What Hallmark leaves out: thoughts on parenting and falling/being in love

As Mother's and Father's Day get closer, as well as G and my wedding anniversary, as well as Otter's second birthday, I keep thinking about the Hallmark approach to how love should be.

It always seemed to me that the myth was that you'd find that "perfect" person and they'd somehow "complete" you; meaning, I guess, that you were incomplete without him/her.

Parenting myths aren't that different; people who are childfree (by choice or not) are supposedly missing an essential piece of life.

Well, I think that's crap. Yes, I adore being a parent (most of the time) and love being a partner (pretty much all of the time).

But that means giving up lots of other stuff. I'd have much more time to read, time to cook, time to SLEEP, if I didn't have a kid. I'd have the freedom to travel (assuming I could become far more fiscally smart than I am) and explore the world in very different ways if I were single.

If I didn't have Otter, I would've been off to visit my friend in Staten Island sometime in the past two years, instead of spending my nights ready to soothe the child when he wakes and my early mornings breastfeeding him. If I didn't have Otter, or even if I didn't have my partner, I'd probably have finished my degree already and would have a professional position that paid a true living wage. I'd have made it to NY to meet my friend that I met online and her partner and her child, who is now a toddler and who I've never seen in real life.

Of course, I also might not have many of my met-online friends, the ones whose combination of infertility and progressive values brought us all together for support and research and comfort whiel we negotiated the struggle to get from an infertility diagnosis to something else.

It's all trade-offs. I won't ever know what exciting things I won't do because I'm a parent, or a partner, or both. And that's okay: I can more than live with that. I chose these paths, and I'm happy with them, even knowing that there are costs, some foreseen and some unforeseen.

But it's just silly to act as if this set of choices is the essential one, as if people who aren't in partnerships or who don't have children (or both) are somehow missing something but I'm not missing anything.

Of course I'm missing things--starting with a lot of sleep and free time, but not just that. It feels disrespectful to me to buy into the Hallmark-style myths that suggest my life is somehow completed by parenting and partnership, disrespectful to the complicated give and take exists in any life. It's not as simple as saying "now I am fully me."

No, I'm not. Now I'm me-who-I-was with some things subtracted and some added. I'm less professionally successful (though not yet less ambitious; still working on getting those in sync), I'm not as attentive and considerate a friend, I'm not as aware and active in the larger public-sphere political world.

I also feel more settled, less emotionally up and down, less purely self-centered and more centered on my immediate family. (My intimates might argue with those characterizations, but it feels that way to me.)

That said, today I was reading an advice column in theWashington Post online, and the columnist, Carolyn Hax, said about falling in love:

If the only way to get his attention is to be perfect, then a big display of cool perfection wins you the chance to be under constant pressure to remain perfect lest you lose his attention again. Whoopee.

The right person for you is someone you feel no need to impress because you're so comfortable that you forget yourself -- and you have no need to impress the wrong person. Dance badly, eat spinach, enjoy.

That feels much more true to me than the Hallmark version (though this mini-excerpt makes it sounds as if there is one "right person" for each of us--and I'm not sure that's a useful idea; some of us have many right people, some of us are right on our own--some both.) Being with G, having Otter, doesn't make me any more perfect (as G would, I'm sure, testify), doesn't make everything all wine and roses and cherubic babies glowing and smiling in the bathtub. In truth, I don't much like wine or roses, and, as our bathtub is not quite as clean as it could be and our local tap water reeks of chlorine due to water purity issues, so toddler baths are not a daily affair "Chez Cat".

But I am free to dance joyfully in our kitchen (badly or otherwise) whenever I like, in front of G and Otter, and often do. Having G and Otter there makes it more likely that I want to dance and sing and do laundry and wake up in the morning occasionally cranky but still glad my family is here (even when Otter is talking loudly about trains at five am).

This is the right life for me, not because I couldn't be happy with some other life, but because I choose to be happy with this one. (Of course, being a poverty-stricken single mom with a serious health issue isn't a life I'd say I'd be so happy in, and having G and Otter and also having somehow achieved serious financial security plus some extra cash would be a nice change from this.)

It's not that things couldn't be better, or that I coudn't imagine worse. It's that the mythic version of happiness doesn't seem to me as rich and interesting as my own messy life.

Maybe that doesn't fit easily on a greeting card, but it works for me.