10 Years/10 Stories: #8

My journal February 20, 2005:

"Ralexwin should be home on the 26th. I am starting to get excited, but I don't think it will really hit me until her leaves Kuwait, which will be tomorrow night (my time).

Vicbowin is so excited about him coming home, she keeps telling everyone.

'My daddy's coming home from war and I'm gonna marry him.'"

While Ralexwin was in Iraq my neighbor gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. When I first met this little creation of God I was enamored. His chubby little cheeks and angelic blond hair seemed to flick a switch inside my body and I suddenly became aware of an overwhelming, inescapable urge to get pregnant.

As you can guess, I was incapable of putting myself into such a state and had to satisfy the burning desire with tending the sweet little boy as often as I could.

By the time Ralexwin returned I was being incinerated by my bodies desire to multiply and replenish the Earth.

Except there was this one slight hiccup. One of the main things they tell you when your spouse gets home from war is DON'T GET PREGNANT. The first several months after a military deployment are incredibly difficult (understatement of the century) and the last thing you need is to add the stress of pregnancy into the mix.

Ralexwin and I decided to take this advice to heart. We were struggling and knew that it was best to wait... just a little while.

So I went on birth control.

Bad idea.

At first we didn't see what was going on. We were so caught up in trying to readjust that any extra emotions on my part weren't readily visible. Our arguments, however, got increasingly worse.

I would scream and throw things. I would threaten divorce. I would storm out of the house to go spend what little money we had on clothes. I slammed doors in his face. I glared at him across the dinner table. I even, once, kicked a hole into our bedroom door.

Then, in one of the clearest memories I have of our marriage we realized what was happening. One day I sat on the stairwell crying. Ralexwin sat below me. Both of us were exhausted from another grueling argument when it finally clicked. I don't know who came up with it, but in that moment we realized that these fights were happening once a month.

Once a month.

It was my birth control.

We decided then and there that our marriage required another baby.

So it was that, nearly a year and a half after the first burning desire to feel a child move within me, I felt the Mischievite stir.

Our third child was finally on his way. Five years after the last.