I may be some time

When I feel I'm failing — and I do, all the time, in a thousand different ways — I don't worry I'm shortchanging Charlie. It's Paul who gets the shaft, over and over again.

When I'm napping alongside Charlie and get jerked awake by his sudden cries, I call down the stairs to Paul, "Can you come take him, please?" so that I can get more sleep. "Sure," he says invariably, ready and goodnatured. Later I go down to the kitchen and find Paul's dinner halfway made, abandoned when he came to take the baby.

When it's time to pump, I come into my office, shut the door, and sit at my desk. I pump for twenty minutes, then relax in my chair for another fifteen. When Charlie's being captivating, I push the pumping off for a while, eager to spend more time with him. When he's howling, I claim asylum, leaving the screaming baby with Paul while I retreat to my quiet room. I don't think Paul has checked his e-mail in the last seventeen weeks — seventeen weeks today — but I regularly have time to visit blogs, make my own posts, and chat with friends.

Sometimes at night when Charlie begins to make fretful peeping sounds, I lie beside him and will him to go back to sleep, hoping for just a few more minutes of peace. Of course he does not, but I let his noises escalate until there's no ignoring them, which is usually long enough for them to wake Paul as well.

Now and then when Charlie's having a rough night, I sit in the den with him patting him as he cries. Sometimes Paul wakes, despite the distance between our bedroom and the den, and comes to see if there's anything he can do. I know in his place I would lie in bed and hope that the crying will stop.

At least I don't tell him yes, there is something he can do: Will you take the baby for two seconds? I am just going outside. I may be some time.

I always tell him to go back to bed. But before you take that as proof that I'm not as unfair to him as I might be, consider this: why don't I ever close the two doors between bedroom and den before the baby howls?

Bad mother, good wife

Ayelet Waldman is a bad mother.

Hey, hey, I'm just quoting. That's what she claims:

If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.

The article I linked above describes the consuming desire Waldman feels for her husband, novelist Michael Chabon, a passion that eclipses her love for their four kids. From her writing I infer that she's happy to the point of complacency in being a bad mother as long as she's still a good wife.

But is that even possible?

Paul and I are barely on the cusp of this new phase in our partnership, where we're learning to modulate our own needs to accomodate Charlie's. I'm just beginning to understand how carefully I'll have to negotiate those needs, sometimes doing what's right for Charlie at the expense of our relationship, sometimes doing precisely the opposite, only hoping I misjudge as seldom as possible. I'll make mistakes; I already have. What matters is the trying.

To talk about who I love more, my husband or my child, as Waldman does, seems meaningless — they're part of each other. Although Paul and I have a relationship separate from Charlie, just as Charlie and I have one apart from Paul, just as the two of them do, for now we are mostly a triad. No one of us comes first right now. We have to come together.

So how can I be a good wife if I'm not also a good mother to the small creature we made together? How does it honor the man you love to be a bad mother to your children?

I think it's possible, just, to be a good mother and a bad wife. (I've seen enough divorces to believe that.) But does it work the other way? Can you be a bad mother and still be a good wife?

Fire drill

In response to my last post, some of you are noodling around the question of whom you'd save from a burning building, your spouse or your kid. Putting aside the extreme unlikelihood of ever needing to make that choice, your comments have made me consider the question myself. I am finding it a difficult conundrum, so I have made a chart to help me choose. To wit:

Paul	Charlie
Snores	Snorts
Admires my rack	Eyes my rack with a wary, hunted look
Acts excited and pleased when I handle his scrotum	Pees indignantly on me when I handle his
Bakes homemade sourdough bread	Produces small-batch artisan cheese in the folds of his neck
Dark, luxuriant, glossy hair	Hair so much like a tennis ball, we might as well have named him Spalding
Whistles in the shower	Produces a not unmusical noise from a more southerly sphincter in the bath
When he doesn't like what I've made for dinner, tactfully says nothing and simply refrains from going for seconds	When he doesn't like what I've made for dinner, emits a bloodcurdling shriek, arches away with a horrible grimace, and, later, just out of spite, ejects his serving down the front of my black T-shirt
Smiles at me (teeth)	Smiles at me (gums)
Lets me have sips of his milkshake	Um...no, thanks. No, really. It's okay.
Folds own pants	Fouls own pants

I think the choice is clear. Unfortunately, since I am not strong enough to heft Paul in a fireman's carry, I will be leaving him and Charlie to roast marshmallows while I scramble to safety bearing one yowling cat on each shoulder. Listen, they'll be fine:

Paul	Charlie
Loves the person I love best	Loves the person I love best