How parenthood changes marriage

Once the kids arrive, mom and dad may want to be more careful about where, when and how often they allow themselves to argue in the presence of their children. This is the focus of Ilene Rosenzweig's "Anger Management," which is featured in "Cookie" magazine and anthologized in “Blindsided by a Diaper," edited by Dana Bedford Hilmer.
Here's her essay:

My husband and I used to fight a lot. Big fights over nothing. Not speaking for hours over things as petty as tone of voice — a complaint so common we could simply hiss “Tone!” to egg the other person on. Some couples fight over legitimate issues: “I hate your friends!” or “You lied to me!” But when Rick and I were still single and living together, we could conjure a full screaming, temple-throbbing blowout from the smallest complaint, say, leaving a bag of garbage in the back of the car for too long before going to the dump. He says he’s taking out the garbage and doesn’t need to be criticized for how he does it. I ask, why is my position a criticism? It’s just logic. “Garbage in the car could attract bugs ... You just hate being told what to do!” And onward and upward the sparks would fly.

That’s not to say we’d fight over everything. We never fought about traditional things. Like when I found boxes of slides of him and his ex-girlfriend on a romantic weekend in Nova Scotia chilling in our freezer, I didn’t clobber him with a frying pan. That I handled with cool ironic detachment, smoothly proffering the slide box and asking if that’s what broke the defrost.

In general, Rick and I tend to get along well because we share a sense of humor and agree about big issues. Perceived slights and insults on minor issues are the things that get our Mr. and Mrs. Roper dynamic flaring. And we were fine with that. We accepted this about our relationship. Until I got pregnant. The pregnancy was only partially planned. Rick goaded me into “trying” because, based on his calculations of how many months of ovulation therapy and sperm spinning our friends had undergone, it would take years for us to conceive. Then we walked into the bedroom and moments later I walked out pregnant. I don’t think we even had sex.

We weren’t ready.

Another reason Rick and I get along so well is that as a couple we share certain maturity handicaps — and were equally panicked about the prospect of becoming parents. Among the myriad fears — losing our identity, becoming a cliché, being bad at the job — most of all I was afraid of becoming like my parents and fighting in front of the kids.

My parents never should have been married, and if it weren’t for me they wouldn’t have been. The only things they had in common were bowling and two little girls. Oh, and passionate tempers. Their union was mined by a lethal combo of short fuses and bad behaviors. I remember when I was a kid, going to the Long Island Rail Road station with my mom to pick up Daddy, and everyone else’s daddy coming off the train but mine. He was playing poker. My mom had her secret pastimes, too — guitar lessons that required afternoon shuttles to Boston. Such deceptions led to marriage-ending blowouts. By the time I was five, my mom “split,” went the hippie route, got into modeling and Black Sabbath; my dad retreated to a Manhattan Upper West Side playboy pad. This was in the seventies, before enlightened divorce protocol about behaving for the kids’ sake existed, and exes could be friends like in “The New Adventures of Old Christine.” This was more a “Kramer vs. Kramer,” full-throttle custody battle that dragged on for what seemed like forever. And the rancor worsened.

My parents’ fights were opera, and words from their bellowed librettos still reverberate in my memory:

Cornea: My father grabbing a phone from my mother’s hand and his ring scratching her cornea, and her going to the hospital.

Private detective: My mother discovering my father had hired a private detective in his quest to track her affairs and prove her an unfit parent.

Alimony: Them both screaming through the screen door after my father had made the ninety-minute drive from the city to our house and my mother refused to let us out for the visit, claiming he wasn’t up-to-date with the alimony check.

Rick’s white picket fence upbringing in Toronto was far tamer than the psychological safari going on in my Long Island home. But his parents bickered — over money. His superfrugal dad complained that his only-slightly-less-budget-minded mom wasted money by putting too much water in the teakettle.

We didn’t want to become the Bickersons. We wanted to be trustworthy steady parents, models of decorum and cuss-free living, whose kids would grow up in a relaxed environment where they could enjoy their childhood. We vowed not to fight. And to that end, I invented “heart to heart,” a concept to stave off an escalating argument. A time-out for adults wherein either party could call “heart to heart,” and the other person would be compelled to come in for a hug close enough to feel the other’s heart beating.

It didn’t work.

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