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Alexei and I are fighting.
I guess it’s only to be expected. It was bound to happen sooner or later. We’ve been married for a little over a year and a half. I wouldn’t say the honeymoon stage is over, but nothing can be perfect forever, can it?
This is our first big fight since we made things legal. To be honest, it’s our first big fight since we were back in Boston and everything went downhill so fast. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t love Alexei any less today than I did on the day that I married him. I love him more, I think. If that’s even possible.
This is way more intense than things were in Boston…if only because I’m not broken anymore. I trust Alexei, I trust that he loves me, and I’m not going to slip back into that cool, detached armor that I clung to so desperately back then in the hopes that I wouldn’t get hurt again. It didn’t work so well anyway. Sure, I moved on. We both did. But it hurt like hell and in hindsight, I was really only biding my time until we were back together. That’s the way it feels, at least.
This time, I’m fighting. With him. Against him. I’m fighting because I’m not afraid of losing him. I just want him to understand.
I’m probably making this sound awful; more dire than it possibly is. There’s nothing wrong with our marriage.
I’m on the brink of making a temporarily life-altering decision and the crux of the matter is that Alexei doesn’t agree with what I want to do.
My sister, Gabrielle, hasn’t made any secret about the fact that she wants to start a family with her husband. Alexei and I have had the same conversation, and while we agree that it is something we want to do one day, we know that right now is not the right time. I think, these days, that it’s less about our careers and establishing ourselves and more about the fact that we’re perfectly able to recognize that we’re completely and utterly intoxicated with each other.
Does that make us selfish?
We agree that we want this time for ourselves. True, we’re only prolonging the inevitable. The sooner we have kids, the sooner they’ll be grown and moving out on their own. Better to have them now, when we’re still young enough that we’ll be able to have fun eighteen to twenty years down the road, right? But that’s not the priority. Right now, we’re young enough to enjoy each other, and maybe it is selfish, but I don’t want to share him. With anyone.
So I can see his point in this. Or, at least, one of them. My sister can’t have a baby. It’s the one thing she wants more than anything in this world, and she can’t have it. They – my sister and her husband – have discussed adoption. They’re not unwilling to go that route, but I can’t find it in myself to blame them for holding out the desire to have a child who is a part of them both. The very best parts. All I have to do is look at Alexei and I know that one day, I’m going to want the same. A little girl or boy with honey colored skin and dimples and dark eyes that are so familiar that it hurts sometimes to look into them because you never want to see them in pain.
And even though she tried to hide it, I could hear the agony and embarrassment in Gabi’s voice when she asked me what she never should have had to ask.
I was the logical choice. I keep telling myself that. I would certainly never want to hire some stranger to carry a baby for me for nine months. I wouldn’t trust a stranger with that task. It was only natural to think she’d ask one of us. Her sisters.
Natalia and Eva are out. Their careers require them to stay in top physical form. Rosalyn, as much as she loves Gabi, would never agree to give up control long enough to cater to someone else’s whims for nine months…even if that someone else was just using her body as a time-share. Julia, while I’m sure she would have agreed, is still young enough to be a little too unpredictable when it comes to responsibility.
So who did that leave? I’m married. I’m not running around Seattle every weekend, getting drunk and coming on to strangers. Every now and then I’ll get tipsy and come on to my husband, but that’s different. My days of passing out, naked and drunk, at 7 AM are somewhat behind me.
More than that, I can empathize with Gabi. I never really figured myself for the maternal type, but I’m coming around. Obviously.
And it’s only making me miserable that in wanting to do this one selfless thing for someone I love, I feel like I’m being horribly selfish in regard to the one person I love more than anything else in the world.
Alexei doesn’t want me to be a surrogate. He doesn’t want it to disrupt our lives. We’re supposed to be spending this time enjoying one another and I’m guessing there’s not much to enjoy about hanging around your wife for nine months when she’s hormonal and fat and carrying someone else’s baby.
I keep telling him it could be a trial run. Practice, to see if we can survive this kind of thing. He never laughs when I say it. I hate that, but a part of me does understand. I think he feels like I’m stealing this from him. Robbing him of my first pregnancy. Instead of spending nine months bonding with each other over some new life we’ve created, I think he thinks we’ll spend it bickering. And that he’ll spend it catering to my every craving and demand, the crying jags, the tempers, the changes in our sex life, without the benefit at the end of the journey of being able to hold the most perfect thing God ever created in his arms and realizing it was all worth it.
And you know what? Maybe he’s right. Maybe I’m expecting too much from him. He said that if I absolutely, one hundred percent, decided to do this…that he’d support me. I don’t know why, but at the time, it didn’t sound like his heart was in it. Oh, I know he would. As best he could. It just hurt that he couldn’t see that I’m trying to do this for all the right reasons. I told him I could stay in New York for the nine months, but that only made things worse. I could see it in his eyes, and I know I looked the same.
I can’t stand the thought of being away from him for nine months.
But then he says stupid stuff and I just get so angry at him. He’s so concerned about what his friends and colleagues would think, watching me balloon like a house, giving their congratulations, only to be dealt a stilted, “It’s not my kid. Actually, it’s not her kid, either.” If his friends and colleagues are so judgmental, I don’t give a fuck what they’d think. I’d like to think my friends would try to be a little more understanding, whether they approved or not.
And I’m not asking anyone to approve or agree or anything like that. When it comes down to it, it’s no one’s decision but my own. That’s the way it goes, right? Pro-Choice. Pro-Life. Woman’s-Choice. It’s my body.
And he’s my husband.
He’s the only one whose approval I want. He’s not giving it. We’re fighting. And I don’t know how much more of this I can take.
I have to believe it’ll all be okay in the end.
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FAT
drained
pensive
pleased
