May 11 2009
My Wife Cried
I have mentioned in previous posts that my wife is pregnant with our third child. My wife told me that I should use their names so that the posts read more like I am talking about real people. I guess I don’t have a problem with that, after all it was out of deference to my wife that I used the descriptors to begin with.
Bryce is seven, Sofie is two and they couldn’t be more different. Bryce is sensitive and thoughtful, Sofie brash and often mean. If one asks how a two year old can be mean, they’ve never had a two year old. Bryce is still quick to tears when faced with any number of life’s little disappointments; Sofie’s tears, when they come, are shocking and tempestuous, and intended to manipulate, often transforming to fury when she doesn’t get her way.
This post isn’t primarily about my kid’s tear though, but about my wife’s. She is very frugal with her tears unlike so many other women I had known over the years. Throughout our relationship I would wager I have only seen my wife cry ten times at most. Usually the tears came after some explosive argument between the two of us, however, there are a few others that I feel merit mentioning.
In particular my wife is prone to tears when she is pregnant. On September 11, 2001 my wife was about 5 months pregnant with Bryce. Now certainly the events of September 11th were upsetting to everyone but there was something unique in my wife’s reaction, something that separated her from others that I met and talked to around that time. Mostly people were amazed, angry, full of speculation and whipped up over the sensational images that were played over and over. My wife’s reaction was sad, simple very honest sadness. I was on the phone in my home office talking about something that seems so unimportant after the fact, when she walked in. I looked at her, irritated as I often did(do) when she just strolls into the office. I was shocked when I saw her face. “They just can’t stop killing us,” she said, breaking into sobs. I’ll never forget to quote and how foolish I felt when she said it.
When she was pregnant with Sofie I was traveling on business for the day when the next emotional moment occurred. It was much more subtle but just as touching to me. My wife had been out in our yard in North Georgia, playing with our son when she heard a commotion on the other side of our privacy fence. She put our son inside and walked to the front to investigate and was horrified at what she saw. A “pack” of three stray dogs were chasing a stray cat and had run the terrified animal up a tree. This story seems benign enough, a typical cat-up-a-tree story but it continues. The dogs waited at the base of the tree, all that day, all night, and the next day. Finally the inevitable happened and the unfortunate animal had to make the choice to come down or starve, and when it did it was attacked and killed by the strays. We lived in a somewhat rural area at the time and the humane society wouldn’t come out for a stray cat or to save a stray cat. And, after my wife watched in horror as the animals set upon the defenseless cat she tried to make her case to the neighbor whose yard the savaging had occurred in, a very nice old lady who had lived with her husband on the property for 50 years, and the old lady’s response was, “I wished they would kill some more of them.” It should be noted that she had a favorite family of strays that she fed on a daily basis.
This time, once again at the five months point, give or take, her tears flowed. The previous two instances were clearly emotional events, which would have been disturbing to anyone. This time she had an unexpected emotional reaction to Grey’s Anatomy. One of the characters, Izzy I think, has a tumor and they played their typical sadistic mind games, setting emotional dialog to soft, depressing music until my wife’s sobs approached convulsion. This is unusual because my wife does not typically enjoy watching, and certainly doesn’t cry when watching, sappy melodramas. She likes action movies and comedies, shunning chick flicks in most cases. She prefers The Unit and 24 to Grey Anatomy and One Tree Hill.
I little investigation on my part revealed that just before she sat down to watch the show, the real reason for her tears may have occurred. She sat down to pay our water bill and one of our CHECK cards was declined. Money has been unusually tight these days and whenever we run low on funds, the stress levels run high. We had the money, and she said that she likely mistyped something but she did have to check the balance. She would hate my dime store psychoanalysis, and though she doesn’t read this blog, I feel the need to apologize for making assumptions. It could have been the TV show, but it isn’t like her. Regardless, her plea to me was the same, “Can I just go back to normal please?” Yes. Sometime around the 3rd trimester, history teaches us, the emotions settle and the physical discomfort begins.
My wife’s reluctance to cry makes it all the more intense when she does. It seems like during each pregnancy there is a moment when she is forced to confront some irreconcilable flaw in the rickety and often dangerous machinery of daily life. This very pragmatic lady for one moment longs to perceive a world that is perfectly design for her baby, and though she understands that perfection doesn’t exist, she grieves its absence. Of course I immediately set about trying to fix the problems, trying to comfort her about 9-11, explaining that the attacks were far away (so stupid), burrying the dead cat and yelling at all the neighbors, and making sure our finances are collapsing. She usually quickly snaps back to normal, a conscious force of will, intended to stop my misguided and annoying flurry of activty. I myself have a deep seeded need to make sure the world seems perfect for her and my children, a need that is doomed to remain unmet. My wife understands this and usually recovers while I nurse the misconception that I can find solutions to all of life’s problems.
