I suppose I agreed. Though it’s more likely I simply took his words as an expression of our life and how it should be and never questioned my own ambiguous feelings around parenting.

I thought it was a moot point anyway. Having children wasn’t supposed to be something my body was capable of conceiving. At least according to my doctor who, upon my second ectopic pregnancy, had told me that the likelihood of my becoming pregnant was about as great as my chances of becoming a saint. I didn’t tell him about my mother’s expectations of sainthood based upon her assertions that the burden of having me in her life was worthy of the Vatican’s blessing of her canonization. He might have lowered the odds of pregnancy had I done so.

In the end, his odds and biological dictates were irrelevant. In my mid-thirties, I gave birth to two healthy daughters, eighteen months apart, and ended any future child-bearing repercussions by undergoing a tubal ligation. Secure in the safety of my womb cut off from future impregnations, I leaped into motherhood. I embraced the state of life’s new born possibilities with the zealousness of a convert to Christianity throwing themselves into the baptismal waters of their rebirth.

My husband was not as ardent in his acceptance of the parenting state. He loved our daughters, but, felt constrained by demands of the after-birth of their often messy lives.  Torn between his desire to not change and my insistence change was necessary to parenting, he kept losing ground in his mission to garnish his post-child life with the same unencumbered freedom of his life b.c. (before children). 

The rift between us grew as I expounded on the virtues of the two blessed infants filling my arms with love, and he retreated into sullen silence at my absence from his arms. Late night feedings and midnight trips to the Emergency Room took a toll on our marital bed leaving us stranded in separate worlds and sometimes separate bedrooms. Five years after their appearance onto the landscape of our conjugality, we broke the ties that bound us and took up the mantle of singledom and co-parenting.

Toppled from my coveted role as wife, flying solo in the parenting hot seat, my mother’s voice began its rancorous reverberations through my psyche.

“What is wrong with you?�?she asked after yet another complaint that I was selfish and inconsiderate to have left my husband. Did I have no consideration for them? (she liked to include my father in these discussions to ensure I understood the magnitude of my transgressions). For their feelings? They would have to spend their retirement worrying about me, she insisted. They would have to worry about how I was going to make it on my own. Without the man she considered to be a perfect husband, how was I going to support my daughters? �?Then again, to my mother, any man was perfect, just as long as he took the time to marry me.

"Why do you have to do it your way?" The age-old question bounced off the flood of memory I was fiercely trying to hold back from engulfing me. "Why couldn’t you at least have consulted us before taking such selfish action and destroying our family name?"

I remember the day the parcel arrived filled with articles and books on the negative impacts of divorce and its affects upon ‘the children�? My father, a Roman Catholic like my mother, and a man whose anger I had feared most in childhood, even went so far as to include a copy of The Watchtower that explained why divorce was a sin and caused children to commit suicide. I cried when I opened the parcel and wondered, why didn’t they understand?

It was an open-ended question. A question founded on my disbelief. How could people who said they love you be so inconsiderate and lacking in empathy that they felt obligated to beat into you their feelings about how your choices hurt them? It was a question that reflected my belief that I was responsible for the unhappiness in our family, for all that had gone wrong, for all that would ever go wrong.

It was a question riddled with voices from the past that had mocked me and chastised me for having feelings that contravened the family code of never speaking the truth. Unless of course, you raised it in anger and hurled it at your opponent with enough force to ensure they cowered in dismay and lost their voice beneath the shouting. It was a question reflected in my brother’s reminder of my place in our family the night before our father’s funeral. I had suggested our mother would be better off getting sleep than sitting on the patio drinking Irish Whiskey at 2 o’clock in the morning, “You always destroy everything good in this family Ellie. What’s wrong with you?�?/FONT>