Sometimes I look back on my marriage and try to figure out the exact moment when Noah and I started hating each other.
Like I said, we loved each other when we got married. We were one of those couples that never even fought. Like, we would have minor, stupid arguments about… I don’t know, maybe I turned up the heat too high in the winter. Or I caught him drinking out of the milk carton. （Why do men do that?） But it was usually stuff we would laugh about—teasing more than fighting. We were both easy-going people who hated to fight, and sometimes Noah would mumble something about “not wanting to end up like my parents.”
After Aiden was born, life got harder. We were excited to be parents, but also scared. Noah would sometimes sit bolt upright in the middle of the night and not be able to get back to sleep until he went to Aiden’s crib to make sure he was still present and breathing. Other times, we would have serious arguments about whose turn it was to change his diaper. Noah created a sign-in sheet on the refrigerator to keep track, but he took it down when he realized how far behind he was getting.
But still, I always thought we had a happy little family. Then Emma came along.
Emma is wonderful. Don’t get me wrong—I love my daughter more than life itself and I’d do anything for her. But she was not an easy baby. She had colic, and all she did was scream. I mean, I suppose she also occasionally slept and ate, but it felt like 99% of the time she was screaming. When I look back on that time, all I remember is this little pink baby with her eyes squeezed shut, her hands balled into fists, and her toothless mouth wide-open as she hollered at the top of her lungs. And we also had a toddler to contend with. The first few months of Emma’s life felt like a haze of the two of us passing her back-and-forth, stealing an hour or two of sleep whenever we could.
It was doable when I was on maternity leave. But then the summer ended and I had to go back to work. Emma was sleeping a little better by then, but not much. Noah and I were sleeping in shifts. It was awful.
On one particular night, I was determined to get a half-decent night of sleep because I had a big meeting at work the next morning, where I was talking to the school board about the special education program at our school. It was a really, really important meeting, and I didn’t think I could get through it on an hour of sleep. I pumped Emma full of two bottles of milk, hoping she’d conk out, but knowing it was a crapshoot.
I told Noah about the meeting and emphasized how important it was. I had to get a decent night of sleep. He swore he understood. So when Emma woke up screaming at two in the morning, I expected him to get up with her.
“I’ve got a headache, Claire,” he mumbled into his pillow. “Can’t you get her?”
I had a headache too. I had a headache almost all the time these days, as well as big purple circles under my eyes. Skipping out on my parental duties was never an option. “You know I have a big meeting tomorrow.”
Noah squeezed his eyes shut. After a long minute of Emma’s cries increasing in volume, he got out of bed. And slammed the door shut behind him when he left the bedroom.
Just as the cries subsided and I started to drift off again, the screams abruptly started again. A few seconds later, Noah came back into the bedroom. He flopped down on the bed and covered his head with the pillow.
“I can’t deal with her,” he said. “You have to do it.”
“But I told you, I have a meeting tomorrow!”
“Well, I have a headache. I’m not getting up.”
And that was it, as far as he was concerned. He acted like Emma was my baby, he was doing me a favor by trying to help, but if he didn’t want to do it, he didn’t have to. I remember staring at him in the dark bedroom, waiting to see if he would change his mind. He didn’t budge. I had to get up and spend the rest of the night comforting Emma.
He never apologized for that one. Even though I was a wreck at my meeting the next day, and he ended up sleeping in after I dropped Emma and Aiden off at daycare. It was so incredibly unfair.
After that, it seemed like we were at war more and more frequently. He never carried his weight when it came to the children and the housework, and what’s worse, he didn’t care. He told me all I did was nag him. We stopped doing things together as a family—I preferred to go out with the kids myself so I didn’t have to watch him play with his phone instead of talking to me. And we never did anything together as a couple. I can’t remember our last date night. For a while, we were making an effort to get a babysitter and go out, but I can’t remember the last time either of us even suggested it.