Hurricane newborn: Preserving your marriage (and sanity) when two become three

The first cry you hear from your own baby is music to any parents’ ears. They’ve made it. They’re alive. They’re okay. They’re a little cold and cranky, but here they are at last. You and your partner look at each other, triumphant, excited, exhausted, terrified. In the haze of those first few hours getting to know each other, your baby’s cry retains its sweetness still, as both parents sprint around the hospital room grabbing never-before-worn onesies and wet wipes, struggling with unfamiliar fasteners and snaps, facing the horror of the first soiled nappy and experiencing the bliss of feeding and comforting a new bundle of joy.

A few months in, standing in front of the fridge at three in the morning, staring slack-jawed at a packet of ham as you desperately try to remember what in god’s earth you were looking for (milk, always milk) the sound of your baby’s piercing scream may have lost a little of its previous charm.

During those days of sleep deprivation and zombified, daytime exhaustion, my husband and I shuffled around like ghosts of ourselves, nodding at each other like bus drivers changing shift as one came on baby duty and the other fell into bed, asleep before their head hit the pillow.

During this time, on the odd occasion that I had an opportunity to communicate with my husband at all, we talked almost exclusively about the baby. What he had eaten, when he had eaten, had he had a dirty nappy yet, when did he need his next nap. We had gone from husband and wife to shift workers doing the run-down before the handover. And as the baby’s cries rose in pitch and the sleep deprivation increased, so too did tension.

It is very, very difficult to be your best self when a baby is screaming in your ear and you’re having a fierce, whispered discussion about what exact position he should be rocked in to best get him back to sleep. Keeping things civil while the most irritating noise that millennia of evolution could produce is ringing in your ears does not foster an atmosphere for gentle and respectful debate.

More than once I found myself hissing, “Fine, you do it then!” followed by bundling the poor child into my husband’s arms and storming off to the kitchen to make an unnecessarily clanky cup of tea, muttering darkly under my breath about the importance of sticking to sleep training techniques.

The expansion of a family from a duo to a trio is far from an organic experience. Where once every conversation, every choice was a give and take between two adults, suddenly you have another, tiny person in the mix. Someone who simultaneously utterly dominates every decision while not actually venturing any opinions of their own – certainly very few constructive ones. The strain of sleepless nights, coordinating a new and bafflingly complicated timetable for your child, learning the ins and outs of car seats, bottle warmers, travel systems, vaccine schedules and on and on ad infinitum can take its toll on even the most stable of couples.

My husband and I found ourselves more than occasionally bickering, sniping and needling at one another. We had always had a very healthy, respectful relationship and prided ourselves on clear communication and open and honest conflict resolution. The tetchiness that had started to creep into our interactions due to sheer exhaustion and stress was starting to wear on us both.

After a few particularly snippy encounters, I found myself making the decision to try to be more mindful of my interactions with my husband. The energy and will to be naturally patient and present were in short supply those days, but deciding to show up a little more in the evenings, to ask questions, to even make time to have dinner together occasionally and talk instead of watching mindless television was a lifeline for our relationship.

Laughter also helped us to hold it together. There are so many moments of utter absurdity that you experience as parents of a newborn (my husband being absolutely destroyed by the baby deploying an unbelievably explosive ‘poop cannon’, was one of the more entertaining, for me at least), that sometimes just clinging to one another and laughing until you cry is the only way survive.

We’ve also been trying to take the time to thank each other as much as possible. Expressing gratitude to your partner releases a shot of oxytocin, the love hormone, strengthening your bond with one another each time it’s expressed (similar to sex, but far easier to do with a newborn clamped to your chest, a healing C-section scar and Bio-Oil slathered all over your stretch marks).

When things get tense, and they still do, extending generosity and empathy to one another even when we don’t particularly feel like it can go a long way toward alleviating strain. Coming downstairs to see the milk bottles unwashed might have previously elicited a snarky comment, assuming the guilty party just didn’t bother doing them. Whereas trying to think of the most generous interpretation of why they may have been left there (the baby was crying, they were in the middle of putting on the load of laundry that is now neatly folded on the table, etc) generates some breathing room to quell the rush of self-righteous indignation that exhaustion allows to rush so readily in.

Our baby is eight months old now and has started to sleep through the night more nights than not, and those unhinged early days and nights are receding like a foggy memory. We ourselves are emerging, blinking into the light, making a few tentative plans with friends again. My husband went to the driving range. I got a massage. We’ve gone out for dinner just the two of us and even talked about topics other than the baby. Things are starting to look a little more normal in our world.

The baby, it’s worth noting, is the best thing that has ever happened to us, despite his absolute lack of any sense of decorum, respect of personal boundaries or understanding of basic social niceties  – why four in the morning isn’t a perfectly acceptable time to start rattling the hard plastic of his teething ring along the bars of his crib is quite beyond him. He’s a gem.

It’s impossible to predict exactly what impact having a baby is going to have on your relationship, but if, even amidst all the madness, the sleep deprivation and the poop (just, absolutely, everywhere), you can manage to keep your sense of humour, stay grateful and remember that they’re doing their best too and you’re both in this as a team. You can make it out the other side together, intact and all the stronger for it, if a little more strewn in bodily fluids.