Nobody Told Us

When you are pregnant, everyone tells you how hard it will be. “You won’t get any sleep!” “They will cry all the time!” “Your life will never be the same!” I have so many problems with people who do that to pregnant women. When women are at their most vulnerable, they don’t want or need to hear how hard it will be. They know. 

They need to hear how much they will love that little baby. How they will forget how bad the labor was when their baby smiles at them for the first time. How precious those moments in the wee hours of the morning are–just a mother and her baby. They need to hear that it will be worth it and to focus not on how hard it is but how much they will love their little one. 

What no one tells them, or maybe what no one told me, was how the marriage changes after the birth of a baby. No one told me that I would resent my husband for sleeping like a baby (my perception) while I woke up three or four times in the middle of the night or that I would hate him a little when he told people how he didn’t get enough sleep when I didn’t see his sleep habits change at all. No one told him that all of my attention would be on the baby, that he would feel isolated from me, that he would not have sex for months (more on this in the future).

Nobody told us. 

The evening my son was born, our marriage was the strongest it had ever been. I was in labor for 15 hours, pushing the last 4. By the end, my husband, Chris, was alternating offering me water, oxygen, and a barf bag. He was attentive, encouraging, supportive. I loved him more that day than the day we married. 

I think me giving birth was harder on him than it was on me. He felt helpless. He saw the episiotomy.  He saw the blood. Despite my warnings in the weeks prior, he looked. When he held our son for the first time, he cried. Not so much because he was overwhelmed with being a father. He cried because he was relieved I was okay. He has mentioned more than once that if it weren’t for modern medicine, I would not have lived. And maybe because he was overwhelmed being a father as well.

The Breakdown

I think this day was a good indication of the next few months. I was focused on the baby. He was focused on me. This is where our breakdown began.

We ended up staying in the hospital for 6 days due to my son’s jaundice. Because of his giant head (97th percentile), the doctor had to use a vacuum. My son was born with a full head of hair, which meant the vacuum kept slipping off. This formed a bruise on the back of his head. As the bruise healed, his liver was not developed enough to process the excess bilirubin in his blood. He had to be put on the bililights, my little glowworm. 

My husband slept on the couch for a week while I slept in a hospital bed. My husband could not stand the baby crying, and I became frustrated that he couldn’t handle it. One of the first nights, our son wouldn’t stop crying. My husband picked him up and tried to console him, to no avail. There was a moment where I saw his spirit break. He put the baby down, not quite as gently as I would, but not rough enough to hurt him, and then he left the room. 

He felt helpless. He felt like a bad father because he couldn’t calm the baby down. I felt resentful and disappointed. I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t just suck it up. Babies cry. If they are fed and changed, you just have to hold them and comfort them until they fall asleep. Chris wasn’t there yet. 

As the weeks progressed, our marriage became more and more strained. I was so focused on the baby that when he complained, I didn’t really care. When he said he felt alone, I thought, Get over it. I had a baby to take care of. I didn’t want two.

Our Resolution

It took months before we really talked. I’m not sure what triggered it, but we both realized we weren’t happy. I think it is important to note that both of us have parents that are still married. The word ‘divorce’ was never brought up. That was simply not an option. Instead, one day we sat down and we talked. Really talked. He let me know he felt isolated and alone. He felt like I didn’t have room in my life for him since I had the baby. He told me he felt like he had given me the baby I had wanted and now I was done with him. I think this was what helped me understand that he wasn’t just complaining. He was really hurting. I told him I resented him every time I woke up and he was snoozing away. 

The conversation wasn’t an easy one. I had to tell him that sex was the furthest thing from my mind because I was MOMMY. Mommy isn’t sexy. Mommy is a walking dairy farm. No one feels sexy when they are drained from lack of sleep, working full-time, and over-touched. I didn’t get time for myself. I was Mommy and Wife, but never Lindsay.

When I got home from work, Chris gave me an hour to just be. On the weekends, when I was clearly overwhelmed, Chris sent me to Starbucks with a book. 

As a wife and mother, you can’t take care of your family until you take care of yourself. You need to communicate this need to your partner. Chris didn’t know I was stretched so thin I was about to break, not until I told him. Only after this first step did the rest start to get better. 

If you take anything from my blog, I hope you take this: No one knows you need help until you ask for it. You can’t resent your partner for sleeping in if you never tell them that you are exhausted. Yes, they should probably figure that out, but let’s be honest: they don’t. Whether that is willful ignorance or stupidity, that depends on the guy, but you can’t expect them to read your mind.