Marriage Does Not Mean Seeing Eye To Eye

Marriage Does Not Mean Seeing Eye To Eye

My husband and I often do not see eye to eye, and that is not just because of our twelve inch height difference.

I have a weakness for wrapping babies like little burritos until their scrunched, reddened faces are the only things peeping out. I myself have always been fond of tight spaces; some of my best childhood memories involve my family’s fourteen hour road trips to our relatives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where I sat in the backseat of the wood-sided station wagon while piled beneath brightly-wrapped Christmas presents and a Tupperware container heaped with jelly nut cookies and sand tarts (between my brother and me, they never lasted past Virginia). I would think that just having come from the cozy, dark cavern of the womb, an infant would have a similar attachment to cramped quarters, but my husband, Randy, does not agree.

You must understand, my husband cannot wear the beautiful sweaters I keep optimistically purchasing for him because the long sleeves make his burly forearms feel trapped. Whenever we go to sleep, no matter how crisply I have tucked the sheets around the mattress, Randy must kick them out with his feet so that his toes can breathe. I, on the other hand, love to burrow down beneath so many quilts and pillows, Randy will often end up cuddling with our down comforter while thinking it is his wife (considering I am five and a half weeks from giving birth, this is an honest mistake).

Burrito-baby swaddling is not the only area where Randy and I differ. For all of my relentless questions (What if my water breaks in public? What if my pelvis’s fused? What if I don’t dilate? What if I can’t nurse? What if the baby has colic?), I am actually pretty relaxed when it comes right down to the moment I have been dreading as I figure everything’s now out of my hands and must work itself out.

My husband is a wee bit more proactive.

Case in point: Two nights ago Randy and I were getting ready for bed when he whipped out his handy dandy cell phone and began timing my “contractions.” I started laughing until the cell phone’s glow illuminated his furrowed brow and I realized this was no laughing matter. At my standard checkup the week before, the midwife had taken my high blood pressure and the baby’s irregular heartbeat into account and believed I might be having premature contractions. After fifteen agonizing minutes hooked up to a fetal heart rate and contraction monitor, the midwife realized my “contractions” were really just from our feisty baby girl kicking against the contraction band.

When I called my husband upon leaving the birthing center to tell him about my first experience with labor, I did not start out by telling him that all was now well. Oh, no…coming from someone who loves hearing a good story as well as telling it, I had to run down through the blood pressure debacle and the warm goop the midwife had squirted on my stomach; the monitor thing they attached to my stomach that looked like something from The Matrix and sitting there while not knowing if an ambulance was about to be called. By the time five minutes had passed, I could hear Randy’s own blood pressure starting to rise even through the phone.

“So everything’s all right?” he asked.

Deflated that he had rushed my dramatic narrative, I just said, “Yeah.”

I believe this histrionic tendency might have upped my husband’s proactive level as every night he is now practicing timing the duration and frequency of my “contractions,” and every morning making a quart of raspberry leaf tea infused with stevia and honey that I am to drink to prepare my body for labor. For the past few days he has also been instructing me to compile the numbers we need if case I actually do go into labor.

“Eh,” I waved my hand, “I got six weeks to go.”

“So you’re gonna wait ’til you’re giving birth to find out who to call?”

Sighing, I grabbed my cell phone and scrolled down through the numbers for the women’s center. “I have the number already in here,” I said, feeling all high and mighty.

“You’re sure?” Randy folded his arms and raised an eyebrow.

“Sure I’m sure. See–” I hit the green button and pressed the phone against my ear. “Since it’s after hours, they’ll just give me the extension for the midwife on call.”

The phone rang and rang. I listened to the voicemail in English, then in rapid-fire Spanish. Sure enough, it mentioned something about an extension, but I was supposed to have that party’s number on hand.

Turning off the phone, I smiled through tight lips. “Now that I think about it, I think they might’ve given me those numbers a while back, but I lost them when I lost my notebook.”

Randy just looked at me. He didn’t have to say a word.

Another area where my husband and I differ is the way to decorate the nursery. If it were up to Randy, our daughter would be sleeping in a padded white room that looked like she was a candidate for one who flew over the cuckoo nest. Everything would be incredibly sterile and sparse, and she would be sleeping on a white crib with a thin white mattress and a breathable white sheet carefully scrunched up around her calves so her little precious piggies could breathe.

I do not like sterile or sparse; I like texture and color and pizzazz. After pointing out that Randy cannot really see color anyway due to his color blindness, I finally talked him into painting the ceiling the same pale mint as the walls and purchasing the Tiffany-style light fixture that would cast unique stain-glass effects across the room (honestly, once it arrived, the only effect the light gave was a slight nauseous feeling). Randy’s really been a good sport about catering to my decorative whims, but for whatever reason he put his size twelve boot down when I told him I wanted to hang teacups from the ceiling.

“From the ceiling?!” He looked up at the nursery ceiling as if I had already hung the cups there and he had been too distracted by raspberry leaf tea-making and contraction counting to notice.

“Yeah, from the ceiling,” I said. “I saw it done at a coffee shop.”

“Well, the nursery’s not a coffee shop,” Randy said.

“I’ve already got the ribbon and everything. You just hafta trust me.”

“I don’t want to be dodging teacups every time I go in there to change her diaper.”

“Oh, you won’t,” I explained. “They’ll be hanging way, way up and they’ll be over Addie’s crib.”

Randy shook his head. “Nu-huh, you’re not hanging tea cups over my daughter’s crib. They’ll fall down and hit her in the head.”

I bit my lip and stared at the ceiling. “I have thought of that,” I admitted. “Do you think command strips would work?”

“No,” Randy said. “How can I even explain that to her? Sorry about that gigantic bruise on your forehead, honey, Mommy’s ‘artistic’.”

“Fine. I’ll take the ribbon and command strips back.” I looked at that ugly stain-glass light fixture I had insisted on and smiled. “Hey!” I cried. “What if I turned this light upside down and used it like a lamp instead?”

My husband just groaned.