The Blog

Dedicated to my brother and sister-in-law

Having a baby is such an incredibly amazing and wonderful human experience. If you’re lucky enough to not require too much scientific intervention, creating a new life with the person you love most in the world that is a combination of both of your DNA, can be so powerful. And, while it may not happen exactly that way for everyone given fertility or other health challenges, timing, partner struggles, and so on, this was my experience. 

My biggest dream in life was to find my soulmate and raise our mini me’s together. I was lucky enough to find my person in 2007, we were married in 2010, and we had our first child in 2014. It was magical. It was also incredibly hard as sleep deprivation, hormones, differences of opinion in parenting styles, and nursing challenges wore on. For the most part, we were well-aligned and respectfully talked through areas of divergence. 

But, sometimes, we got off course, especially in the middle of the night when “it’s your turn” battles played out. Because, let’s be honest, unless you’re fortunate enough to have family help or rich enough to have a night nanny, more often than not, it’s just you and your partner and someone has to get up and deal with the baby when all you really want to do is roll over and go back to sleep.

And, like a lot of other foolish parents, just when you’ve gotten into a rhythm and things start to get easier when your first baby turns one, you start thinking about baby number two – or B2 as we affectionately named our fetus. 

We enjoyed special one-year-old milestones – walking, talking, and our first overnight trip away without the baby. Leaving our first child with his nanny for the weekend caused the biggest fight my husband and I ever had. Quality time is my love language and after nearly two years of baby time, I was desperate for a couples only weekend away. However, my husband could not get comfortable with the idea of leaving our first born with someone that had never stayed overnight with him before and wasn’t family. We worked it out, but it did put a bit of a damper on our weekend away and ended up being one of those agree to disagree type of resolutions.

Then, after an incredibly uncomfortable third trimester, B2 arrived! This experience was nothing like our first born. My husband didn’t spend the night in the hospital with me because he was home with toddler. I still recall the loneliness I felt at the hospital that second time around as I struggled to get some sleep while also trying to nurse the baby. But, that’s the gig, you sacrifice your desires for the sake of your kids. This is what was best for our first born – to have his dad home with him to ease this transition as we expanded our family.

We were in the middle of building a four-bedroom family home so our family of four plus a dog and a cat were all piled into a two-bedroom apartment. Since I was going to be up multiple times a night to nurse, we decided that the best sleeping arrangements would be to have a boys room (the master bedroom) and a girls room (our guest bed in the nursery across from he crib). It worked for a while, but as my hormones went haywire and my sleep deprivation wore on, I became increasingly emotional.

I recall one time being curled up in a ball sobbing on the bathroom floor feeling exhausted, fragile, and lost. I missed the things that made me feel like me – jogging, yoga, or literally anything I could do by myself for myself without a baby in the mix. My husband closed the door and asked me to keep my meltdown hidden from our first born (now 2 1/2 years old) so as not to scare him. It felt insensitive at the time, but in retrospect, I get it.

I will never forget the words I uttered one night while walking to dinner with a dear friend who was visiting from out of town. I had the baby in the stroller and my husband was home with our toddler. I was lamenting about how my husband just didn’t get it and that my other mom friends understood me and this struggle way more than he did. I confessed that if something terrible happened to my husband and he died, I think I’d ultimately be okay because he wasn’t really all that helpful. He was kinda just getting in my way and making things harder with his sometimes contrary point-of-view. These words haunt me now. I could not have been more wrong. I recognize that I was a hot mess at the time and this was an emotional response during an extremely hard time in my life.

A few months later, what really helped me and our marriage was a night away at a local hotel. B2 was five months old and I was so sleep deprived that all I wanted was eight hours of rest with no disruptions from a baby or anyone else. My mom was in town visiting, so, I seized this opportunity and booked a room at a nearby swanky hotel. My husband came over for a date night and then when it was close to bedtime, he left and I read a magazine while I pumped so as not to impact my milk supply. Once those bottles were filled, I put on my eye mask, popped in my ear plugs and blissfully slept straight through the night. I pumped again the next morning, got myself a coffee and a pastry, and went home back to reality. It was exactly what I needed. New mammas, please do this if you can. It’s a game changer. 

The mothering experience is not something a man can truly appreciate or relate to. Despite good intentions and best efforts, our husbands can feel like nuisances as they fawn over our enlarged breasts, and complain about their sexual needs being neglected. This is human nature. Biology has made it so that women have zero desire to be intimate with their husband and prefer to focus all their energy on that little helpless baby. We’re getting our serotonin buckets filled there, but our husbands still crave us. A new moms emotional support lifelines are usually other moms – her mom, sisters, and friends. The new mom just wants her husband to stop fondling her and go wash the baby bottles or do some laundry.

Another thing that really helped was hiring a mother’s helper for a few hours a week. If my husband had to work late, I had no idea how I was going to safely wash a baby in the bathtub, dress and nurse her, while simultaneously also making sure a toddler was safe in the tub and got his diaper on afterwards. Hiring an extra set of hands was the best investment we could have made in our marriage at that time. Not only did she help with whichever kid I wasn’t tending to, but she did laundry, and eventually minded both kids so that my husband and I could take a few hours together to exercise or sit in the hot tub. Game changer #2.

If you don’t have kids, please don’t judge those that do. Or, at least, if you do judge us, keep it to yourself. Before I had kids, I had all sorts of judgments of parents and their kids. I thought and said to my husband, “When we have kids, let’s do… [insert my way that would be different and presumably better].” Once I became a parent, I learned that you can’t plan for everything to go the way you would have liked. I never thought I’d be a slave to my kid’s nap schedule, but there I was hunkered down every weekend afternoon from 1-4pm because a well rested child makes the rest of the day easier and more fun. And, my kids don’t nap on the go — believe me, I tried. A cranky, overtired child makes the rest of the day unnecessarily hard.

What I know for sure is that it gets easier as the kids get older and you begin to reconnect with the parts of yourself you lost in pregnancy and the early years of parenting. You get to do things for yourself without kids again. Your hormones rebalance and you enjoy physical intimacy again. And, if you have the right partner, you grow together through it, not apart because of it. 

So, dear new parents, be extra kind and patient with each other knowing that no one is operating at their best when they have babies. Raising a baby can be very stressful especially for momma with all the wild hormones. Dads, give her some space and trust in the foundation you built before the baby came along.

And, please enjoy the new baby sweetness! They grow up so fast and, before you know it, you’ve nursed for the last time and changed your last diaper. But, you don’t always know when it will be the last time that you snuggle them in the rocking chair or hold their hand in public, so treasure the special moments that each day brings. Maybe even write some down to share with your kiddo when they’re older.