But once the baby finally arrives, it is really, really common for so much of the attention to shift onto the baby, that hardly any is left for each other.
Pregnancy can be such an exciting, bonding experience for couples. Once I realized that the problems we were facing as a couple were actually widely common, it became a whole lot easier to get to work on sorting them out (and it’s an ongoing process: as the babies grow, so do the challenges!) 1. And it’s important too: your relationship is the very foundation of the whole set-up! It IS possible to nurture your relationship alongside nurturing a new-born, it just takes a little more work, and a lot of perseverance. But even through the sleep deprivation and the death-knoll ringing and regularity of routines, it needn’t descend into nit-picking and imbalance. It was challenging, difficult and strenuous, and not only in physical, menial ways – family life has a way of pushing emotional edges to the max. It became pretty clear, pretty quickly that family life was not always sunshine and roses. And although on the surface, life this way seemed to make sense, the reality was that the extra weight and responsibility we were both carrying meant that the health of our relationship started to suffer.Ĭosy nights in together had become colicky baby rocking sessions, cocktails after work had morphed into baby-led weaning, and the long, meandering conversations about our bright, adventurous future now centred around who last had the wipes and whose turn it was to do the dishes!
My husband went back to work, becoming the main breadwinner of our newly-formed household, and I began to take care of most of the childcare and chores (spending most of my time at home with the baby, it made sense to take on these roles too). I remember spending my first pregnancy imagining the picture-perfect moments we’d create as the three of us settled into domestic bliss and lived happily ever after! And the first couple of weeks did feel very much like that (I’m not quite sure if they looked like it from the outside, but it definitely felt like we were arriving!)īut then slowly, gradually, almost imperceptibly, things started to change.
Starting a family is one of the biggest and most exciting transitions we can make in life.
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