What's Gonna Work, Part II

I had a thought. I was reading about Sarah Michelle Gellar, who was married for eight years before having her first baby. She talked about how being with her husband for that period gave them time to grow and change together, so that they were a team when they finally had to deal with the stress and excitement of caring for a newborn. It sounds so sensible.

When I was younger, I always thought I would like to live with my husband-to-be for about five years before we actually got married, just to get used to being a team together. In the end, that schedule got compressed a bit. We weren't lucky enough to find each other until we were in our late twenties. I started to get scared that marriage would never happen, so I pushed for it to happen sooner, and then as soon as we were hitched I started pushing for a kid because I was so afraid I wouldn't be able to conceive.

Maybe some of the challenges that my husband and I have faced - the frustrations of not working together, not agreeing on priorities, not agreeing on whether to have a second baby - are due to us having a baby so soon after we got married. We didn't have a lot of time to just play around together - go on trips, learn about each other.

It was a relief to me when I got pregnant so quickly the first time - whew, met the age 30 deadline - and I have loved raising our daughter. But perhaps there would have been less stress and more teamwork if we'd waited. I often felt when our daughter was brand new that I had to shield him from the inconvenience or difficulty of the baby by handling what I could by myself. I did all the feedings, most of the diaper changes, all the laundry and planning and doctor's check-ups and scheduling and packing. He never had to get up in the night with her when she was little.

It wasn't until recently that I felt at all resentful of that - when I heard a friend who's expecting a child of his own soon mention confidently that he expected to take the late shift and feed the baby before going to bed, so his wife could go to bed early and catch up on her sleep. I felt sad that I didn't get help like that. (Realistically, I don't know how he could have helped, since I was nursing and didn't want to skip a feeding for fear of having my milk production drop. But I would have liked him to offer. Why couldn't he have magically read my mind and known to make such an offer so I could have refused it?)

Anyway. The thought was about how our lives might be different if we'd waited. Or if we didn't have children. Maybe we'd have more time for each other. Maybe we'd see each other more as partners in this whole endeavor. Maybe I'd feel more united with him and more trusting of his decisions. Sometimes I have the sense that everything (the joined lives, the house, the child) are my ideas that I've talked him into, and whenever it's not super-fun I feel apologetic. I promised it would all be great and I feel that it's my fault when it's not.

Is it too late for this to change, I wonder? Are my choices just to accept that he's the way he is, and not try to make him different, or to have serious conversations where I try to bully him into being different - is there no organic way for us to get there together?

Or are we just "in the belly of the beast" raising a small child, and things will all get easier as she grows older and more self-sufficient? Perhaps child-rearing is a challenge to the best of marriages, and there are better days ahead. Not that I think our marriage is strained. Just not as perfect as some other people's seem to be.