balancing parenting and partnering

Since going back to work is has been even harder to bal­ance being a par­ent and being a part­ner. Wait, I want to qual­ify that with being a *good* par­ent and a *good* part­ner. I don’t think the role of par­ent hasn’t got­ten any harder, there are just moments that it feels like it is more demand­ing now. The kids want me from the minute I get in the door until they have fallen asleep and then I attend to them when they wake up through the night. Week­ends are even more demand­ing because the kids are clingy. My hus­band has projects lin­ing up that are requir­ing more of his atten­tion so often he uses the week­ends to make head­way on his projects.

Since the kids were born it has been quite a strug­gle for me to keep in mind that while I tend to the kids I also need to tend to my hus­band. I don’t know about hav­ing one baby but going from no kids to two babies is incred­i­bly hard. Thank­fully the hus­band and I are usu­ally on the same page but I’m not going to lie, for a long time it felt like we were just sur­viv­ing and our mar­riage was put on hold. There were times when it was as if we were teth­ered together by a bungy cord and we were each going in dif­fer­ent direc­tions and we had stretch the cord to the limit. It’s not that often that we are each mov­ing away but when it hap­pens things start feel­ing bleak and I notice that I feel snap­pish and cranky.

When we attended our pre­na­tal class one ses­sion we dis­cusses how hav­ing twins puts addi­tional pres­sures on a mar­riage and the instruc­tor sug­gested that we talk as a cou­ple about what cop­ing mech­a­nisms we would use. The only thing that I can remem­ber is that I said I wanted to ensure that the two of us had “date nights” so that we could get out and recon­nect as a cou­ple and tem­porar­ily leave our role as par­ents behind. We haven’t been that great about ensur­ing that we get a date every month, but when we do get out I always have a great time. True to our gen­der roles, my hus­band would rather just have sex to recon­nect and I want to have a date and talk. Now sex is great, but I need to be relaxed and in the mood and he has finally real­ized that if I get my date then he is almost guar­an­teed that we will have sex. I still find that I get hyper-focused on car­ing for the kids and I for­get that I need to care for my mar­riage too.

Before we had kids we used to play board games or com­puter games together but now there never seems to be the time to do that. It doesn’t help that dis­cre­tionary time is almost non-existent. There is always some­thing that needs to be done. After the kids are asleep my hus­band is usu­ally in the office work­ing and I’m down­stairs fold­ing laun­dry, watch­ing tv or surf­ing and catch­ing up on blogs.

What do you do to stay con­nected with your spouse? How do you bal­ance being a good par­ent and being a good part­ner? Is it pos­si­ble to make sure every­one, kids and adults, are get­ting their needs met?

No related posts.