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sorry, Ralph, I can’t make it to lunch, I gotta sit and watch my life go by

Since I was in the middle of one of those quintessential British mysteries (my favorite exchange so far: “I’ve had a thought.” “Well, treat it gently. It’s in a strange place.”)

I decided last night to settle down in the bathtub and read a few more chapters, try to figure out whodunit. Todd wasn’t home yet. I’m always a bit nervous about taking a bath when he’s due home, because more than once I’ve gotten completely engrossed in my book and ended up squeaking and jumping (or as well as one can jump in the tub anyway, perhaps “thrash about” would be a better description) when he suddenly appeared at the bathroom door. The cats also tend to choose that time to run madly around the house, making sure their paws sound as much as they possibly can like clomping people-feet.

So when I was halfway through my bath and thought I heard a strange noise downstairs I shrugged and figured it was probably the cats, or the wind. When it happened again I felt crabby and nerve-wracked and…

…and three hours after I started this journal entry I’m sitting in front of the computer again. After typing the above paragraph I tried to check email and realized the links were down. So I curled up in the armchair with Shelly and finished up the mystery. (I know, it was a flimsy reason to finish the book, but I really wanted to know what happened.) I hadn’t a clue, by the way, whodunit, it was such a surprise that I’m definitely going to look up more of the author’s books next time I’m at the library. The links came back up just as I was finishing the last page. Anyway, where was I? Ah, yes, the bathtub.

I assumed it was the cats and said, “C’mon, you guys, settle down, would you?” and tried to go back to my book. No such luck, there were more strange noises from downstairs and after calling, “Todd? Is that you?” and not getting an answer I finally turned on the hot water in hopes that it would drown out the cats. Imagine my surprise when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. I quavered, “Todd? Is that YOU?” and was highly relieved to hear him say, “Yup, it’s me.” He looked a little bedraggled when he came into the bathroom and I asked how long he’d been home. It turned out that the noises I’d heard had been him knocking on the back door which was locked from inside and having to go through the basement instead which was pitch-black. I grinned and said, “Were you scared?” (I’ve been a little suspicious of the basement myself ever since we watched The Amityville Horror.) “Were there monsters down there?”

He rolled his eyes and said, “I was doing fine until suddenly this huge BANG BANG BANG started up, and eventually I realized it was the water turning on, but it did startle me.” Which I thought was pretty funny, given that I’d turned on the water to drown out the strange noises he was making which were startling me, and so on and so forth.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the Hypothetical Child; meeting Dress With A Head and enjoying hanging out with her so much was the catalyst for both of us to start wondering a little more seriously about whether or not we want to have children. The other day we were discussing the sort of house we want to buy and Todd said that we might want to take school systems into account when we decide just where we want to live, and I’m STILL mulling that one over. It makes me feel about two hundred years old and approximately twelve years old at the same time.

Something that finally did occur to me, though, that’s put quite a few of my fears/worries about children to rest. For years now I’ve been pointing out the different ways that parents mistreat their children and saying, “What if that’s us?” and then — and this is one of those can’t-see-the-forest-for-the-trees realizations — I was fretting over the possibility of being a terrible parent and out of the blue came the obvious. Or it just came into focus from its hiding spot on the tip of my nose in front of my eyes.

When we were in the Framingham Public Library parking lot and Todd said, “Maybe we should get married after all, what with you not being covered by health insurance,” and I said oh, all right, even though it seemed ridiculous to me to certify we’d be together forever, that’s just a given, an absolute — what I’m trying to say in my winding-road sort of way is this: I thought marriage was something you stood by and let happen to you. I’d seen so many people fuck it up so spectacularly that I thought there couldn’t possibly be any way to avoid that.

What I learned, though, was this: that it doesn’t happen to you. You live it. I decided to spend the rest of my life with my best friend, to make kindness and happiness and love and intelligence a priority, and I’ve made that happen. We’ve made that happen. We both wake up in the morning, after five years together, astonished that we found each other. Astonished that we could possibly be this happy together. Thankful to whatever forces in the universe made it possible for us to meet. So I finally stopped worrying about the possibility of being a terrible parent. Because I realized that you don’t have to be a passive participant in parenting any more than you have to be one when it comes to marriage.

© 1997 QN Podcast (formerly Quirky Nomads).