Uneven Balance

I had known Robin for over a year now when she told me that she and her husband had been trying to have a child for eight years now and have all but given up now. She was thirty five and he was forty and they were both smokers who refused to quit. She talked about her husband like a teenager deliriously in love. I don't know a lot of couple married ten years who feel that excited about each other.

One morning she called me to say that she was feeling nauseous and lightheaded and could not possibly drive in to work. My first reaction to that was one of excitement. May she had finally got pregnant. What she described sounded a lot like morning sickness. I had felt exactly that way when I first found out I was expecting J.

I asked if her husband was home to take care of her. "Yes he came back from work" she said but did not sound cheerful at all. "He is working in his office upstairs and won't even know if I died. Imagine, I die right now and he finds out in a couple of days. That won't be pretty will it ?" she added. This took me by complete surprise. As we talked some more, I could tell that she had been crying.

She came back the next day and told us it was a food allergy. I wondered they had both been excited like I had been the previous morning and then got thrown emotionally apart from not being able to deal with disappointment. In a few days, Robin was back to being the infatuated teenager who could not wait to get home to her husband in the evenings.

Some people are incredibly blessed in one relationship of their life and it may obviate the need for several others. In Robin's case, her marriage fulfilled her to the point where there is probably no room or need for a child - her cup runneth over, she already had the sense of completion that a child brings other women.

As I thought about it, I seemed to recall several other couples I know who were deeply in love with each other and childless for years. The babies came along in due season often ten years after their friends had had their last children and long after they had given up on becoming parents. After the euphoria of new parenthood wore off they became just another married couple - the euphoria of the their childless years replaced by a certain staidness.