There’s a reason why people say that having a baby changes everything. Because it’s true! No one can truly prepare you for how parenthood changes a relationship but know that it WILL change. While we’re only two years in, parenthood has changed how we interact with each other and with what we need from each other.
One of the very first episodes on The Swirl and Sip Podcast was all about how my relationship changed once Stokely was born. I could see how having a new baby was impacting my friends relationships since we all had our kids at the same time. More fights and arguments go hand and hand with less sleep. We were lucky because the things that were causing some issues for our friends didn’t come up for us. We’re extremely blessed with our finances and our general personalities are pretty laid back. We didn’t run into money problems or huge differences in our parenting styles.
One of the biggest ways Stokely changed our relationship was in our communication. For as long as we’ve been together (almost two decades), we’ve struggled with finding the right way to talk to each other. We don’t really like confrontation and we definitely handle our anger differently. I can pretty much let things go in a day whereas he’ll sit in it for a while.
Having Stokely forced us to really get to the root of why things bothered us. We had to become better at communicating why we didn’t like something or why we wanted something a certain way. I had to learn how to ask for help without feeling like a bad wife or mom. The hubby had to learn how to say what he needed instead of expecting me to already know.
We’re extremely blessed that Stokely didn’t change much about our relationship. We’ve been through so many things prior to having Stokely that there isn’t really much that has an effect on us at this point. But I know for many, many couples it simply isn’t this way. The best thing you can do is talk to your partner. And know that the newborn-no sleep stage doesn’t last forever.
[…] us, having that time to reconnect with each other is essential. I’ve talked before about how parenthood changes relationships. Getting time to ourselves allows us to be better parents and […]