycle of needs for any length of time, though, is frightening.

This winter, my husband’s family encouraged us to leave the children for a night and get away. We did, and in many ways the less-than 24-hour jaunt to Milwaukee felt like a one-week trip to Paris. We lolled in bed, read the newspaper, ate dinner slowly, watched a movie, talked and laughed, returning home the next day with our relationship renewed.

A month or so later, we were out for dinner with two other couples, also parents of young children. I gushed about our amazing overnight trip, and asked if anyone else at the table had thought about going away for an extended period of time. We all agreed that we had fantasized about the ultimate child-free getaway, but, one friend revealed the parents’ true conundrum when he admitted, “I don’t know how long I could actually stand to be away from them.” We parents dream about leaving but we can’t stand to tear ourselves away.

If we can’t tear ourselves away physically, sometimes we let our imaginations take us away. Lately, I — and my husband, to a much lesser degree — have become obsessed with the details of our single friends’ love lives. The other day, one of my best friends told me about a four-hour makeout session she had with a boyfriend. Four hours making out? Even when I was single, I may not have had the patience required to make out for four hours, but the idea of being able to attempt such an experiment sounds so free-wheeling and childless that it has instant appeal. While I’m not jealous of my friend’s quest for true love, or of her tiresome wrangles with online romance, I am intrigued by the adult-only content of her life, by her many days spent focusing on her own concerns and nothing else.

I have another good friend, a notoriously unattached childfree man in his early 50s. When I told him the story about my photograph, he just laughed. Time marches on, he said. Whether you have children or not, eventually everyone has to get out of bed.

What I think my friend was trying to say was that free-time’s downside is that free-time can quickly turn to over-analytical self-obsession. In many ways, having children has stripped our relationship to its bare bones, and from this less-obstructed vantage point, we’ve come to realize that too much reflection can sour even the freshest milk.

“You can only loll in bed so long,” my friend insisted. “Nothing ruins a conversation faster for me than trying to do it in my pajamas. In the real world, you can’t sit there and delve and explore each other forever. You can only go so deep before you hit the bottom.”

Herding Cats

So what have my husband and I learned about time, not just mourned, from the fractured experience of raising children? We’ve both tested and expanded our patience, that’s certain. Children’s sense of time is so different from adults’. For them, time is condensed (as in “When is Sesame Street going to be on? In 15 minutes? That’s soooo long!”) but also limitless.

On a warm winter day, the half-block walk from the bus stop to our house can take 45 minutes. It’s like herding cats, with stops everywhere: to eat the snow, to argue when told not to eat the snow, to climb the snow bank, to slide down, to take mittens off to make a snowball, to complain about having cold hands, to get a bucket to put snow in, to put snow in the bucket, to spill the snow, then get more snow and artfully sprinkle the snow on the neighbor’s front stoop, to sing each verse of a song learned in school that day, to hug and topple the younger sister, to ask to play at a friend’s house, to attempt (five times) to make snow sticky enough to build an igloo block.

Through all of this I have to breathe deeply, to try to move at my daughters’ pace, to follow my youngest girl’s circular path up the sidewalk, to pick her up when she falls and wipe her nose. All this is busywork, completely unimportant but at the same time heartbreakingly important. The chaos and noise of small children rattles our house until evening, and then a sudden quiet descends when they are both finally asleep. Then comes the rush to accomplish all the things that were not accomplished when they were awake. Then comes sleep. Then morning. And it starts all over again.

From Blindsided By A Diaper: Over 30 Men and Women Reveal How Parenthood Changes a Relationship (Three Rivers Press 2007).