My husband and I used to fight a lot. Big fights over nothing. Not speaking for hours over things as petty as tone of voice—a complaint so common we could simply hiss "Tone!" to egg the other person on. Some couples fight over legitimate issues, like "I hate your friends!" or "You lied to me!" But when Rick and I were first living together, we could conjure a full screaming, temple-throbbing blowout from the smallest complaint—say, his having left a bag of garbage in the back of the car too long before going to the dump. He says he's taking out the garbage and doesn't need to be criticized for how he does it. Why is that a criticism? It's just logic. Garbage in the car could attract bugs.... You just hate being told what to do! And onward and upward the sparks would fly.
That's not to say we'd fight over everything. We never fought about traditional things. Like when I found boxes of slides of him and his ex-girlfriend on a romantic weekend in Nova Scotia chilling in our freezer, I didn't clobber him with a frying pan. That I handled with cool, ironic detachment, smoothly proffering the slide box and asking if that was what had broken the defroster. In general, Rick and I tend to get along well, because we share a sense of humor and agree about big issues. Perceived slights and insults over minor issues are the things that get our Mr.-and-Mrs.-Roper dynamic flaring. And we were fine with that. We accepted this about our relationship. Until I got pregnant.
The pregnancy was only partially planned. Rick had goaded me into "trying" because, based on his calculations of how many months of ovulation therapy and sperm-spinning our friends had undergone, it would take years for us to conceive. Then we walked into the bedroom, and moments later I walked out pregnant. I don't think we even had sex.
We weren't ready.
Another reason Rick and I get along so well is that, as a couple, we share certain maturity handicaps, and so we were equally panicked about the prospect of becoming parents. Among the myriad fears: losing our identity, becoming a cliché, being bad at the job. Most of all, I was afraid of becoming like my parents—and fighting in front of the kids.
My parents never should have been married, and if it weren't for my arrival, they wouldn't have been. The only things they had in common were bowling and two little girls. Oh, and passionate tempers. Their union was mined with a lethal combo of short fuses and bad behaviors. I remember, when I was a kid, going to the Long Island Rail Road station with my mom to pick up Daddy, and everyone else's father coming off the train but mine. He was playing poker. My mom had her secret pastimes, too—for instance, guitar lessons that required afternoon shuttles to Boston. Such deceptions led to marriage-ending brawls. By the time I was 5, my mom had split, gone the glam-hippie route, and gotten into modeling and Black Sabbath; my dad had retreated to an Upper West Side playboy pad. This was in the '70s, before enlightened divorce protocol about "behaving for the kids' sake" existed and exes could be friends, like in The New Adventures of Old Christine. This was more like Kramer vs. Kramer: a full-throttle custody battle that dragged on for what seemed like forever. And the rancor worsened.
My parents' fights were opera, and words from their bellowed librettos still reverberate in my memory:
Cornea: My father grabbing the phone from my mother's hand, and his ring scratching her cornea, and all of us going to the hospital.
Private detective: My mother discovering my father had hired one in his quest to track her affairs and prove her an unfit parent.
Alimony: Both of them screaming through the screen door after my father had made the 90-minute drive from the city to our house, and my mother refusing to let us out for the visit, claiming he wasn't up to date with the alimony check.
Rick's white-picket-fence upbringing in Toronto was far tamer than the psychological safari that went on in my Long Island home. But his parents bickered—over money. His superfrugal dad would complain that his only slightly less budget-minded mom was being wasteful by putting too much water in the teakettle.
We didn't want to become the Bickersons. We wanted to be trustworthy, steady parents, models of decorum and cuss-free living, whose kids would grow up in a relaxed environment where they could enjoy their childhood. We vowed not to fight. To that end, I invented "Heart to Heart," a concept to stave off an escalating argument. It was a time-out for adults: Either party could call "heart to heart," and the other person would be compelled to come in for a hug close enough to feel the other's heart beating.
It didn't work.
As hormones and preparental anxiety mounted, so did the tenor of our rows. A memorable one, as usual, sprang from nowhere. This one before the day had even started. It was about who had to take the early boxing session with our trainer that morning—there was some disagreement over who had scheduled it. And neither of us wanted to get out of bed for the 8:30 bout. (Clearly we were not prepared for the coming rigors of baby-rearing.) But we did rally for a Rocky-level quarrel that ended with Rick, in a fit of frustration, punching a hole in our bathroom wall. A few weeks later, another beauty climaxed with him hurling his glasses to the floor, shattering the lenses, and the two of us crawling on the ground to gather up the shards, sobbing at the violence, "We're going to be miserable parents."
Next Page: Bottling up and shelving hostility wasn't the answer either.
