Zenaida's Den

…So, she and I discussed this topic back in February. And fought about it. She has some ideas I don’t agree with. Like I could understand her not wanting to do anything that affects or invades her body and that’s so valid, like personal autonomy is really important to me too, but—she goes even farther than that. She doesn’t believe in using anything. I’m hesitant to tell you that because I don’t want to make her sound like a nutjob but…well, I don’t know, she comes from a different background (it’s not even that she’s a Jedi, I cleared this with Amalia, this isn’t a Jedi thing at all it’s just Fan—maybe it’s a culture thing I mean she literally has over a hundred siblings and the goddess where she comes from is always depicted as pregnant). She really believes in natural order, I guess, and that’s where all her ideas come from. And I challenged her and challenged her and challenged her, but she and I just come at things from such radically different starting points, so none of my arguments meant anything to her, and none of her arguments meant anything to me.

She was still all about the baby thing then, because of the thing with Bunnie, and how she had spent the last year wanting to be a mom—and I wasn’t against having kids, but I thought we should wait a few years first. That was when we first brought up the nitty-gritty, and that was when I first heard her stating all these ideas and opinions she’s apparently always held that I genuinely did not know people in the modern galaxy held, and I was like “you are insane you are crazy I did not know you believed things like this” and she was like “can’t you just respect this like you respect the other things we don’t see the same way” and I was like “I respect your right to do whatever only affects you but this affects me too, so, no” and she was like “well then I guess we’re just not going to sleep together because I’m not okay with what you want to do” and I was like “okay, yeah, that’s legitimately a fair compromise, let’s go with that” and then she got mad at me because apparently she had meant it like a threat. (Unfortunately, I was the wrong person to leverage that threat against.)

So we kinda just left it there for a while. But over the course of February and March, her depression was getting worse, and the worse her depression got, the more open I became to having kids soon. I really thought she was depressed over the baby thing, and that having one of our own would bring her back—because she loved Bunnie, she loved that kid, I know I didn’t write much about that time of my life because—well—I was helping take care of a baby—but she was so happy back when we were taking care of Bunnie, and that was the last time I had ever seen her happy, and I really wanted to see her happy again.

So by the time April rolled around, I had pretty much accepted we were gonna have a kid in the next year or something, and that we were probably gonna wind up with a few. That was back when everything was going really great for me, so I was in a very “ah, what the hell” time of my life—I felt like I could handle anything, and I was actually starting to think having kids would be pretty cool. But…that was when she told me that she didn’t want kids anymore, y’know, that time in the park when she also told me she was becoming passively suicidal. So then I just assumed, “oh, okay, so she’s finally come around to my perspective and we’re gonna do what I said we should do then.”

Which…was an assumption I held all the way into May, when I found out it’s a little more complicated than that. She is still afraid to have kids, because she’s afraid of not having enough of herself to give like her own mother didn’t, but…basically she sees a rift between what she wants, and what she thinks is right. And believe me, I tried to talk to her about it, because I really think she’s holding herself in a cage of her own making, but…it’s just impossible to convince her out of certain things. It really is. I have tried really, really hard. It’s impossible.

Some people aren’t able to handle that about Fannie. It even gets hard for me sometimes. But, hey—there’s a lot of things most people can’t handle about me, either, so that’s kind of how I’ve found my patience with her.

Long story short…she still didn’t want me to use anything.

I told Amalia this when we visited, because she will just ask me any damn question and I’m usually stupid enough to give her the answer, and she reacted pretty much the same way I had originally. And she brought up a lot of the same concerns I have, about Fannie’s mental health, and how getting pregnant could affect that, and are we just gonna wind up with five hundred kids by the time she hits menopause, and be like those weirdo cult families on reality holoshows.

But what I told Amalia was: “Okay, but, I don’t even know how often we’re gonna do it anyway. We barely even kiss anymore, so when we get married we’ll probably be even more over it. We’ll probably just do it once after the wedding and then like twice a year on Valentine’s Day and our anniversary, and I think I can face those odds.” And Amalia was like “well first of all it only takes one time and second of all really are you serious you’re only gonna have sex twice a year” and I was like “well it’s been almost half a year and we haven’t even made out since we got engaged, so…yeah?” and Amalia was like “are you sure she’s not just depressed and mad at you right now” and I was like “what are you talking about, she and I just aren’t that physical” and Amalia was like “no you’re not that physical she’s mad at you for something” and I said “you’re crazy” and then it turned out Amalia was not crazy and, in fact, right.

Cut to sloppy makeup makeout session in the speeder. (Which, to be clear, did not result in sex—as if I would ever do it in a public parking lot in MY MOM’S SPEEDER are you freaking kidding me I would rather be impaled—but anyway, she wants to save it for after the wedding, which I used to think was quaint, but it’s nothing compared to this other thing.)

And now it’s June. And I just sent my almost-wife to inpatient psychiatric care. And had to keep her from being put in police custody upon her release because she’d attacked one of the officer droids who had brought her there. And I’m trying to find her a therapist. And still have to finish planning the wedding. And all these things cost money. Money I don’t have. And you are very correct. I can’t afford to have a kid. I can’t even afford to get us out of my parents’ house. And that’s just talking about the financial side of things—she and I are working through a lot right now and we just—it wouldn’t be a good time.

So I talked to Fannie last week and was like, “hey, you can’t get pregnant, we are not gonna make it if you get pregnant, what are you willing to do to make sure you definitely don’t get pregnant because I’m not even joking we cannot let that happen we’ll be screwed if that happens no pun intended.”

And she was like “well, we could do this sort of thing” and I was like “no you don’t understand there needs to be zero chance like none at all or at least less than three percent.” And she was like “well the only way for there to be that little of a chance is this or this” and I was like “yeah exactly so which do you want it to be” and she was like “well I don’t want to not be able to have you, but I can’t compromise what I believe, I just can’t” and I looked her in the eyes and told her, “Fannie, you chose to compromise what you believed when you chose someone who doesn’t believe all the things you do. As much as I made a stink about it at the time, this is exactly the kind of thing Luke and Amalia warned us about at the very beginning, and you chose me anyway, and now you have to sleep in the bed you’ve made, again no pun intended.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. I think it broke her a little bit.

It made her start to cry.

But…I mean…it’s true.

So I got all quiet and I said, “Are you sure you still want to marry me? Because if you don’t, you need to decide soon.” And I tried not to say it like a threat. I tried to just give it to her straight and be as gentle as I could, because—yeah she can’t keep doing this she can’t keep moving forward with me while secretly not being okay.

And she was silent for a long time, which sort of freaked me out, but…eventually…she shut her eyes and said it all in one breath, like she was diving headfirst into the ocean—“Yes I’ve made my choice Ben I’ve already chosen you and I choose you still and I choose you forever.”

And I said, “good,” because for a second there I was really worried.

“But you chose me, too,” she said, giving me a hard stare. “You knew I was like this, and you chose me too.”

And I stared at her too, and, well—she was right. Maybe I hadn’t known her every single position on everything. But I had known the kind of person that she was, which was just the kind of person I wasn’t, and I had chosen her in spite of that just as much as she had chosen me. From the very start, us choosing to date and then marry each other had been kind of like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. You really can’t do that without losing some corners.

…For both of us, really. Because I have had to compromise my license for her as much as she had had to compromise her ideals for me.

And so…well…we both gave in a little, about the sex thing, and together we worked something out. I won’t tell you what we worked out. That’s between her and me. (Believe it or not, I actually have some ability to keep certain things private.)

But…we did work something out, in the end.

This issue is only one of many things we are having to work out right now. And maybe this is sort of my fault—rushing into things, not getting enough cleared up between us early on—but, it’s just as much her fault as it is mine. We shouldn’t have started this, and we started it anyway. We probably shouldn’t have continued, but we’re continuing.

I don’t know. Maybe we were kind of incompatible to begin with.

…But I’ll be damned if I ever let that stop us, and I think that she agrees. I will die before I give her up.