On The Importance Of Knowing What You Really Want

February 5th, 2005

"The cool thing about you is, you're like an older woman." Aaron says this to me over dinner one night, back when we were still dating. "Um, how exactly am I like an older woman(I was 21), and why is that cool?" I ask. "Because you know what you want and you don't play games," he answers, clearly satisfied that he's paid me such a great compliment. "Ah. Thanks. I guess." I didn't really feel like what he was saying was a compliment at the time, and, as a few years of marriage would teach us, it wasn't entirely true. I definitely thought I knew what I wanted, but I turned out to be lying a lot of the time. Fast-forward about a year. We are living in our Tiny Stinky Apartment, and Jack is teething. I've been giving him Motrin. Aaron expresses concern that Jack seems to be spitting up more than the usual amount lately, and wonders if the Motrin is irritating his stomach. I calmly assure him that I've been alternating Motrin with doses of Tylenol; Motrin is processed through your kidneys, Tylenol is processed through your liver. I further assert that one of my nieces used to projectile vomit(as opposed to spitting up normally) and she still grew round and chubby, so even though it looked like Jack was spitting up a lot I was certain he was still getting enough calories. "You know," Aaron says, "you say that kind of thing like you're absolutely certain you're right and there's no room for error, but you turn out to be wrong about 80% of the time." "Excuse me?" I splutter, so angry I can barely speak. I grew up in a family of nine, I have dozens of nieces and nephews, I was a nanny for eight years, did two years of nursing prerequisites in college, and I'd watched a lot of 'ER,' so naturally I resent my husband questioning my medical expertise. I get angrier and angrier, and very shortly it becomes clear to me that I am far more furious than the situation warrants. I excuse myself, saying I think I needed a time-out. I step outside and sit on the top of our steps, trying to get a little objectivity. A few days later I'm still so upset that I decide I want some professional counsel and I make an appointment with a therapist. I meet with her once a week and we discuss my marriage, my romantic history, my adolescence, my childhood; she asks very good questions, and I do my best to give honest answers. I can tell when we are really getting somewhere, because sometimes after she asks me a question I get really uncomfortable and I don't want to answer, but I do because I don't want to waste my time or poison my marriage. I work at it and work at it, and eventually it becomes clear to me that I have never in my whole life had a clue about what I really wanted. I thought I wanted to be smart, to be respected for having all the right answers. What I actually wanted was to be loved, but I'd been so busy trying to be right all the time that I didn't know I already had what I really wanted. Turns out, I don't have to be right all the time for my husband to love me. He does anyway, and he'll keep loving me no matter how often I'm wrong. Which is a lot. The summer I got pregnant with Jack, two of my siblings separated from their spouses. My oldest sister decided after five kids and fourteen years of marriage that she would really rather be single, so she left. She lives in another state now and I haven't heard from her in years. She got married when she was nineteen and had her first baby at twenty. She was young and in love, and for the first several years of her marriage everything appeared to be great. She married a very nice man who loved her, earned a solid living, and their kids were cute. But somewhere along the road, something in her started to break down. She gained weight. She watched a lot of TV and didn't leave the house much. She started drinking and gained even more weight, which eventually led to a cycle of rehab and relapse. Whenever she went to rehab(which was pretty often), I watched her kids so her husband could work. The days were long and intense as I attempted to fill in for a mother who'd been absent for a lot longer than she'd been physically gone. This went on for two or three years until she finally left for good, and by that time I'd decided I never wanted to have kids. It just looked way too hard, and the stakes were so high if you screwed it up. Five little boys, the youngest only four, were left without a mother. I still don't really understand what happened to my sister; maybe she's crazy, maybe she's ill, maybe she's wicked. Maybe all three. For a long time, I hated her. Loathed her. Then I felt sorry for her. Today, as Aaron and I celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary, I'm grateful to her. It may sound like an odd thing to say, but I really mean it. I only have two boys(for now), yet I've had days when I thought I would go stark raving mad if I had to change one more poopy diaper or settle one more fight. Motherhood can be incredibly exhausting; it is constant, unrelenting work that often demands everything of you and never says 'thank you,' just tortures you through the night so you don't get any restoration and then you have to drag yourself out of bed and do it all again the next day. And the next. And the next. For years. So why am I grateful to my sister? Because she showed me what not to do, and otherwise I might not have known. And I feel sorry for her because I don't think she ever knew what she really wanted either. I don't think she really wanted to be married. I think she wanted love, attention, excitement, and change. Marriage can give you those things, but it's a really bad plan to get married because you hope to get something. There's a lot of giving involved, and she didn't like that part. So she took and she took, and she still didn't get what she wanted. In the meantime, she had a lot of kids, and life got harder and harder. To this day, I doubt she knows what she actually wants. Had someone asked her at nineteen where she hoped she'd be in 19 years, I highly doubt she would have described her current situation. It probably wasn't what she wanted, but she got it anyway. The big surprise was that I didn't actually not want children. What I wanted was to do it differently, to not force myself into a role I wasn't certain I wanted and then make all kinds of restrictions about how I had to do it. I make an effort everyday to know what it is I really, really want. Some of the things I want are good, and it's helpful to be in touch with those desires so I can make a plan to achieve them. Some of the things I want maybe aren't so good, and it's really helpful to be in touch with those desires so I can try to figure out what in my life or heart is out of alignment and needs to change. I still enjoy being right, when it happens(which, despite what my husband says, is more than 20% of the time). But I enjoy being loved a lot more. If you're not honest about what it is you really want, you're never going to get it. If you really want to be married and have kids, you need to accept the reality that it will require you to work your ass off every day. If you don't want to do that, you don't really want to be married. The good news is that when you know what you really, really, really want, getting it is really satisfying. I'm going to get off my soapbox now because my husband just walked in with groceries and flowers. We're going to put the boys to bed early and then cook dinner together. Later we'll sit by the fire and drink wine, and talk about how we want to be married for a long, long time. This is what I want. This man. To be married to him, to grow with him, to learn, to change, make babies, and get old and wrinkly.