Having a baby was the most mind-blowingly positive experience of my life—and there’s nothing I’d give back about it (save a few stretch marks). However, as happy as my husband and I were to get pregnant and become parents, my son’s birth also created a tectonic shift in our relationship. It wasn’t just disorienting—it was a terrifying vertigo of hormones and logistics and new pressures that, for the first time, threatened to rock the foundation of our previously impenetrable bond. The pull from the new (little) leading man in my life was an unexpected, destabilizing force in our marriage, and for a time, I worried my heart had strayed too far.
For starters, in the maelstrom of post-childbirth chaos, we broke every single rule about the basic care, feeding, and upkeep of a relationship. It was simply too easy to put all kinds of other stuff, important as they were, first: sleep, work, baby playtime, alone time, health. But after a while, these misallocated emotional expenditures backfired: We found ourselves quick to anger, jumping to the worst conclusions about each others’ intentions, and not giving each other the benefit of the doubt. And, predictably, not having sex.
Like so many couples in the early days of postpartum parenthood, it wasn’t hard to replace sex with almost anything else—an extra snooze, half an episode of GOT, a shower—but for us, weeks rolled into months until one day we woke up to realize we were living more like roommates than partners. But sex wasn’t the half of it. Whether by choice or circumstance, we stopped doing almost anything we previously enjoyed in couplehood: art festivals, wineries, hiking, getting champagne-tipsy, a sweet nightly ritual we used to call “candle time” (i.e., reading and cuddling before falling asleep). In fact, even when we tried for candle time now, the candles themselves bothered me; behind weary eyelids all I saw were dancing strobelights of agitation; I asked for them to be blown out. Cuddles—mine—had become twitchy with new anxieties. And perhaps revealingly, my husband started sleeping in the guest bedroom to avoid my uncontrolled, dead-tired snores, too sonorous for even his exhaustion level.
We were both clearly, criminally, letting our son’s needs eclipse our own. And the transgressions took other forms, too: mistrust, for the first time, came crawling into our relationship and tried to take root. We each now felt separately, immensely responsible for The Most Important Thing in the Universe, and it sparked a whole new level of concern about how things were done, why they were done, and who was going to do them. We questioned each other’s decisions. We balked at technique.
But perhaps our worst mistake—because it’s the one we got wrong from the very beginning—was to assume that the mostly inconsequential problems that plagued our pre-kid relationship would stay the same size forever. Small problems though, left unfettered, have a way of growing into big ones. Particularly under the stress, weight, and pressure of parenthood. What was tolerable as two mature adults going about our lives became less so as a just-getting-acquainted threesome.
So we did hard things. We had tough conversations. We also got help, in the form of counseling. In session, we got to take out all those old incompatibilities, dust them off, and give them the time and attention they’d always deserved. To decide what to do about them as the two mature adults we still were, after you washed away the layers of excretions, playdough, yogurt, and goo.
A few new realizations helped, too. We let go of perfection. We started trusting each other again, by accepting that one of us doesn’t always have to be wrong for us both to be in the right. And though it took some creative (and sometimes unsexy) approaches to find the fun and intimacy in our marriage again—like snore strips, mandatory date nights, expensive champagne, and candle time 2.0 (this time sans fire hazards but replete with dim lighting and plenty of cuddles)—we eventually did.
The most cherished of our new strategies, though, has been the institution of a ritual we call “firesides.” Every so often we’ll give ourselves the time and space to discuss the things in our relationship that deserve attention. My husband jokingly refers to them as “organized fights”—but in truth they’re the healthiest of preventative measures, moving our communication forward, if doggedly, so we can get by. So we don’t get buried in another quake. And all of this, simple or unglamourous as sounds, were the makings of the boost we needed to get up and out of what felt like the Grand Canyon of post-kid slumps.
In other words, we found our footing again. Our child got older, we course-corrected, and the crisis we thought was the end of our marriage, wasn’t. Hard-fought lessons, for sure—but the biggest for me was remembering that the heart is a mutable muscle, capable of growth, expansion, and forgiveness. In mine, I’ve now built a sturdy home for both of my leading men—and am now convinced ours is a family love story that’s only just begun.