booze, biscuits, and bassinets: Marriage After Baby

This past weekend was our 5 year anniversary. What? How did that happen? On one hand it feels like it was yesterday and on the other it feels like an eternity ago. The first few months of marriage wasn’t pretty.

It took us about a year to work the kinks out of living together. We were both well into our 20’s and headstrong and once the fun of marriage wore off we were stuck with some obvious problems. Somehow in the 6 years prior to our marriage we both managed to miss several key facts:

· He never screws the lids back on bottles when he opens them (ranch, hot sauce, bbq sauce, orange juice, you name it). He just places the top on it, but doesn’t screw it shut.

· Actually, he never fully shuts anything. If he opens it, he will shut it, but not fully. Everything will be open about an inch. (Kitchen cabinets, the silverware drawer, the dresser drawers…closed, kind of )

· He doesn’t understand laundry baskets. He throws his dirty clothes on top of the nice wicker basket without opening the lid.

· The toothpaste he actually does put the top back on; however, he tightens it so much you need a torque wrench to get that bad boy off.

· I love to re-organize and play with furniture arrangements at least twice a year.

· I’d always watch Sport Center on gameday with him, but he didn’t realize that I wouldn’t enjoy watching it ALL DAY once it started repeating.

· My closet is organized by season and color.

· I wash towels separately.

· I am not willing to share my really expensive shampoo.

· Speaking of shower…hair in the drain might be his biggest pet peeve.

You see what I mean. We talked, we laughed, we compromised, we yelled, we threw things, we tried harder, we learned to live with each other. The next few years we settled into a great pattern and I can honestly say we had a wonderful marriage. Please do not think that we don’t fight. Good Lord, do we fight but at the end of the day we were happy…at least we thought we were until Tilmon Edward came home.

Some of these items aren’t that big of a deal anymore. For example, TJ actually really loves how organized the closet is. Some things we’ve agreed to disagree on… Whenever I walk into the kitchen and see the pantry door half open, I sigh REALLY loudly, shut it a little louder than I need to, and lean into the living room to smile at TJ. Just for fun, sometimes I will mention changing where the couch is just to see the look of panic in his face.

Now if you take said happy marriage, add hormonal wife, sleepless nights, added pressure of a one income family, no family nearby, and a new baby…what do you get? Apocalypse Now. Woo Wee. Having kids puts your marriage under a microscope. Any cracks you had are now amplified. Something that would have normally just irritated each other sent us (okay maybe just me) into a rage blackout.

When TJ promises me we’ll spend a day at the lake, but he ends up working all day what do I do?

A) Calmly explain to him that it hurt my feelings and I really missed him and just wanted some quality time together.

B) Even though I am wide awake for the night wakeups, I wake TJ up from a sound sleep to go check on the baby.

C) Make plans for something that I know he’ll love and miss just out of spite.

D) All of the above.

No brainer. ‘D’ All of the above. Why? Because I’m exhausted and not thinking clearly, and if I’m miserable then by golly he needs to understand.

All husbands out there…be very patient with your wife. It’s okay that she is a smidge crazier than normal. I promise once you start getting sleep things will go back to the way there were before. I promise. Our house is no longer the powder keg that it once was, but be warned: There aren’t many new mom’s (at least the really honest ones) that haven’t mentioned how much they fought with their spouses in the first few months of the baby’s life. Granted, I’m a little harder to handle than most people out there, so my baseline crazy is a little higher than most, but still…we returned to normal. If there’s hope for me, I guarantee there’s hope for you.

I took all of these pictures today. Not one of these was staged. See...clothes on top of the empty laundry basket.