To Have and to Hold by Molly Millwood PhD

Author:Molly Millwood, PhD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

7

Couples Adrift

Having a baby is like throwing a hand grenade into a marriage.

—Nora Ephron

On a walk one morning with a new friend whose second child is in his infancy, we spoke of the marital tensions that arise around efforts to get a baby to fall, and stay, asleep. She was describing the way her baby stirs at the slightest noise, even the cracking of her ankle as she tiptoes away from the crib after laying him down. I remembered that my husband and I used to joke about how making the transfer of a sleeping baby from arms to crib is good training for the bomb squad. Incredible agility is required; one false move, and disaster ensues.

In our conversation, my friend described a recent night in which she had managed the stealthy walk-away, with the noise machine humming and the fan set on high. Quiet as a mouse, she turned on her bedside lamp in the special way she does so that the on-off knob does not click. She silently slid under the covers and began to read her book, careful not to allow the pages, as she turned them, to brush up against the bedspread. Then her husband walked in and, though apparently not completely oblivious to the baby’s tenuous asleep status because he addressed his wife in a whisper, proceeded to turn on the bright closet light right next to their baby’s crib, switch the fan down to low, and clear his throat heartily a few times as he dropped his slippers onto the hardwood floor from a good eighteen inches above, where his feet were dangling off the end of the bed. “Are you kidding me??” she whispered to him. He looked at her blankly, genuinely unaware of what his transgression might be.

Another mother I spoke with told me about a night when her young baby was very congested. She lay awake listening to, and worrying about, his labored breathing. Her spouse, on the other hand, lay sound asleep, entirely oblivious to their baby’s sick, restless sleep and his wife’s nighttime vigil. In fact, his snoring practically obscured the sounds she strained to hear. Her rage at him was so all-consuming that she genuinely felt for a moment that she wanted to kill him.

These stories highlight how ripe for spousal tension just about any situation can become when there is a new baby in the house. My friend’s annoyance with her husband is understandable on many levels. This is not an unhappy couple, nor is her husband an uninvolved father. He is very much supportive and involved. But her world at present is organized almost completely around the baby’s needs; she is dialed in, around the clock, to his current state. It is her husband’s lack of attunement to the delicacy of the situation, his inability to intuit that his wife was holding her breath, waiting to see if her careful, methodical strategies to get their easily awoken baby to stay asleep in those first touch-and-go moments in his crib were successful, that was an affront to her.

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