Blending Parenthood and Marriage by Jenna

Parenthood is beautiful and rewarding, and the best job in the world, but It can also be a vortex. As a parent, especially a mom, we give so much of ourselves to our kids. We give our time, our bodies, and possibly even sideline certain dreams. However, the one thing we have to be careful not to give up is our marriage.

When my husband and I became parents for the first time, everything became about our daughter. She was breastfed and refused a bottle, so leaving her for very long was out of the question. Because of this, I’m sure you can imagine, that dates with just the two of us were almost nonexistent.

Our every decision revolved around her. These things were necessary, but I began to notice a distance between my husband and I that wasn’t there before. Nights that use to be spent cuddled on the couch were now spent across the room from each other, with him studying and me rocking our child to sleep. We were technically still spending time with each other, but it was hard not to feel that physical distance emotionally. 

I want to pause for a second and point out that I am so grateful for our kids, and the timing that we chose to have our daughter couldn’t have been better for us. I wouldn’t do it any differently. There were so many beautiful experiences wrapped up in this same time. However, right now I’m wanting to discuss the difficulties that we faced and how we dealt with that, so that if someone is facing the same thing, they can know they aren’t alone. 

Alone is exactly how I felt, though. It didn’t matter if I was at home by myself in our quiet apartment, trying to soothe a fussy baby, or if I was standing in the same room as my husband. Sometimes I just felt so isolated emotionally because this tiny human was so dependent on me and no one else could do my job.

It didn’t help that my husband and I weren’t able to have sex for about 9 months after I had my daughter, because of some complications that I’d had. It was just one more thing that was threatening to drive us further apart. My husband and I both recognized that our marriage felt different, and we began to look for ways to help us still feel close to each other. 

One of the things we did that helped was that we started getting our daughter onto a schedule as she got older, which meant that she was in bed by a decent time. After she went to bed, we had our alone time.

My husband still had to study most nights, but we tried to take at least a little bit of time for ourselves. We would watch a show together, or eat ice cream, or even just sit and talk. When my days got hard, this was the time that I would look forward to.

Another thing we would do was “short dates.” For months, we just took our daughter everywhere with us, which was fine, but I did crave that alone time that we were missing out on. Eventually, we started coming up with things we could do that wouldn’t take a long time so that we could still be back by the time I needed to feed her. Of course, I always still craved a little more of that time, but it worked to help us feel a little closer to one another. 

Once we started finding ways to feel emotionally close to one another, things got easier. However, we were still struggling with our physical intimacy. Months had passed since I’d given birth, and I was still unable to have sex with my husband.

On top of my original issues, I also had back surgery, which made it even harder. I felt inadequate, frustrated, and embarrassed that my body wouldn’t cooperate. My doctor had told me to keep trying and eventually it would get easier, but every time we tried and it didn’t work, I felt more and more like a failure. There didn’t seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel.

I had always been fairly secure and confident in my feelings about my body. I knew it wasn’t perfect, but I was okay with that. However, through this process I found that for the first time, I was tearing myself apart with expectations and hatred for my body.

This wasn’t a problem that we could solve easily with a schedule, or a simple plan. It took a lot of love and patience on both our parts. Eventually we found ways to be intimate without having sex, and with time, my body healed and it wasn’t an issue anymore. It was hard to not let it come between us, though. 

One of the main things I learned through that time in our lives was the importance of just continuing to try. It would have been easy to just get lost in parenthood and to drift apart. It wasn’t easy to talk about a lot of the issues that we were facing, but I had to force myself to because feeling that distance between us was way scarier.

We didn’t find solutions right away, but because we continued to try different things, we eventually found what worked for us. We just recently had our second child, and now we’re having to find what works all over again, but I’m a lot less scared because I know that we’ll figure it out.