Coffee with Heather :: Marriage after kids [Mentor Series Wk 1] Ep 580

And so today, we're gonna focus on marriage, because becoming parents is one of the greatest joys in life, and also one of the greatest [laughs] stress tests on a marriage.

And I don't think, I mean, Bruce and I were married five, maybe six years before we had our first child, and marriage was fantastic.

We traveled, we connected, uh, but I didn't realize how the stress of parenting would impact our ability to communicate, um, how things shifted from fun to conversations about logistics.

Who's gonna take care of changing the diaper? Who's gonna, uh, get...

Well, I knew who was gonna wake up in the middle of the night.

We kind of figured those things out.

But without realizing it, our relationship was slowly becoming centered around responsibilities instead of connection.

And also, I recognized I had left a job to stay home, and Bruce was still working, and so I had made it my job to figure out how to make sure our child was happy and healthy and growing.

And I was doing all the research and all the reading.

And so when he would come home, and as kind as he was to help me, I then felt like I was the expert, this was my job, and he was coming into my job and didn't really want, not in a mean way, but, like, I can imagine nobody wants to be micromanaged.

And I would be frustrated that he wasn't taking every little piece of my advice.

And I would try to tell him, it would, it was like if I went into his work, sat down at his computer, and just started messing with his spreadsheets, but he couldn't give me any input.

And so just that analogy helped him recognize how I was viewing my role as a mom, and for him to have a little bit more grace to me, and for me to realize that we maybe needed to split labor differently.

And so for us, with our first, that became Bruce was in charge of bath, bedtime ritual, and that was my time to either ... pick up the house or do something I enjoyed and relax, um, after the day of caring for the baby.

But another thing that was a big surprise after becoming a mom is recognizing how different you are.

And I would've said on paper that Bruce and I looked very similar in how we were raised, how long our parents were married, the homes we grew up in, but you don't realize that you maybe have a very clear picture how you think you should sleep train or not sleep train, how discipline should happen, how schedules should look.

And then you see, oh, wait, my spouse has a different idea, and those differences can start to frustrate, and you can start to believe that different equals wrong.

And I realized that I was trying to make Bruce a clone of me instead of recognizing that God gave me Bruce and God gave our boys Bruce, and one of the best things that can be, uh, part of our parenting is our differences.

So instead of asking, "Why doesn't he parent like I do?" start asking, "What does he bring that I don't?" And that question changed everything.

In chapter eight of my book, Don't Mom Alone, I write about something that completely reframed marriage for us.

The goal wasn't finding someone exactly like you.

It's learning to value someone who sees the world differently because they don't just need your strengths.

They need your spouse's strengths, too.

And Bruce brought things into our home I would have not, never naturally brought.

He brought adventure and humor, relaxed confidence, risk, fun, and if I'd spent all my energy trying to make him parent more like me, our boys would have missed so many gifts God intended them to receive through their dad.