Big 5-Year-Old Love

I got an email from my friend Julia this morning.  Her daughter, Libby, age five, had just announced that she wanted to marry her infant sister, Stella.  At least Libby is no longer looking to depose her mother as Stella’s parent.  That had been the issue the last time we touched base. 

You see, Libby loves her new sister that much.  Almost makes me want to reconsider… Almost. 

Julia explained to Libby that, as Stella was a blood relative, they could not legally marry.  Not in this country, anyhow.  Libby would have to find another, more socially appropriate way to profess her undying love for her sister.  And consider other prospects for a life partner.

Libby decided that marrying a friend might be a good idea, with which her mother (who’s husband, I can attest, is her best friend), heartily agreed.

Well, of course, Libby picked my Sophie.  (I say in my most Jewish-mother voice.)

I shared this news with Sophie on our way to nursery school. 

“Libby’s mother told me that she wants to marry Stella.”

“She can’t do that!” cried Sophie, aghast.  “Stella is too young.  When Stella is a mommy, Libby will be a grandma!” 

“They’re not THAT many years apart.  Libby is about four years older than Stella.  I’m that many years older than daddy.”

“Oh.”

“Besides, that’s not the reason they can’t get married.”

“Why can’t they?”

“You aren’t supposed to marry your sister.  It’s against the law.” 

“Oh.” Sophie was taking this all in.  Perhaps realizing that she had no sister with whom to fall in love and experience the disappointment of not being able to marry, fashioning it into a rationalization for why it’s a very good thing she’s an only child. 

Or maybe that’s just my own twisted imagining.  

“So you know who Libby decided to marry?”  I said, dangling the information before her.

“Who?”

“YOU!” 

Sophie’s face bore a serious expression.  She was considering this prospect.  “Well, I’m going to have a whole bunch of girls marrying me, so she could be one of them.”

My daughter is planning on having a harem.  Of women.

“Who else would you like to marry, Soph?”

“Leah.  Lilly.  Reid.”

“So you would marry a boy?”

“One boy.  And Margo.  We’d all be mommies together.” 

“Except for Reid.”

“He would be the daddy.”  The fantasy makes sense.  After all, when they get together, what do they do but play at being parents—I frequently hear Sophie and her friends bossing their dolls around with glee.  “Time to go to bed!  No, you cannot have another cupcake!  Yes, you have to wear those pants!”  Parenting with greater limits, consistency and vehemence than I can possibly muster. 

How do we decide who to marry?  Chemistry?  Security?  Someone with whom to continue the various dynamics we established in our families of origin?  

Imagine, marriage, not born out of sexual attraction, finances, and familial dramas, but friendship, pure enjoyment, and a vision of communal happiness. 

An Indecent Proposal

Sophia and I are eating breakfast together.  This is a time when Sophie is inclined to suddenly reveal a little tidbit of what happens in her life when I am not around.  I relish these moments. 

These crumbs of personal experience must be offered, I have learned.  When she comes home from school, she is always tight-lipped about her day.

“So, Soph…what happened in school today, anything interesting?”

“Can I listen to Seussical?”

“Can we talk for a little bit first?  I haven’t seen you all day.”

“Okay mommy.  I will tell you one thing.  Then, you have to turn on Seussical.”

I sigh.  I don’t want to grill her.  But come on.  Why the secrecy?  When I was a child, I was all too happy to share every intimate detail of my day with my mother.  Much to her chagrin.

My mom:  “What happened at school today?”  She braces herself.  Pours a cup of coffee.  Takes a seat. 

Me:  “First period: insert lengthy story.  Second period: insert lengthy story. “  I am oblivious to all social cues that I should speed things up.  Eyeball rolls. Yawns.  Glances at the clock.  (She teases me to this day, asking me when she calls, “So what happened during first period?”  Very funny, mom.) 

And even now, I catch my husband glazing over, when, in Technicolor, I illustrate for him exactly how the day went. 

Even my therapist, MY THERAPIST, jokes that I talk too much.  Can I help it?  I’m a storyteller.  It’s in my blood. 

But, clearly, this is one trait Sophie has not inherited from me.  Which is why, I get really excited when she engages in spontaneous sharing.  I try not to act too hungry for every gory detail, but I know my eager expression betrays me every time.

“Trip asked me to marry him,” she says, as casually as if she was saying she learned how to squats in Kick N’ Flips. 

“Who’s Trip?”  I had never heard of this Trip fellow.  Never seen him at Montessori before.  He must be a new kid.  Clearly, a man of action. 

“Oh, he’s not in my class.  He’s a napper.  I see him on the play ground.”

“When did he ask you to marry him?”

“So, Trip was already in the bathroom, and I showed up.”

“What was he doing?”  I pictured a one room bathroom.

“He was going to the potty.” 

“Okay….”

“And he asked me if I saw his foot.”

“So he was in a stall?”  She looks at me like I’m an idiot, as if this is why she never tells me anything. 

“Yes, Mommy.”

“So what did you do?”

“I said no.  And he said, can you see my foot now?  And I said no.  And he said “AHHHHHHH!  My butt’s on fire!”

“I’m not following.”

“He says that sometimes.  To be silly.”

“So then what happened?”

“Then he asked to marry me.”

“And what were you doing, when he proposed to you?”

“Oh, I was pee-ing,” she says, matter-of-factly.  Really.  Can you think of anything more romantic than this?

“So what did you say?”

“I told him…maybe,” she gives me a coquettish, side-long glance. 

“Why maybe?”

“Because.  I don’t know if I want to marry him, or PJ or Samantha.”   

I nod, understandingly, and reach for pen and paper.  

“Let me get this all down, I tell her. “ And she beams, while I write down her story, asking her to recount each detail, making sure I get it right.

When I’m finished, she asks, “Can I see?” 

“Well, I just kind of scribbled it, Soph.”  I tell her, handing her the slip of paper.  She studies it, and I watch her mouth move.  She’s reading it. 

“What do you think?” I ask?

“Great!” I can see she is quite pleased with herself. 

She may not suffer from the same verbal incontinence that I do, but she shares the same impulse.  We all share that impulse.  

Nothing to Be Ashamed Of

Sometimes, the only way to reduce a stigma is to bulldoze over it, flattening it with personal experience and truth, encouraging others to come out and share their truths.

And so, I’m coming out of my personal bedroom tonight. My “personal bedroom” because it is mine and mine alone. Not mine and Kevin’s. And DEFINITELY not mine and Sophia’s. Just mine, all mine.

I wasn’t always comfortable with the fact that Kevin and I slept in separate spaces. In the beginning, when love was raw and young, I thought couples in love were SUPPOSED to sleep together. Wasn’t it an indicator of their level of intimacy? Of their willingness to share the most private parts of themselves? Of a desire to never be apart, even in sleep?

So when Kevin told me that he really had a hard time sleeping with me, that it made his poor sleep even worse, I took it very personally. I felt rejected and unloved. Why doesn’t he want to sleep with me? I wondered. But it wasn’t me. It was any living being who snored, changed positions or simply inhaled and exhaled, including our cat. So, when we first decided to cohabitate, we sought an apartment that had two bedrooms—one for Kevin and one for me.

In our first apartment together (the second floor of an aging, subdivided mansion that was once owned by one of the Johnsons of Johnson and Johnson), my room was grand and capacious with a windowed turret and a marble fireplace. The cat and I lived in fairytale splendor. Kevin slept in the adjacent room, an elongated closet, its windows packet tightly with egg crates and tapestries to block out every last photon. This was an arrangement I could live with, and did, for three years.

It got so, eventually, I couldn’t sleep with Kevin. When forced into a co-sleeping arrangement on a vacation or family visit, both of us would toss and turn with one of us inevitably winding up on the floor or in the bathtub or simply awake all night. Sleeping alone worked for us. And after awhile I came to realize that I actually preferred sleeping alone. I liked the silence. I liked the freedom of being able to keep the light on as long as I liked. I liked not sharing the covers. I liked not being woken by his alarm or when he got out of bed. Our time together is precious. And so is our time apart.

When Sophia was born, having two separate rooms served us well. I kept the baby with me, waking every two hours to feed her, and Kevin slept undisturbed in the room on the other side of our high-rise apartment. It allowed him to go to work each day and function. I had the luxury of staying at home and catching sleep when I could, he did not. But eventually, Sophia and I no longer made good bedfellows. It was time for both of us to have rooms of our own.

So, we went looking for a new domicile, one that had at least three bedrooms—one for each member of our family. We found an ideal situation that had a separate mother-in-law suite on the first floor and three bedrooms on the second. Kevin transformed the first-floor room into a light-proof, sound-proof cave. I claimed the master bedroom (along with the king-size bed and BOTH of the his and her closets), and Sophia landed in a sunny corner room that shares a wall with mine.

It wasn’t until I started showing people around the place that I realized there were those I could tell about our sleeping arrangements and those I actually felt ashamed to tell. Of course, most of my friends and family have known about it for years. But when it came to the babysitters, our new neighbors, gosh even the cable guy, I found myself leading them past “the computer room” or “the guest room,” but never “my husband’s room.”

Which got me thinking: What Sophia is going to tell her friends? Will our sleeping apart make her feel weird and different? Will she accept it as normal and be surprised to learn that her friends’ parents sleep together? Will she worry about the state of our marriage based on the status of our living arrangements? Will she campaign to “bring us back together?”

Will she lie, like I do?

Then I read “Do You Sleep with Your Spouse?” on The Motherlode, Lisa Belkin’s blog on the New York Times website in which she reflects upon the intersection between research and real-parenting. She wrote about the fact that more and more couples are sleeping apart…23% of all couples in 2005, up from 12% in 2001. Okay, not the majority, but a sizeable chunk of the population. She then cited studies on couples who sleep apart v. those who sleep together which yielded an unsurprising finding: those who sleep apart, sleep more soundly. What was most remarkable about the blog was not the facts and figures, but the response to it…parent after parent wishing he/she (mostly she) had a room of his/her own.

So, if I’m gossiped about or considered to be weird by Sophia’s friends’ mothers (which, I have to admit, is one of my fears) maybe, just maybe, those (imaginary) gossiping moms are envious.

And at the end of the day, what’s going to affect Sophia is not whether Kevin and I sleep apart, but how comfortable I am with the arrangement, how I communicate the reasons why we do it, and that I’m a refreshed, well-rested mom instead of a cranky, sleep-deprived one.