“Are you going somewhere, Mommy?”
Our three year old asked if I was leaving.
Deflated and a little caught off guard I asked his father, my husband, “Do you know why he said that?”
“Yes.”
Minutes earlier I’d felt a surge of affectionate energy towards my husband and, after a request to come my way so I could offer it, he slowly slumped his way over. I grabbed the father of my two children by his shirt collar, pulling him down to my level so I could press my lips hard against his unshaven face. For the first time in a long time, I inhaled his scent and, enjoying it, let my kiss linger for a moment, remembering those days when he’d drive me to the water’s edge and we’d sit in silence, heads pressed firmly as one, breathing and listening to our hearts growing…
And then there was nothing, as if nothing had happened. And the room filled again with a silent void. And we were strangers again.
“Mommy! Are you going somewhere?”
Our oldest son thought I was on my way out, since the occasional kiss happens only when one of us is leaving. It’s kind of like clockwork. It’s hit or miss. It’s seldom passionate, always brief and distracted. It’s the only time he sees his parents openly show their love for each other. But we do love each other – don’t we?
It’s funny how romance seems to dry up when children enter the home. The love is still there and, with each birth, it actually grows and evolves in to all kinds of new love. And we cast so much of that love in to the sea of chaos that is raising a family that we chronically forget to kindle the flame that got us to “family” in the first place.
There’s so much joy and tenderness in our hearts, and it’s mostly because of our kids. And, ironically, there’s an absence of presence in our marriage because of kids.
Where kids fill up an emotional oasis, my marriage drains in to an emotional desert.
