Before Husband and I were married, he used to do all sorts of things to romance me. He would bring me flowers and put them in beautiful vases all over my apartment so I’d remember, when I looked at them, that I was beautiful. He once gave me eleven roses instead of the full dozen and wrote me a note that said, “If you’re wondering where the other rose is, just look in the mirror.” I know. I’m a lucky woman.
For our first date, he showed up at my door with a handful of wildflowers, and we spent the morning at this epic mountain in Wimberley, Texas. You had to climb up five hundred sixty-three precariously wooden stairs to get all the way to the top. It was wonderful once we made it, as long as we didn’t look over the side, which would make me dizzy and, because I’m one of the most graceful people on the planet, likely plummet to my death. That day he brought his guitar and we sang together, and then we kissed and then we pretended we watched the sun rise, even though the sky was covered in a cloudy haze that did not allow any sort of beauty through. The only reason we knew the sun had risen at all was that a small yellow eye hung in the clouds, and we assumed it was the muted sun.
The night he proposed to me, he went to great lengths to arrange a production with a ballet theatre that had come to town. He wanted to take me backstage and stand there, drop to one knee, and pop the question. He got all dressed up in a tux, and I wore a long and strapless red dress, and, after fighting a bit about my not wanting to go backstage because I was so incredibly hungry, he won and pulled me up on stage in front of five hundred people, dropped to a knee and, indeed, popped the question.
His romance has always been a disaster waiting to happen, but it’s sweet and wonderful and so very missed.
It’s a running joke in the contemporary world that once you get married—once the guy gets the girl—he stops romancing. It’s not true in my case. Husband kept up his romancing for years—he crafted a life-sized card for our first anniversary, wrote a song for me on our second anniversary, and left me alone for our third anniversary.
That was the anniversary when I was eight months pregnant with our first son.
When we had children, all romancing screeched to a halt—not because he didn’t want to romance me but because kids make it practically impossible to do anything special for one another.
There was the year when he tried to make me a video with the kids telling me what a great mother I was, and they just kept staring at the video camera and laughing, because they didn’t know what to say and they were more interested in goofing around. There was the time when he arranged a little art project wherein they drew pictures and colored in letters and he put it all in a frame that was broken two months later by the same kids who had colored it. There was the time he tried to write me a song and then record it, and you could hear kids calling his name in the background.
No more sweet and thoughtful gifts, when you have obstacles at every turn.
He used to whisper sweet things in my ear, but it’s hard to whisper anything sweet when there’s a kid pulling on your arm, trying to demand your attention. Most days, our sweet whisperings sound like any of these phrases:
“Hey, do you want me to wash the dishes tonight? I know you have book club.”
“I made the bed today, and I put a load of laundry in the wash. Just thought you should know.”
“How about I take the kids to the pool for the evening and you stay here and…clean up?”
Once, on a Mother’s Day after I’d just had twins, Husband left me a note and said, “I thought you might enjoy a day off from church.” He’d left all the kids home with me, because he also thought I’d like to spend Mother’s Day with them.
Well, he had good intentions, at least.
“Why don’t you go to the grocery store by yourself, honey?” is also a frequent romancing technique, even though going to the grocery store is probably the last thing I’d like to do, because it requires too much thinking, since I nearly always leave my list at home. I usually take him up on it, though, because at least I’m getting out of the house. Sometimes I’m so tired I can hardly move, and a vegetative state without kids jumping on me every five minutes is preferable to going out to the grocery store, but I’ll still do it, because “a vegetative state without kids jumping on me every five minutes” is not an actual possibility in our house.
As you can imagine, Husband and I also don’t get very many date nights out. It’s not easy to find a sitter for six kids, especially when you’re calling at the last minute. So our romancing looks like sharing a bowl of popcorn in our bed while we catch up on Netflix shows.
Romancing looks a lot different now that we have kids. It looks more like completely tidying the house before I come down from a long day at work. It looks like playing a game of trampoline dodgeball with the boys out back so I can have a few minutes to myself while I wash the dishes. It looks like distracting kids with a story while I squeeze in a five-minute shower.
But you know what? All of that is romantic, too, because these are acts of sacrifice. Maybe there isn’t a whole lot I can show for it—there’s not a love song I can sing in the shower or a video I can share with all my family or a card that I can keep in my dresser forever. But that does not diminish the romance of these small and thoughtful acts.
Romance is all how you look at it.
And, if I’m being honest, the small and thoughtful acts mean more to me. Sure, it was fun to get all dolled up so I could stand on a theatre stage and cry my yes to his question. Sure, it was exciting to see him show up at my door with a bouquet of random flowers hiding his face and then follow him out to watch the sunrise. Sure, it was wonderful to be called a beautiful rose.
But we get to do interesting things now, too. We get to curl up in a blanket on a winter morning and watch the sunrise from the back porch while the kids are still (hopefully) sleeping. We get to drink hot chocolate in the late hours of the night and eat popcorn and watch old episodes of “How I Met Your Mother.” We get to share our lives with children and watch them enrich it with beauty and meaning.
The other day Husband brought me flowers for the first time in years. He put them on a table and all the boys exclaimed over them, pointing out their colors and their shapes and the water that would keep them alive, at least for a few days. The whole kitchen seemed brighter, and I smiled.
It’s still possible to romance after children. You just have to know what you’re looking for.
This is an excerpt from This Life With Boys, the third book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
(Photo by This is Now Photography)
