Fuller Wiser

Midway through Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, a scene takes place in the fictional London Below, at Night’s Bridge. Richard, the main protagonist, is holding the hand of a little girl he’s just met as they walk across. Crossing the span, both Richard and the girl sink into black shadows, full of dark apparitions and emotions that threaten to pull them under. Upon emerging from the darkness, Richard finds himself on the other side of the bridge. Looking behind him, he sees only the girl’s necklace on the damp stones. She didn’t make it; the darkness took her.

I recall this today because I feel as if my wife and I have been making the journey across Night’s Bridge for quite some time. Two years, really, though we not-infrequently found ourselves bumping around Below in the preceding seven. But our childless years were difficult in a different way, and the struggle of parenthood is so alien to anything we’ve weathered as a couple before that it has threatened to tear us apart on a number of occasions.

And in this darkness, it has been hard to find comfort in the one place it has normally been plentiful: Each other. Our hells have been very personal, very internal, and the knowledge of how bad our partners were hurting has kept us from seeking help from the other. Even when we tried, we were often rebuffed by our respective No Vacancy signs, no room for any more grief here, move along, stranger. And of course this would ignite more pain, throw us deeper into our lonely well of despair, which may well have been the same one, for all that we could see. Like crabs in a bucket, we flailed, scratching for purchase, oblivious to whether that was a branch or a hand we had just stepped on. In our solitude, we were killing each other.

I’m not entirely sure what happened this weekend, but I hope it lasts. For the first time in a good while, I was able to communicate with my wife. I think, like most developments, it had to get worse before better, because last weekend was a carnival of mental breakdown, mostly for my wife, who after a long time of pushing down a certain range of emotions for a variety of reasons, finally let them take her. It was painful to watch, and more painful still not to be able to help, but each day has been progressively better between us. Not back to normal exactly, but at least bearing some resemblance to the open communication we’ve enjoyed for most of our marriage.

When we first moved back to Texas in early 2006, while my wife was still looking for a job, I temped in a very bleak former strip mall for a very shady company, mostly stuffing their unmentionable documents into nondescript boxes. One fellow temp, a woman my mother’s age, found out I was a new parent. She pulled me aside one day before lunch, and said, with immense gravity, “You should know that your marriage will never be the same. My daughter is grown, and my husband and I get along well, but it’ll never be like it was before. Ever.”

At the time, I thought it was a bit extreme, not to mention presumptive. Relationships vary, as do the dynamics that power them. But really, it was a very tactful statement. She obviously knew that she had no idea how my marriage would change, that it would be in different ways than her own. What she understood, as I eventually did, was the sheer mass of the change that parenthood would bring into our lives.

As science tells us, any object with great mass will affect everything in its path, bending space and time around them even as they are pulled by other massive objects at the same time. Two human beings of equal mass can form binary systems, each orbiting the other peacefully, enjoying the pleasant gravitational pull from their partner.

Grim as it may sound, a birth in the family is like a black hole opening between two stars. Energy and mass are pulled towards it, disrupting the original orbit. The new arrival grows, gathering what it needs from its surroundings. There is no malice in this need, it’s simply nature. But it is powerful, and it is destructive, and it can be fatal.

This, of course, is where my astrophysics analogy breaks down, because a black hole would indeed destroy all stars in its path. What actually happens, though, if you’re lucky, is that pressures equalize. Orbits become stable, and soon there are three massive objects, each in the pull of the others.

It can end this way, but it doesn’t always. And I have been very concerned that our little system would not be one of the fortunate ones, that not all of us would make it across Night’s Bridge, if you’ll pardon the mixing of metaphors.

Of course, we haven’t really made it yet. The kid’s only two, and as I recall from my own childhood, some of the worst is yet to come. But I have to think that we can take heart from surviving this period, and use it as a lesson that as tough as things get, we are indeed strong enough to make it through, and make it through together.

I don’t know, and I can’t know. But I have hope, and that’s something I’ve been missing. The hope I have is that hope will be enough.