“I need to talk to you.”
He sat down beside me on the couch, pulled me close and hoisted my legs onto his lap. “I love talking to you too,” he whispered into my ear.
When I didn’t return his steamy kiss, Ben pulled back. “Oh,” he said. “You’re serious.”
I smiled. “I’ve just been thinking that I can’t hang around here all the time.”
“You ready to move on? Or get our own house?”
I shook my head. “No. I think I could stay in this pool house comfortably for the rest of my life and have your mom wait on me... but I think I need to get a job.”
Ben smiled. “That’s awesome! Have you found something you really want to do?”
I looked skeptical. “I don’t have a clue what I really want to do.”
“So why are you getting a job? I’m making plenty and we have like no bills.”
“I just feel like I need to do something with my time; I need a purpose.”
Ben rubbed my shoulder. I knew he was trying to be supportive because he was always supportive. He only wanted what was best for me. “But, TL, you’ll be pregnant soon, and there’s no use in stressing yourself out with a job unless it totally fulfills you, you know?”
Every logical cell in my body knew that he was trying to take the pressure off of me, to let me know that I didn’t have to do anything just because I felt like Ishould. But I could feel myself getting angry anyway. “Oh, so being a CPA fulfills you?”
Ben shook his head. “No. It’s a job. But I do it because I’m your husband, and I like taking care of you. And my dad needs me. Andmaking both of you happy fulfills me, so revision to my previous answer. Actually, being a CPA does fulfill me.”
He had responded to my snap as coolly and calmly as I could imagine. But, for the first time in the fifteen months I had known Ben, I needed him to argue with me. I had to feel him waver just an inch from that sheet-glass countenance of his. “And quit saying soon I’m going to be pregnant. I’m not pregnant, and the last thing I need is you reminding me that I’m failing at my only responsibility.”
Instead of fighting with me, Ben lowered his eyes to the ground, making me feel a hair off of Hitler, and said, “TL, I love you madly, and I think you’re the perfect woman. I don’t need a baby from you to be happy or fulfilled or anything. Let’s just not worry about it.”
What I needed to do was cry. I needed to crawl into my adoring husband’s lap and sob about the baby I had dreamed of and how scared I was to even find out why it had yet to appear. We could be adults, talk through it together, and make a plan for either moving forward or putting it on the back burner. But, instead, I stomped off into our bedroom, like the relative child I was, closed the door rather forcefully and yelled, “I told your parents we’d have dinner with them at seven.”
Friends always asked me if it was hard having a therapist as a mother-in-law. Until that night, I had always answered, “No.” Until that night, it had always been easy and normal and like any other mother-in-law. But, until that night, I had been transparently happy. As soon as we sat down outside in the gorgeous iron coral chairs around their outdoor dining table, Emily said, “Oh no, kids. I sense some tension. Should we talk it out?”
“Everything’s fine, Mom.”
“Well, are you having enough sex? Because you know if you aren’t having enough sex—”
“Jesus, Emily,” Ben’s father Greg interrupted.
“They’re grown-ups, Greg. They’re married.”
“I know, Emily, but no one wants to talk to his mother about...” He paused and waved his fork around in a circle. “That.”
“Well, I was simply asking,” she said, turning toward Ben, “because—”
“Yes, Mom,” he interjected before she could go any further down her line of psychological questioning. “We have lots of sex, if you must know.”
I could feel myself looking into my salad as though it was a criminal in an interrogation room, and I was the bad cop.
“Yes,” she started up again, “but sex forprocreation and sex forrecreation can sometimes feel different. You don’t want to feel like you’ve lost all the fun of it on the quest for baby.”
I knew my face was redder than the tomatoes on the plate, but I turned to Ben and said, “You told them we were trying to have a baby?”
He shrugged, his fork and knife in midair. “I didn’t know it was a secret.”
“Great,” I said, thinking that if it wasn’t enough for the two of us to be thinking something was wrong with me, now the entire family thought something was wrong with me.
“If it makes you feel better,” Greg said, “I didn’t know about the baby.”
