Can't Say Later

As I mentioned in my last post, it's been a bad week or so: kids coughing, me with a sore throat and yet never quite catching the cold, and my mom completely finking out on the babysitting she claims to REALLY WANT to do, so that I never have free time anymore and feel even more oppressed by my children, who have been pains in the butt lately. Plus, I need both GYN and psych appointments, and there is no time to make them, and I can't bring all three little kids with me to either one, so I am feeling resentful and trapped as well as oppressed and irritated.

In fact, sitting in recliners in the living room with Mike and observing those children roiling around us, I felt a sapping of joy and energy, and I could feel the weight of the years of parenting still ahead, as well as a feeling of failing the parenting thing anyway (since the pain-in-the-buttedness is mostly stuff that we're telling them not to do and they're doing anyway). And I felt my increasing age, and the increasing age of my youngest, and the way the light of SOME freedom is only two years ahead, when my youngest will be in kindergarten a few hours a day and I can once again have the great luxury of going to the dentist now and then.

I turned to Mike and said, "You know, I think it may be time for..." and he made a snipping gesture while raising his eyebrows, and I said yes. And he said, "You've been going back and forth on this, so I won't go ahead and make the appointment. I'll let you do it, and then you can't say later that I'M the one who did it!"

He didn't say this all bitchy and you-crazy-lady the way it looks when I write it; it was good-humored and friendly, with even a tone of "I won't rush you into this---take your time." And I WOULDN'T be happy if I said, "You know, maybe..." and he was already dialing the number. But it was still a blindingly stupid thing to say. "So I can't say HE did it"? Does he seriously think that later on if I'm EVEN MORE regretful that we never had a sixth child, that he can turn up his palms and say, "Hey, you're the one who made the appointment with the urologist!"

It does not matter AT ALL who makes that appointment, it is still His Will Being Done. Me making the appointment would mean that I no longer wanted to mess around with the hormones that make me crazy or the condoms/spermicide that hurt my skin and give me UTIs, not that I'M the one who decided we were done having kids. It would mean that I was forced to GIVE IN to HIS decision, not that it was MY decision or even that I had any input on the decision. It would mean that I realized he was never going to change his mind, so I would be forced to bend to what he wanted. It would IN NO WAY mean that I "couldn't say" ANYTHING. I have been absolutely powerless in this decision about another child, and if making the appointment with the urologist is what symbolizes that decision for him, then he will make the appointment himself.