knot tying.

i need to find a functional way to tell them. i feel like they should know. maybe i'll wait 8 more weeks, end of the first trimester, when the baby will be more solidly present in both my body and my mind. i just don't need their negativity.
she crawled into my lap over sticky waffles this early morning and her thin, long limbs had me yearning for her pudgy babyhood, which disappeared so quickly, so sneakily. i wish i'd believed people when they told me that she would grow up fast. looking through baby albums, pictures of her small and red and newly born, pictures of her months-old and pudgy and chuckling, pictures of me exhausted, unkempt, struggling: such an incredible lot has vanished.
i told him about this space, which contradicts my original intent. i didn't want him to know about these ravings because i didn't want him to have to deal so constantly with my ceaseless outpourings. i was sorry for telling him because my detailings haven't always been nice and i furiously fluttered watching him focus on the entries, watching him read about himself. but i'm glad i told him because it caused some immediate clarification, because he told me he wants to know what's going on inside me, he wants to know what i'm thinking and feeling. as if that's not forever dripping off my sleeve.
and he wants to help. he said he'd been thinking that he needed to change things anyway.
he is so good to me and so surprisingly so. just when i expect he'll be really pissed. my only hope is that he isn't squelching his own ire or irritation to appease me and help me get to a better place.
i'm going to have to vigilantly work to not alter my sentiments because i know his eyes will see this.
the big article on marriage this morning in the week in review section of the paper reminded me of much of david meyers work on the satisfaction and gratification of community, partnerships, fulfilling interpersonal interactions. marriage rates are declining while the divorce rates among those who bother to marry are climbing. marriage has lost most of its significance, if it ever had much, and is now a pretty feebly regarded institution. it's so disposable to pledge your life and heart and soul to someone only to, with the protection of your well-written prenup, rescind on the whole deal weeks, months, years later. we are such an intensely individualized and hedonistic culture. if something isn't immediately pleasurable to the individual, there's always another wife or husband just around the corner. instead of investing the time and energy and gray hairs in the struggle to make things work, it's a whole lot easier (and socially respected, now) to simply can your spouse and hop on match.com to find a replacement. how damn depressing. not that i'm not glad for the possibility of divorce. there are certainly instances in which it is completely warranted.
but i don't want a divorce. when i marry, i want to marry for life. i want to commit myself to the person i'm with for good. if i don't think something is forever, or has great potential to last that long, i won't bother with i do. because i don't want a throw-away marriage. i don't want to recycle through a second, third, fourth husband. something about that just doesn't seem right. for better or worse, when i commit, i want to do it wholly, selflessly and honestly. i want the union to be about that: a union, something that impacts, involves and influences the lives, desires, actions, investments of two people, not one. perhaps it's naive or archaic, but i want to marry because i've found something in which i want to actively encourage lastingness, because i've found fulfillment, companionship, love.
i wish i could say that i thought they truly loved each other, but i don't. i think they have spatterings of affection. i think they mostly tolerate each other for the sake of making it through another day. i do think they need each other, whatever that means. i do know that they're committed to each other, at least insofaras they've remained married. she might be having an affair. if that comes to light, it will change my attempts to rose-color aspects of what is otherwise, i think, a mostly undesirable union. she has checked out of the marriage, for the most part, but that stems from having lost so much of herself in it so soon after their first encounter and for so long. now that she can't distract herself with babies and has grown tired of her older, less overtly needy children, she needs something else, something more, a gaping escape hatch from the dingy reality of her home life, her fragmented, tenuous, conflictual partnership. i don't want that to be me. i don't want to suffer in denial only to wake up twentyplus years later and realize i'm truly miserable, that not only do i not truly love my partner, i actually detest him and resent everything about him...from the way he flosses his teeth to the way he smells in bed.
i woke this morning slightly nauseated, needing to eat. this baby (babies) is (are)such a voracious one (s). feed me, feed me, feed me. i don't think he ever gets enough to eat. i'm not actively vomiting, which is pleasant and unexpected. i hope it lasts. there's nothing, NOTHING, worse than puking first thing in the morning.
waterfall today. i need to just hold her hand and walk.