Blame and second chances

It's easy to see that if I had just married my wife and we didn't have a kid, she wouldn't be acting quite like she does today. And even if she did, and if no amount of effort from me got her to change, I could divorce her at any time and get away (relatively) scot free.

So it would also be easy to blame my son for keeping me in this marriage. But in all honesty, being with my son is a good thing; I enjoy my time with him, and I love him. If I had the choice to go back in time and stop myself from impregnating my girlfriend, I wouldn't do it, knowing that my son either wouldn't have a chance at life, or that he would be born to other parents that wouldn't take care of him as well as I do. I would throw myself on that grenade again to care for my son: he listens to me, he enjoys doing things that I enjoy doing, and he's a good kid because I'm his father, and I keep a firm eye on him at all times.

Things are different between my wife and I: when we have time together, she seldom follows my suggestions. She enjoys doing things with me, when she isn't tired or busy, which is most of the time. And she's a good woman, when she isn't nagging me or complaining. But the only reason she became the woman she is now is because marriage made our lives so busy, complicated and full of chores, errands, work, babysitting and the like, that problems just completely overshadowed our once fun relationship. Unlike the time before I got married, I have a hundred things to do every day for the sake of my family, and there's nothing I can do to improve my personal life:

If I move my wife's mother into our house to save several hundred dollars a month in old lady support payments, then I have to deal with her being in my house and bossing me around 24/7.

If I tell my mother-in-law to stop butting into my life, she dumps on my wife, my wife gets upset, then I have to fix everything.

If I hire a housekeeper to take care of the chores that wait for me every night, I won't have enough money to pay bills.

If I set aside one day of the week as a "Don't Bother Daddy" day so I can play video games all day or something, my wife will get upset that she has to take care of chores and watch our son all day, then she'll dump her nonsense on me.

Before I got married, I lived every day as an optimistic, happy man. ALL of them. There was only one time in those six months where things went so wrong that I felt angry, but I felt better in an hour because I was just that strong and self-reliant. But when I married, what once was a life of free-spirited fun and adventure became one of just trying to stay afloat through all the problems of marriage, problems that didn't even exist until my wife and I tied the knot.

I know this post might sound confusing, like I'm trying to find someone to blame for all my problems, and I can't quite put my finger on who. And I can't repeat this enough: it's none of their faults. Marriage is what turned everyone into people that they're not. In fact, the only person I blame is me, the one who should have re-evaluated his depressed boy dream to marry, the one who should have gotten a vasectomy, or at the very least the one who should have used two forms of birth control instead of one.

I wouldn't be married now if I didn't have my son. But I don't blame him, or my wife or her family. But they are the sources of my near-poverty and my dreams being ground into the dust. But they aren't to blame. It's complicated, so let me try to put this all a little more simply:

Marriage sucks. Children are a multiplier.

Just being married sucks, and a divorce can fix it in no time.

Just having children makes life multiple times more busy, fun, happy, tiring, aggravating or interesting. Whatever you're feeling is entirely dependent on how you are guiding your life, and the life of your child.

But put them together, and you have a life that sucks... multiple times over. And there's nothing you can do about it, and there's no way out.

If I were to be born again as a new man, and I had the chance to date my wife once more, I would do it. Marriage hasn't just taken my freedom, time, strength, money and dreams from me; it's stolen my girlfriend, too. The girl I dated in 2007 is not the same person as the woman I'm married to now, and it's not because she was lying to me before. It's because marriage has placed so many problems and pressures upon the both of us, that she and I are now too busy or working too hard to do the things that used to make us happy. I would date her again, to know her without all of these pointless issues that keep popping up in a married life.

Second and finally, if I were given the choice to have another kid in another life, I would find a time to do it. I'd probably wait until I was in my 40s before I went through with it, and I wouldn't help birth one; then I'd just be stuck in the same situation I'm in now. But if I had the absolute choice on when to start and whether I wanted to do it, I would definitely adopt a child or two or use a surrogate mother and be a single parent.

Raising children is a lot easier than people make it out to be. The reason people say it's so difficult is because of a contradiction that arises while being married with kids:

1. To be an excellent parent, one or both of the two people in a marriage must be in charge. Otherwise, the child will not understand where their boundaries are and will run roughshod over everyone around them.
2. To have an excellent marriage, one or both of the two married people must be a follower. Otherwise, the two spouses end up fighting all the time about marriage and child rearing decisions.

So unless I'm:

- In a marriage where my wife happily does everything I ask her to (No),
- In a marriage where I happily do everything I'm told (No),
- My dreams, goals and decisions over my own life mean absolutely nothing to me so I don't feel unhappy about giving them up (No), or
- I don't have dreams, so marriage has nothing to take from me in the first place and I can't regret giving up something I never had (No)...

... I end up in the situation that I'm in now.

Raising children is easy when you are a powerful presence in your kid's life, where they feel 95% love for the loving parent you usually are, and 5% fear for the person you become when they seriously misbehave, and I am that kind of person. Marriage is easy when you just sit back and let your partner handle all the work, make all the decisions and tell you how to live your life, and I am not that kind of person.

Now put these two things together: I'm a father who is loved, respected and looked up to by his son, but who gets nagged and ordered around by his wife like a child. I work six to seven days a week and make almost three times the amount of money that my wife does, but almost none of it goes to me personally. I've been through hell and back in my youth and have become a powerful, determined man as a result, and I use that strength to clean my apartment.

Marriage is a mess of contradictions. The greatest source of happiness I have in life is my son, but his existence keeps me miserably married. My wife was an excellent girlfriend that I always looked forward to seeing, and after we took vows to be with one another for the rest of our lives, I never again knew true happiness. I have all the strength needed, and more, to make myself happy and raise my son well, but strength is the last thing I'm allowed to use as a married man.

Marriage sucks. Children are a multiplier.