Jancee Dunn - How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

When you have a baby, you set off an explosion in your marriage, and when the dust settles, your marriage is different from what it was.

NORA EPHRON

W hen I was six months pregnant with my daughter, I had lunch with a group of friends, all of whom were eager to pass along their hard-won scraps of parental wisdom. In the quiet caf they noisily threw them down, with much gesturing, like street-corner dice players on a hot streak. There were so many tips flying at me that I was forced to write them on a napkin. Bring flip-flops for nasty shower at hospital, I scribbled. Huggies wipes are nice, thick. Freeze maxi pads in water for postpartum roid-sicles.

Oh, and get ready to hate your husband, said my friend Lauren. I looked up from writing If gas, pump babys legs like bicycle. Wrong, I told her calmly. I listed various reasons why our relationship was solid: We had been together for nearly a decade. We were heading toward middle age, and squabbling requires siphoning precious energy from waning reserves. Most important, we were peaceable, semi-hermetic writers who startled at loud noises, running madly away like panicked antelope.

I looked around at my friends carefully composed faces as they tried not to smirk. Over the course of a few months, I had already been privy to hundreds of parental decrees: Say good-bye to a good nights sleep. Youll never have sex again, and trust me, it will be a relief. Natural childbirth? Youll beg for that epidural, especially if your pelvis separates like mine did.

My favorite edict was supplied by my friend Justin, father of three. Better see all the movies you can now, he said, shaking his head mournfully. When the baby comes? Not gonna happen.

I squinted at him. Parenthood was so overwhelming that I wouldnt be able to sit on my couch and watch a movie? Ever?

As it turns out, my friend Justin was wrongI was watching movies the week after I gave birth.

But my friend Lauren was right.

Soon after the baby was born, my husband and I had our first screaming fight as new parents. To be more precise, it was I who screamed.

What set me off was embarrassingly trivial, yet the source of a baffling amount of conflict in the first few weeks of parenthood: whose turn it was to empty the Diaper Genie. On that day, it was Toms. The coiled bag had grown to the size of a Burmese python, and was about to spring like the snake-in-a-nut-can gag. The stench enveloped our small Brooklyn apartment.

Please empty that thing, I called to him as I sat on the couch, breastfeeding the baby. The fumes are making me dizzy.

In a minute, hon, he said from the bedroom, his robotic voice a tip-off that he was playing chess on his computer. He has a handful of programmed responses on call, like tugging the string on an action doll: Thats interesting; Huh, really? and Oh wow, sounds great (his response when I told him I had a suspicious growth on my leg).

In seconds, I was flooded with molten rage. I carefully put the baby down, barged into the bedroom, and seared him with contemptible, juvenile invective, terms that had not crossed my lips since I was a New Jersey teen in the 80s. Dickwad. Asshole. Piece-a-shit. The force of my anger surprised both of us. Almost immediately, I was filled with shame. True, I was reeling from hormones, sleep deprivation, and a sudden quadrupling of cleanup and laundry. But I love my husbandenough to have had him impregnate me in the first place. I knew within two weeks of meeting him that I wanted to marry him; he was the most interesting person I had ever met. I was charmed by the way he would blush and stammer when we talked, prompting me to lean in more closely just for the fun of making everything worse. During our tranquil nights at home in the early days of our marriage, I was often reminded of Christopher Isherwoods description of a couple reading: the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each others presence.

Im not sure what a dickwad is, exactlybut I know Tom isnt one. Hes a sweet, caring spouse and father who spends hours with our daughter, Sylvie, patiently playing an eighth round of Go Fish. He refuses her nothing: when she begs him to ride bikes at dawn on a freezing Saturday, his standard response is what Ive termed nokay. No. (Five seconds elapse.) Okay. He is almost comically protective of his only child. One day at our local playground, an older girl was taunting Sylvie as Tom watched grimly from the sidelines.

Older girl: You cant do the monkey bars! Youre too small. Youre not strong enough, like me!

Sylvie does not answer, so the girl continues in a singsong voice: You cant do it, you cant do it!

Tom materializes next to the older child, who squints up at his six three frame. Right. Lets see you do it, then.

The child swings through three bars, falls, then hastily jumps back on.

Tom, with Vulcan calm: You fell off. Which is cheating. Youre the one who cant do the monkey bars. Older child backs away.

Playground disputes aside, Tom finds fighting physically unbearable: the moment my voice begins to rise, he turns light gray and retracts into himself like a stunned gastropod. While I have threatened divorce and called him every name in the book, he has neverI mean neverdone the same to me. It gives me no satisfaction to holler at a kind, gentle chess player who enjoys reading and bird-watching in his spare time.