Prioritizing Relationships - Is It a Good Thing To Do?

Ok, so a group of AP friends and I have been discussing Ayelet Waldman and her (old, like 2005) confession that she loves her husband more than her kids. She wrote this little article in The New York Times and seems like lots of people hate her for it, not just disagree with her, hate her. Gosh, I certainly don't relate to her or completely understand her point of view, but I definitely don't hate the woman.

In the article she talks about how much she likes having sex with her husband (good for her! No seriously, good for her!) and how she has tried to figure out why many if not most of her fellow mommy friends are not having much sex. She concluded that most of these moms made their children the center for their "passionate universes" while her husband remained the center of hers. Hmmmm. That got my mind athinkin'.

The first few years of my first and only child's life have been hard ones for my marriage. Many times I have worried that my husband has taken offense to the amount of time, attention, and effort as well as love and emotion that I have put into my child. My child was high needs as an infant and continues to be, in some ways, a high needs toddler. Plus, he is still very young. Small children are simply needy, dependent, time-consuming, immature. They require a lot from their parents. Human infants are born the most physically immature of all mammals simply because our female pelvises can not get any bigger in order to birth larger infants' heads. So, our babies have to be born with smaller heads, hence, smaller brains, hence, less mature and more disorganized brains. Many days I have wondered why God didn't give us human females pouches where the little one could be hoisted into on the first day of life and could stay there for awhile, like those "second nine months" they say it takes for human infants to fully acclimate to being outside the womb. Gosh, I know my 2.5 year old could still use a Mommy Pocket on his bad days.

So I worry, have I neglected my husband too much? Does he have cause to be jealous? Did I F' up the whole balance of the relationships in my life? Jeesh, I sure hope not!!! I surely wasn't trying to ignore him or put our child before him. In fact, the whole premise of loving one's spouse more than one's kids is just bizarre to me. I'm not saying my love for my son and my husband are equal, I'm saying that the nature of my love for them is simply very different. My love for my husband is, in many ways, a conscious decision I have made. It is a product of my own thoughts and emotions with some hormones (biology) thrown in. My love for my son is, I believe, very instinctual so very biological with some thought and emotion thrown in. Dude, if mothering hormones didn't exist, who would fall instantly in love with their balled up, red, old-man-looking, sorta ugly little infants whose cries are definitely not easy on the ears and whose pee and poop you have to clean up? Its those hormones, in large part, that keep us from abandoning our little ones.

Like I said, I do not love my husband or my child MORE than the other one. The love I feel for them is DIFFERENT. Okay, so lots of my fellow moms agree with me on those points. Some did go on to say, that for them, it is important to prioritize their marriage about their kids because they will be living with their spouses longer than their kids, and also it is important to provide an example of a strong marriage for their children. Another mom noted that it was important to prioritize and take care of ourselves, maybe before our marriages and children because if we don't take care of ourselves then we can't take care of others. Yes, but... was my reaction again. Yes, all of these things are important (self, marriage, children) and should be priorities, but to rank them in an absolute order of priority? Again, yuck! It seems way too simplistic and unrealistic. Can't we just say that ALL of these things are priorities in our life? And its a constant juggling act to decide what takes top priority at this very moment in time based on who or what is in need of the most attention? That balance is hard and there are no hard and fast rules? God, I just HATE black and white thinking. We (human beings) are smarter than that, and we sell ourselves short when we try to oversimplify things and tout those oversimplifications as truths.

Plus, I think lots of people these days are ill prepared for marriage and parenthood and really, most relationships because they still have unmet needs and hangups from their early years. Yeah, I sound like a psychologist now don't I? But its true!! So many people didn't receive the nurturing they needed, weren't allowed to work through their developmental needs, weren't allowed their need to be dependent as children, and were pushed into independence artificially and before they were truly ready. These detached, needy people then go out into the world ill-prepared for all these challenges in balancing relationships and figuring out when to put others' needs before your own or vice versa. In our supposedly super-independent society, we have a bunch of grown children walking around pretending to be adults. I say this because so many people are incredibly selfish or at least self-focused, "independent" to the point that they struggle to maintain healthy relationships, and still believing that the newest handbag or big screen tv will make them happy. If that doesn't sound like a teenager or a child, I don't know what does. So is it any wonder we have problems with too many marriages failing? Seriously.

My other gripe? Why is it that balancing all these tenuous relationships seems to be the sole responsibility of women? The mommies if you will. Now I appreciate that more men are becoming family-minded and family-focused. I love that. I respect and support dads that choose to stay at home with their children. But I still think its unfair and lame that women are expected to do it all and take care of everyone else and be perfect. I get that women biologically, due to those same hormones I talked about earlier, are more adept, usually, at nurturing and handling relationships. I love that part about being a women myself. But, it is not solely a mother's responsibility for keeping her family together. It is just as much a father's responsibility to support his wife and nurture his relationship with her, to sometimes prioritize his children above himself when they are at need for whatever reason, to take care of himself and not relegate that responsibility to his wife.

As it is, I believe many men are left ill prepared for life as a family man - a true co-parent, a loving spouse, and not simply just the provider for the family. Even if they want to take on these roles they are often at a loss on how to do it because they have few role models for this. To make it worse, our children's early years are when they need the most from their parents so moms and dads need to figure out how to put others first really fast - not just their little bambinos but also their spouses because let's face it, being a parent to a infant is freaking hard! Sometimes mommy gets burnt out from taking care of her infant's needs for hours on end and need to be taken care of themselves. Sometimes daddy feels out of the loop, disconnected, uneeded and may withdraw even more instead of trying to find a way to reenter the the family mix.

Parents can't just be selfless, though. They have to balance putting others first with knowing their own needs and being able to communicate those needs with their loved ones in an active, loving manner so their spouse and those around them can support them and help them. Active, as in not passive aggressive. We need to ask for help and not be scared to ask for help for fear that asking for help is not acceptable and is seen as failing. Its a complicated dance but a necessary one. Human beings are social creatures.

My struggle as a social creature and novice mother has been how to get my own needs met. I feel like I've been doing, doing, doing for others, trying to meet expectations, trying to keep everyone happy and taken care of. But who in the hell takes care of me? How do I take care of myself when I'm expected to take care of everyone else and there is not enough time to do both that and take care of myself, and least not all by myself. Its a futile struggle! The whole Super Mom/Super Woman thing is ridiculous!

Back to the original essay that sparked this diatribe, the author, Ms. Waldman, has since gone on to write a book entitled Bad Mother as well as a few blogs about how her thoughts and experiences. Again, while I totally understand all the mom angst out there about all the competing demands placed on us and how someone always seems to take fault in something you're doing as a mother, I'm just not down with this trend. The trend I am speaking of is the "bad mom" trend. They say bad mom is the new good mom (insert eyeroll). I HATE things that refer to the almighty They. Anyway, its a philosophy that, in a nutshell, touts that since I can't be as perfect of a mother as my own ideals or what everyone else around me seems to expect of me, I'm going to glorify how imperfect I am, how much I don't follow the expectations out there, how rebellious I am. It all feels very teenagerish to me. I know a few moms who kind of take this philosophy, and I even enjoy a few of the mom writers and bloggers, like Her Bad Mother, who write about it. But it, like one friend described it, it seems a bit passive aggressive. But more than that, its inexact, maybe inauthentic? These women don't think they are bad mothers. They're saying that being perfect shouldn't necessarily be the goal, that imperfect is human, and good mothers are human. Yes! True! So say that, I say. There seems to be an insecurity in adopting this "bad" label, again like the rebellious teenager who bases their whole identity around how different and nonconformist they are. How bout discussing the very real, important experiences of the modern mother and dropping the whole good/bad, black/white thing, huh? But I digress. Can you say rambling? Yep, its my specialty:)

But, hey, did you notice the themes that run through this meandering thread? The threads? Let me spell them out: oversimplification, truth is complicated, perfect is not good and imperfect is not bad, independence must be balanced with community, selflessness but be balanced with self-care. There are no simple answers in life;)