There are people out there who think having a baby will ‘save the relationship’.
Those people are wrong.
Having a baby might make you love your partner even more because watching someone become a parent alongside you can be pretty intoxicating. But this will probably only happen to people who already quite like each other, not couples on the rocks.
It’s far more likely that your relationship will become a constant dance of wanting to kill your partner and then not killing him. (No one ever gives a woman credit for not murdering the father of her children in the middle of the night, by the way.) It’s not easy.
And this can happen even if everything was fine before the baby arrived.
It can be frightening to feel such rage towards someone who, deep down—really deep down—you truly love. Especially when, just a couple of months ago, you couldn’t wait to see this person become a daddy. You dreamed about how your little family would look and you knew everything would be perfect.
And now, in the middle of the night, as you try to feed a screaming baby next to that sleeping hulk of useless nipples and unparalleled sleeping ability, you feel slightly less enamoured.
It’s always in the dark of night that you turn to this person and start resenting everything he represents. His ability to fall asleep in seconds. His inability to hear anything at all. His refusal to lie awake and listen to the baby breathe all night like you apparently need to do now because your brain won’t let you drift off. His abdominal muscles that are still functional, the control he has over his bladder. His la-di-da lifestyle with lunch breaks and tea breaks and fresh air and ADULT CONVERSATIONS and LIFE. The fact his career is forging ahead without any concern about his commitment to his work now that he’s a parent.
It’s perfectly normal to look at that snoring lump and dream about gouging out his perfectly un-bloodshot eyeballs and hanging them over the crib like a mobile.
You can blame lack of sleep and raging hormones. When you’re so tired you start forgetting words like ‘milk’ and ‘bowl’, it’s understandable that watching a person sleep could send you into a homicidal rage. It’s like starving for three weeks and then watching someone binge on pizza. And you can’t exactly rage at the baby, can you?
It’ll be okay. Most women go through periods of planning out their partner’s death in exquisite detail. Most of us don’t follow through.
You’ll calm down and start to like them again. Eventually. Usually around the time you decide you want another child.