Believe it or not, having kids affect our husbands’ lives, too. They miss their wives, and what it used to be! Dedicating time for my husband was as important for our family as everything else.
I remember becoming a new mom and experiencing everything you probably already know: the joy, the worry, the overwhelming love, the sleepless nights. Setting apart time for my husband was the last thing on my mind at that time.
I was so focused on that tiny human being and in everything surrounding her. After all, she was so fragile, so pinky, so dependable on us. I was breastfeeding around the clock, changing diapers, and rearranging my house to suit my new needs.
Additionally, I was scared of absolutely everything: SIDs, is she nursing enough, is she sleeping too much, “is that cough normal?”…
It was so easy for me to forget about the adult standing next to me craving for attention and, even more so, for my love.
Yes, when a new baby arrives, it instantly becomes the priority, and that’s exactly how it should be. Both mom and dad should work together to make sure that little baby is getting everything he or she needs, tagging teams when needed, and trying to make the transition into parenting as smooth as possible.
However, it’s also important to remember that while you and your husband are now “mom and dad”, you are still husband and wife.
Feeling overwhelmed? Check out this post about craving alone time as a mom.
It seemed impossible to dedicate time for my husband in my already packed mom schedule.
To me, there nothing more complicated than balancing out my time as a mom. I personally feel like I do so much all day long, only to get to the evening and feel like I got nothing done.
Do you ever feel like that? Like, no matter how much you work, nothing ever seems “done”?
I’m used to saying that life as a mom is always divided into 5 categories (read more about it here):
- parenting
- house chores
- managing
- husbands
- self-care
Out of these five categories, you can possibly execute 2 very well, 1 modestly well, 1 gets poorly executed, and the last of them usually gets neglected. At least that’s how it is for me.
From my personal research, I have found that the two categories that usually get neglected are self-care and dedicating time for my husband.
We spend so much time and energy with the other three that when the time comes, we are either too exhausted or too stressed to think about anything else.
Validating my husbands’ feelings about being left out
On countless occasions, my husband has come up to me to express he was sad about my lack of time and dedication to him. My first instinct was… to get mad. Of course.
“How dare he bring this up? Doesn’t he know how much I do daily? How much I work? How tired I am?”
And so, I fought back. I started naming and listing eeeeeeeeverything I do on a daily basis, which truly is a lot. In response, he would get mad too, and there it was, a whole fight or argument over the simple fact that he missed me.
Other times I wouldn’t even get upset for myself. I would get into a very dangerous spiral of accusing him of not loving our kids enough.
“How can you even feel that way? Don’t you know they won’t be this little forever? Don’t you realize how lucky we are to even have kids? If you loved them as I do, you would want to spend as much time dedicating to them as I do”.
Ouch.
And then, on other occasions, I wanted to throw the same old pity party for myself.
“Nothing I do is enough. I work, work, work, and he doesn’t appreciate me. It’s like he wants me to be everything and doesn’t even care how tired I am”.
It was a lose-lose game because at the end of the day, my husband continued to feel unloved and I continued to feel unappreciated.
How to find a solution? Easier said than done.
In my family, my husband and I are still working around how to be better husband and wife after we became mom and dad.
I did make a few changes in my day so that I could have some more time to dedicate to him, and he made a few changes in his approach to the subject.
- I started planning my week and included activities in strategic spots to maximize my kids’ energy spending.
- Because of that, I was able to get the kids “ready” for bed earlier in the day.
- If I have to work at night, I will do it on the sofa using a laptop so we can be connected, as opposed to sitting on the computer with him on the other side of the room.
- I started cooking dinner and cleaning up for the day before I put the kids to sleep at night. It surely is a little more hectic that way, but after a couple of weeks, we all got the hang of how this would work out. Now they know when it’s “clean up time” and will usually not cause much trouble. Doing this has given me a lot more time to spend with my husband once the kids were in bed.
- I took the kids out of our bed/bedroom. Yes, we co-slept with both our kids, from the time my daughter was born until she was over 2 years old. I don’t necessarily “regret” that decision, however, I am thankful that it has been different with our son and we had this sleep situation figured out with him before he turned 10 months. (Read more here)
- We started scheduling intimacy time. Yes. I have found that waiting for that to happen “spontaneously” was becoming incredibly frustrating for a multitude of reasons. Scheduling time for sex allowed me to not only plan my day better but also built up expectations for both of us.
Of course, the occasional fights about me not paying him enough attention still happen and will continue to happen. As my great-grandfather used to say, “marriage is one of life’s cruelest jokes, because by the time you figure everything out to have a perfect marriage, it’s time to part from this life”.
But the important thing here is that once I put my bitterness aside and he put my feelings in perspective, we were able to better understand each other… and then start working on it.
My takeaway? My husband loves me enough to miss me. And that’s cool with me.
When I realized that my husband actually missed me… it all changed in my head. And I mean really thinking about what that meant. He missed me. Because he loved me. Why would I get mad about that?
Granted, we had to have some tough discussions about what it meant for me being a stay-at-home mom and pouring out so much of myself to the kids and the family, and that he had to understand that sometimes I was just plain tired.
But the thing I am most thankful for is that in the midst of the exhaustion and busy day, I was being cherished and missed by the guy that I chose to have a family with.
And I truly hope this helps you also work it out within yourself and with your husband so you can, too, realize that you will always be a better mom and a better dad when you are a intertwined husband and wife.