Bringing Up Baby: What Having A Child Does To Your Relationship
If you were to design a crack method to break up happy couples, you’d probably include sleep deprivation, financial insecurity, shredded erogenous zones, a third person in your bedroom and stress. In short: a baby.
The idea that having a baby will ‘bring you together’ as a couple is like believing a hammer will help bring you together as a plate. Of course you can have moments of pure joy, but the pervading smell of dirty nappies, the daily clash of parenting styles, the claustrophobia, loneliness and inability to spend more than three minutes in the bathroom without someone screaming at the top of their lungs is likely, if not certainly, going to put a strain on romance, not to mention affection.
From the first moment he transcribed an episode of The Archers for me into 16 text messages because I didn’t access to a radio, I have loved my partner with a headiness like ripe daffodils. But it would be a hot white lie to say there haven’t been moments in the last year when I’ve considered throwing all his belongings in the river and walking out into the mist. Or moments when we have fallen asleep without so much as saying goodnight, let alone brushing our skin against warm skin. Or times when I haven’t looked down at my body like melting wax, my flat like a fly tip and my baby like a ball of fury and wondered how long I have until he walks out on me forever.
And yet, I can still remember the strange rush of oxytocin that hit me like a gale during that first post-partum week. Somehow, the waves of love I was meant to feel towards my baby all seemed to fall on my boyfriend instead. I remember bubbling over with hot, salty tears from just thinking about how much I loved him, with gratitude that he had made me a cup of tea, with wonder that he had made me a mother. I have never been more in love, more dependent on and more ingrained into the hollows of my partner than I was those strange weeks after delivering his son.
Having a baby is probably one of the most prolonged and thorough ways to test your relationship to breaking point. Which is ironic, when you consider how quickly and with what little thought you can get pregnant. But, if you make it, if you can weather the pain, the fury, the discord, the monotony and the damp washing, then you become something so much more than a couple. You become a family.
He and I are now, come what may, genetically entwined for the rest of our lives. Every day I shall see a small, blonde version of his face looking up at me from my son’s upturned head, feel a tiny reproduction of the curve of his chin lying sleepily against my shoulder at bedtime, watch the familiar light of his eyes look back at me from my son’s flitting gaze. We’re in it now. We’re together.
Even if sometimes I want to push him into the mud and scream.
Source – Vogue
