Babylune

How Do You Measure Relationship Progress?

by kate baggott on March 23rd, 2007

A year ago I was 13.5 weeks postpartum and I wrote about working on my relationship skills in this blog. I had a lot of difficulty adapting to having two children and the extra work.

I also felt abandoned by my spouse whose work hours increased with the arrival of our second child. Looking back, I was angry at my husband all the time for leaving me to deal with our larger family and more chaotic household all alone.

It isn’t as if he couldn’t have take vacation time to help me adapt. Doubtlessly, he had his own emotions about our growing family and more chaotic household to process. My mother-in-law also died when the baby was only four weeks-old.  

With a new baby, a confused 3 year-old, sleepless nights, confused hormones and loneliness clouding my days, I didn’t have the time or energy to deal with my husbands issues, so it might have been better for all of us, in the end, for him to work on his own feelings with an extra hour at work every day.  

Now that that particular terrible time has passed, I can ask myself what I would have done differently when I was a very new mother dealing with a very new set of circumstances. I know I felt very unloved, but I did not leave the marriage because I needed the support that was there even though it wasn’t enough at the time. I got close enough to leaving that I understand completely why a braver woman would choose to go it alone. 

I did take a month out to see my own family like I try to every year (as I am now) and feeling so safe in my own country made re-entry so much more difficult. It took months and months before our relationship was a comfortable place to be. It was not the lyric from the Lemonheads song that I wanted my marriage to be:  

I know a place, where I can go when I’m alone/ I know a place that’s safe and warm from the world/Into your arms, ohh, into your ams I go.

So what have I learned about dealing with new-baby stress over the past year? It’s temporary, but while it lasts every day feels like an eternity. A break might help, or it might make things worse. Support from friends and family outside your marriage is nice to have.

In other words, I have learned nothing. We just survived it. Somehow.    

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POSTED IN: Mental Health