So, maybe not for all couples, but for my husband and I, marriage is work.  Not all the time. And, sometimes, it’s even easy. But- Sometimes, it is WORK.

My husband and I have known each other for over half of our lives. We met on the first day of high school. We were friends – real, genuine friends – for the whole of high school. We lost touch, as some do, after high school. And, I found him again some years later on Facebook and we met up to catch up. It took about a week before I was in love.

We waited a while, had a wonderful foundation, and decided to try for a child.  When we got pregnant, we were so excited. We figured that it would just be some sleepless nights, long days of raising our new offspring, and things would genuinely be amazing.  While some of that came true, it wasn’t as smooth as predicted.  It was almost like dating someone new all over again, except that in the middle of trying to establish a relationship with that someone you are somehow already married to, you have a tiny, EXTREMELY needy human being that requires your every ounce of energy.

If there are people that don’t struggle with the newborn stage, I think that they are AMAZING and INCREDIBLE and a slew of other adjectives that I can not think of. And, maybe not human.

For us – and we have talked about this – we were blindsided by the new feelings that were brought up by bringing this little person into our home.  It was strange. We had talked about the types of parents that we wanted to be, we had already worked through compromises. We had established a set of guidelines that we felt were going to be an asset.  I suppose that in many ways, it did help.  We had a plan of attack and a jumping off point that was a significant advantage, but when the tiny person arrives, at least from my motherly point of view, things I thought I was passionate about, fell away and were no longer of any importance to me. Things that were once so clear cut, had hazy gray lines, little bits of black even.

I was changed.  So much of me was different.  I still cared for myself, but my heart was out of my body, it was living and breathing outside of my body and somehow, it was the way that I experienced life. New touch, new smell, new, new, new. I couldn’t remember life without this wriggling thing, without the smell of new, the cries of need, the want to surround and protect my heart.

It makes the partnership difficult.  You have all the desire in the world to be everything to both your offspring and the person you so carefully chose to make them with, but you can only put so many people in the first slot.  And, forgetting about your own self leads to destruction.

End part one.