Latest / Built In Real Life / Built In Real Life - Ep 4 - What Happens To A Marriage After Kids
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- Built In Real Life - Ep 4 - What Happens To A Marriage After Kids: What's up, everybody? Welcome back to Built in Real Life. I'm here with Melody today, and we got a doozy on the docket. today we are going to be talking about what happens to a marriage after kids. it was certainly something that changed our lives and in ways that you never can anticipate or prepare for until you're a parent. so Melody. You're so nervous about this episode. I love it. I'm so nervous. I'm clammy and shaky, and this is nothing phases me. But this is something that nobody talks about. And I think that it's important because marriage does change after having kids. Yep. So so Melody, do you think having kids made our marriage better or worse? So I think that that's a twofold answer. Okay. Right? Because Our children have enriched our lives in so many ways. We have more love to share among us. but I can't say that our marriage hasn't changed. it certainly has. Because I think we as people have changed as well. And that's that's part of a marriage too. You have to adapt to the different things of You know, as you grow, as you change different phases in life are going to change who you are. And being a mother definitely changed who I am. Sure, me too. Yeah. I mean, it being a father taught me more about myself than I was prepared to learn, to be honest with you. but I I think a a really good answer to the question of whether it was made better or worse is just that it became different. And here's why, right? I appreciate you saying there's more love to go around and more things to share and everything like that. But that's the exact answer. When you're married, you're a couple. But when you have a child, you become a family. Yes. And then you have another child. Then you have another child. So there are new priorities besides just the two of you. And so when you're married and if you don't have children, and this is not to put anyone down or anything like that, but if you're married and you don't have children, you're still a couple. You're the priority is still. There's not more priorities. There's not other things. Of course, there's business and life and bills and all that stuff, but you have a lot of adding. That's true too. But you're adding people to your dynamic. Yeah. And different personalities. Children are people. Like you're adding people to your home. Like it be it's no longer a couple. It's no longer two. You become a family. And with that, your priorities wind up changing. Yeah. I think that for a lot of people. one of the big downfalls is not going through the process of maybe reanalyzing those priorities from time to time. And the demands of life make it such that you kind of just cling to what requires you most immediately. Most of the time, that is, kids and them and their schedule and stuff. but it's very easy to either I can't use the term forget because you don't forget that you're married, but You don't consciously deprioritize your marriage. It just kind of happens because kids take up so much of your capacity. yeah. So if you don't do that reanalysis of, hey, we need to get back to being us, we need to get back to the couple before the family to make sure that the foundation and the roots are strong still. making sure you circle back to that priority list is really important, like super important. Yeah. And I think having rules around it kind of helps, but I think a very important part of becoming a parent in general is grieving who you used to be. Right. You can't just get up and go. You can't just do whatever you want to. You have to have the process in which you're kind of letting go of who you used to be, in a sense, and then welcoming in who you are now. And I think that you are evolving as you go. And it's funny because I always used to look at my parents and be like, And now that I'm a parent, I'm like, no, they were definitely like figuring it out as they go. and that's something that I think that we are doing as well, is we figure it out as we go. Same thing happens with our marriage, too, is we're trying to figure it out as we go because different phases of life, like the newborn stage is something totally different than a seven-year-old, for example. Like, You were more of a support to me in the newborn phase than you were now as like a caretaker, I would agree. Yeah. Yeah. Like put in and I remember the frustration I felt at the time because I wanted to help you desperately. Like you're a new mom, it's our first child. I want to be able to jump in and provide care. And our daughter wants nothing to do with me. All three of them actually. Exactly. I want mom, I want mom, I want mom. And like you know, i it now thinking back on that, you know, as a a new dad, I remember I took that hard. Like it was it was hard not to be able to As much as I knew that I could or wanted to, because at a certain point, like the baby's crying. But in that moment, you're trying to support me. Correct. And so it became a little bit frustrated that I couldn't do that. You know? Yeah. so let's talk a little bit about what we were like before we had kids, before we kind of like really delve into all of this. So we lived in the city. Yep. We right after we got married, we were in the city and then we moved to Reading, which was a totally different life. But we were social people. Like I remember when we lived in the city, I was always out with my friends, always, you know, at happy hour, et cetera, doing all of these things, having fun, a very vibrant social life, I would say. and then once we had kids, that completely changed too. Well, I mean, we went through some pretty quick, pretty big changes pretty quickly. Yeah. So we got married in 2016. Mm-hmm. And then we had we purchased our first home and had our first child within two months of each other in 2018. Yep. And then from then on, like this you're talking about a social life. Life was completely different by the time we had even purchased that house. I remember walking into that home, you hadn't even given birth yet. And it was Like kind of the next phase, like I kind of like felt like we had shed where we had been and kind of leveled up into we were homeowners now. Then we're about to be parents no less. Like yeah, we were forced into maturity. For sure. And so you talk about like I didn't mean catch-ball, I'm sorry, but you talked about like grieving who we used to be. Yeah. And I didn't feel that until later on because at the time I was like slamming the book shut and ready for this next chapter of life. I'm gonna be a dad. We're gonna be homeowners. Like I've been a husband for a year or two years now. You know, like I was I just felt like I had a momentum in life. Like I was I didn't really wasn't really looking back now. And it's so funny because a micro example of what you shared was just the other day, you had said, it's a perfect day for us to just lay in bed and do nothing. I think it was Sunday. It was like a cold, dark, rainy day. Football was on, the candle was lit, and you're just didn't want to like get up and get out of bed. Then the kids come piling in and it's like a million things we gotta do and we get moving and doing stuff. Turns into chaos, yeah. But it didn't have to be that way when it was just us. Yeah. We can do whatever we wanted to. I grieve in I'm I miss laying bed. I miss griev I grieve, you know, like you miss sleep. I still prioritize sleep, but I did miss the lazy days that we used to have and it being kind of like okay, but at the same time we did that. We tried and we're like, I have to get up. There's there's too much to do. Right. We have momentum to life now. It's too hard sometimes to just chill. Yeah. And then we would transition, I think, into life now with kids, right? We there we are, social life, boom, slam the door shut. Yeah. You had actually just graduated from college. And then we are boom having a baby. I was pregnant at your graduation. Yeah. Yes. So We slam that door shut. And then here we are in homeownership, parenthood, two completely new, new avenues of life. And then when did we really start transitioning and kind of feeling the changes of parenthood to the point where, all right, we grieved our old life and then now we're a parenting team? I don't think the parenting team portion really kicked in, honestly, until we had our second kid. Yeah. And I'll tell you why. It's because they're so close in age. Yeah. That the first kid was still going through that process that we were just talking about where they still want mom. They're still very reliant on you and your care. I can't really jump in as do as much. But that started to change obviously as we got to twelve months, eighteen months with our oldest. And then Next baby comes February of 2020, which presented its own two weeks before COVID. Yeah. and so that's when we really started to operate as a team, when it was like, okay, you take this kid, I'll take this kid. Because by then the other kid was more accepting of somebody else's care. And the new kid only wanted mom. Yeah. I also needed to kind of protect you from that. I felt like needed to kind of shield you and allow you to have the time with your newborn. And like it was difficult too because you needed to kind of split. Talking about splitting the love and the care and it grows and all that. But now you have two kids. We have two kids. Yeah, but you're man on man coverage. So you got it. We didn't even know what that meant at the time until we had three kids. So we had the third kid and we're like, we are outnumbered. So like you know, I I wouldn't change anything about the way that we did it, but it definitely presented some pretty significant challenges. And we didn't really know how to navigate those challenges until they became a little bit bigger with like the second kit in the mix. Yeah. Which that ended up being, I think, a very difficult time in our marriage too. because it was two weeks before COVID. And so I'm getting out of the hospital. I'm used to my mom stayed with us after our first kid. She was very involved. Your mom and parents were very involved. And then we completely lost all like social contact with everyone within two weeks. And That was, I think, extremely hard on our marriage too, because we were used to not being together so much. Yeah. Just based on work and everything, we had kind of separated a bit. Yeah. But that was nice because as a couple allowed us time to like recharge, maybe miss each other a little bit, come back and then in February, March of 2020, we found ourselves in a townhouse with two under two. And it felt like the walls were closing in. It felt like a shoebox. It was crazy. Yeah. And then you wouldn't let me go anywhere because I was a new, you know, we had a newborn in the house and you wanted site like you wouldn't even let me go to the grocery store. Yeah. Yeah, which which I like presented a lot of challenges because we're adjusting to two kids now. We're adjusting to parenting as a team. Yeah. And then we're adjusting to no social contact, which I thrive on a lot. I love being around people. I think you are kind of hit or miss. Like you're very much an introvert. But you need your time to recharge. I just have the social battery and when it expires, it expires. That's all. Yeah. But now that we're three kids and our kids are five, six, and seven, I think we're learning now that we have to be more intentional about our marriage. For sure. And I think that that's something that we should have realized probably years ago. That but we're in the throes of everything, we're in the throes of struggling, not sleeping, juggling three kids, two and under, three and under. Yeah, it was it was hard. So we had to adjust that, and we didn't really think about being intentional in our marriage at that point because I think we were just in survival mode. Like our kids were so close are so close together. They're sixteen months and seventeen months apart. And we didn't have time to prioritize. We were just kind of taking things as they come. And now that kind of like the dust is settling, they're becoming more independent. Looking back, you know, were there opportunities to potentially be more potent and more intentional with our marriage? Yes. Of course. But But again, we're learning as we go. Sure. And and there's no, of course, there's like best practices and there's things, but there's really no rule book for life. Right. Like there's no when you have kids, this is what you need to do with your marriage. So like, and there's of course there's guidance, the spiritual guidance, and all different ways that you can do it. But one thing that even through the struggles and the seasons of difficulty, and not to say that we don't or haven't faced new seasons of difficulty. Yeah. But one thing through those seasons is no matter and we did drift apart. Yeah. But no matter how far we drifted apart, we still were like facing each other. There was just a lot between us. And we I always in my mind viewed it this way. Like we were still reaching for each other. It was just harder to reach each other because of how much was in between us that needed to get solved or taken care of or took the capacity. And then as we got a little bit older, And our children got a little bit older, we started to kind of figure things out. Now, the good thing is eventually, I think our youngest was probably say three. So this is probably only about two years in the making now. But eventually we got to the point where comfortably we could treat all three of our children like a unit. They're on the same schedule. They ate at the same time. They woke up and went to bed at the same time. They all went to the same school. Like we wound up getting them in a routine. So instead of it being Three individual needs, it wound up becoming a little bit easier in terms of capacity to treat them as a group, as a unit, do the same things. And then that freed up some more capacity for us to do other things, like focus on our marriage a little bit more or start a company. Like there was just some things that we needed to do where we realized this isn't sustainable. How to how do we retool things to make it work? And so structuring parenthood helped a lot. Because in the beginning you're just trying to figure out, but then some things start to stick and you're like, okay, that Let's keep doing this and then you just kind of cobble things together as you go. I think a big unspoken thing though about having children is it's like holding up a mirror to yourself too. And the fact that a lot of childhood trauma comes up. that you're trying to give to your children. And maybe give them something that was missing in your childhood. And I think that's another thing that impacted our marriage significantly as well, is I didn't have capacity to be there for you in ways that I was before. Right. Our capacity changed, my capacity definitely changed, as well as my mental load. Yeah. And that's something that. Again, as part of evolving as a person, is you're seeing those things that maybe you weren't allowed to do as a kid. And it comes up as trauma for you that then you have to deal with internally, or maybe even go to therapy. And I think that that's something that nobody talks about is. What did you need as a child that you now need to provide or try to provide to the to your kid, to your child? Right? When we grew up, it was cry it out, leave them alone, let them do their thing. And research has shown that that actually is not good, for example. So now Our generation is changing, but I think our generation is trying to break so many cycles that that childhood trauma is there from us for us, even more so. That forces us to say, Hey, we need to break this generational cycle. But I think that's something that attributed to us. Drifting apart even more because I had to handle things. You had to handle things. It was something that we had to address separately. We were both in therapy and we to Definitely deal with it because I think a lot of it for me started causing like a little bit of resentment, I we ultimately had different ways or different ideas to raise our children. Yeah. So a couple things. Like at the beginning, I mentioned parenting taught me more about myself than I could have ever known or anticipated, right? Like it does make you face a lot of those things where you're Required to have more patience than maybe you are naturally inclined to have. Like you have to really stop yourself in certain instances. And then when it comes to like the generational cycles thing, I think that Like parenting has an identity. And I think generationally, as you go back in the generations, parenting had its identity. And this is how you raised your kids. And this was the blueprint. This is what you did. And you know, you take it back to World War One and then World War II. Like there was just a blueprint for how a family kind of was supposed to be, what the dynamic was supposed to be, the role that children were supposed to play, the then the role that a wife was supposed to play. Like there's so many generational things that kind of changed it. And I think every generation kind of has their own. things they want to do for their family. And I am not that generational wife. Is that what you're going? I don't think anyone really in our generation is is that tru they call them like traditional. Like they're not a lot of the generational cycles are broken through the breaking of traditions because they are just no longer applicable to current day or they just don't seem to make sense. Or, you know, or someone has their own experiences as a child and think I don't want this to happen, or my own child to go through that. One thing I tell you often is that we can't protect our kids from everything that they're going to experience. And I think life and the world is going to also shape them. And I think as parents, we bear a big responsibility to equip them for reality, to be honest with you. We can't really pacify children for the world and stuff like that. So I agree with you. Like we did do a lot of work where we ourselves had not found that identity yet. We had not found our parenting identity. how we collectively were going to approach raising our children and approach discipline and an approach just all of it, start to finish, all the way down to in the beginning, what food are we going to feed them? Like there was just a lot in terms of our identity that we hadn't discovered because the only identity that we had known was as a married couple. Yeah. So now we're parents, new identity, same people, new identity. How do we blend everything that made our marriage and leading up to our marriage work to make it that we're a perfect pair? And now we're split again because it's parenting identities. Now we have to come back together to, I don't know, we weren't super far apart, but we were raised very differently. Very differently. Very differently. very differently. And I think that with that, there was a lot of competing theories and approaches, and we're like, okay, we're not gonna do that, or we are gonna do this. And I think even now we still have these times where one of us might draw the line or at least When I say draw the line, I don't mean to be so stern. It's just creating a boundary, I think, is important where we'll stop each other and say, hey, we need to talk about that. The way that one of us handled the situation is not how I'd like for it to be handled in our family. We need to talk about this. Yeah, because you are definitely the disciplinarian in our in our parent dynamic. which it's funny because I always thought you were going to be the pushover and I was gonna be the disciplinarian, but I Again, grew up very differently and there was very different styles of discipline in my home and your home. Correct. so we definitely have had to meet in the middle with that. I mean, your response and I've I have to remind you a lot, like you're like, this is the way that my dad did it. And I'm like, Yeah, but your dad was raising boys, not girls. That's true. You know, and that's that's something too that we have to navigate. As well, because we are raising children. It's not easy to take advice from our parents because we are raising children in a completely different world. Completely different world, a digital world. everything is different. A digital world, a screen world, a everything. And I love that our generation is starting to get like we started out one way and now it's like, nope, we gotta go the other way. Like, how do we start raising our kids like they were in the nineties again? Yeah. Because it's You have to protect your children, or they're not going to be children for very long. That's true. In this world. And that's something that we have had to have a balance as well in because we see our our kids changing, their behavior changing. And is it easy to just give them an iPad sometimes? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. But at the same time, I think sometimes discipline disciplining children and finding that compromise is sometimes when we felt disconnected as a couple as well. Because it's like, well, I'm doing it this way, and this is the way that it should be. And it's like, actually, no, we're not gonna do it that way because I don't feel comfortable with that. And that's sometimes where. I think feelings came in because it trigger it triggers my childhood, you know? And that's where we have I start having feelings of, hey, I don't want my my child to feel how I felt as a kid. And so it's easy for me, I think it's easy for one of us to blame another person. It's easy if I don't want to deal with my trauma. It's easy for me to say it's your fault. I stunned him. He's speechless. My fault. It's not your fault, but it's easy for me to blame you for it. And I think that's where and I think that's where resentment can come in in a marriage because we're so far apart in different things, like disciplining our children. Or maybe I feel like I do more. Or you do less. Or and we've had conversations and even arguments around this too. And the fact that you're like, I do more with the kids, and you need to be more of a present mom because of the business. that's when I think we felt the most disconnected as a couple. That's when our marriage was suffering because we were navigating all of those things, childhood trauma, seeing yourself in your children, seeing potentially the way that your parent disciplined your child or disciplined you and seeing yourself in your child. And I don't want them to feel that way. I know exactly how they feel, and I want to mom a bear and protect them. Hmm. And I would say that is when we felt or for me, that's when I felt the furthest from you. I would agree because we weren't in alignment. Like when we are in alignment, it doesn't feel like you're across from me and we're reaching for each other. But in those moments, it's also yeah, it's also not easy to communicate in those moments either. No. Communication is something that we still continuously are trying to get better at. Yeah. and that takes a concerted effort for sure. So wow. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. but that's kind of like the nitty-gritty of the things that people don't talk about because as a woman, like your mental load, and I think that this is something too that people don't talk about as well. When you become a mother. Your mental load goes off the charts. I mean, I don't know how my mom did it because she couldn't Google everything, but I Googled so much. As a new mother, my priority is taking care of that child, helping this child live. And my priority is not my relationship with you. And I think as a father, that also is difficult because it changes your relationship overnight. It it it does. But I think that subconsciously, and I don't know that I ever really truly felt this way in the beginning, but I think subconsciously some men think when you have the baby, you'll be back. So it's like nine months where you're like, you're in this, like, all right, like I don't recognize my wife. This is crazy. You have the baby and it's like, all right, my wife is back. That person's gone. Yeah, gone forever. The person is gone. The person that you knew is gone. She's a changed person. She's now got new priorities to keep a human being alive. It's like, who are you? If I need you, I'll I'll get you. But not in such a you know passive way. But that goes back to what I was saying earlier, wherein it's like it's almost like You definitely need a lot of help and a lot of support from me, but it's almost like you're locked into what you're doing. You're on your own. You've got your baby. I need to like, I'm totally in. Like, I can't be distracted. And that is probably for me when I felt the most disconnected from you. Not as we navigate the parenting journey of discipline and the variants and our I I actually don't mind that. I actually like when we get the chance to kind of have a conflicting point of view about things because you're not right, I'm not right. You're not wrong, I'm not. It's just debatable. Where do we know? No. it's just where do we compromise? How do we find something that doesn't make you comfortable, doesn't make me comfortable, is beneficial to our children, though. Yeah. And that compromise in a marriage sometimes is a little bit easier because you just kind of bite the bullet and you're like, whatever, it's not a big deal. But when you're compromising like that in parenthood, you're both consciously making decisions for another person. Like goes back to the family versus the couple thing. It really it just changes everything. Yeah. another thing, we just talked a lot about the micro of parenthood and things like that. But just to zoom out a little bit on like the macro, you mentioned like my example was my father raising myself and my brother. Your parents had yourself and your sister. Yeah. I always tell people growing up, like I did not have a lot of women around. Like I I had all boy cousins. I had like two girl cousins, of course my aunts, but like I just grew up in a very Male predominant family, I guess you could say, right? So in my mind, I always said, I'll have boys one day. I just never imagined having girls. One day I'll teach my son how to do this, and one day I'll take my son there and I'll do this. And I remember telling this story to somebody else one time after I wound up having all girls and struck out on having a boy and then gave up. and I was like, Yeah, just always imagine boys. And somebody was like, Well, why can't you do all that stuff with your girls? And was like, You know what? You're right. Yeah. And so I think that as a parent, it is a huge responsibility to raise strong, responsible, independent women in this day and age. Yeah. It's a huge responsibility to have. And it's not that having a a son or boys is is any different. In fact, it's equally as important because one day our daughters will meet those boys. Like you know what I mean, or whatever. I just think that raising women is really important. And I think that. I can be hard no sometimes. I can be more blunt than you. I can be the disciplinarian. I am the disciplinarian because I don't know, not to be like too down and out, but like life is hard. Like you not everything is sunshine and rainbows. And I'm not trying to like make my kids feel depressed or anything like that, but we've always taken an approach with our children to raise them as people. We've always spoken to them like they are authentic individuals with their own individu individual personalities and aspirations and interests and everything like that. And I think we're very present with them in that. And I think that from the macro sense, instead of you know everything that we had just been talking about, I think every decision that we make, we have to be super intentional about with young daughters that are going to become strong, responsible, independent women. And we teach those sorts of independences now. We teach that responsibility now. So that way later on, they're not having to adapt to something that doesn't make sense to them in their teenage years. We try to fit them into what they have to do. That ain't gonna work. I already know that. So early on now, I think it's so important foundationally to teach them responsibility, to teach them independence, to teach them respect and loyalty, some of the core values of our family. those things get instilled from day one, as far as I'm concerned. So when it comes to the macro sense of things. I just think we always have to be present and continuously have the conversations that we have to try to enrich and improve the lives of our children in an effort to continuously improve our lives as parents to enrich our marriage. I think all of it ties together. I think it took a while for me to realize that we have our marriage identity, we have our parenting identity. And then they've those things blended and now we have our identity. Like we're the leaders of our family. And I think that's really important. Yeah, I think We're now finding though our identity and in all of it because then owning a business I it it complicated things even more. For sure. Because you say this is my fourth child. It's a new person in the family if you're so a new priority. So I'm focused on my children, I'm focused on my business, I'm focused on being a wife, sometimes in full disclosure. You know, so it's how do I keep all of these things up and running and having all of it together, having our kids back to back to back. I started the business when our youngest was not even one. Yeah. And it was just one thing after another after another that now when things are settling down five years later, and we don't have we're not in survival mode with our children. Sometimes I was definitely in survival mode this past weekend. But we have these more time and we're realizing that hey, we need to make more time for our marriage. We need to make more time for us, and we need to find our identity in everything. For sure. As business owners, now that you're back in the business, as parents. As a couple, you know, all of those things combined, what is our identity? And all of them, but most importantly, as we're trying to prioritize our marriage, it's hard to like if we do set aside time for ourselves. We have to make date night roles. We can't talk about kids. We can't talk about business. And it's so hard to have those boundaries. I like it. I like going on date nights and like the difficulty of not because it happens during those nights. It forces you to talk about something else. And you're like, Uh-oh. This is all we talk about all the time. But it's not anything we ever spoke about because we didn't have a business or children or anything. Correct. What did we talk about? Correct. We're still trying to figure out what to talk about. but I I like that challenge and it happens every single time. It happens in the car, it happens and we'll make a compromise. We'll be like, all right, when we get to the restaurant, yeah, no more talking, like and then I'll be at the table like okay, I'm just gonna say this whole Just one thing and then we're not nothing else after this. Yes. But also things happen. Being a parent is the biggest Or I would say the most mind-boggling thing. It's you want, you want to have time away from your kids and just have time with your spouse. But then when you have that time, for example, when they go to bed, you're like, my gosh, I miss them so much. I love them. let's look at pictures together of our children. And then we go on vacation and we are without children and we're like, we miss them so much. So it's A blend. How do we find this perfect mix of everything and have boundaries, but also take care of our marriage at the same time? It's obviously difficult. And we have no recipe for success. There is no outcome to this to this episode to say this is the secret sauce. Good luck, everybody. We don't have the secret sauce, but we are calling, I think, more awareness to the things that people face because it's not easy. You're you're absolutely right. And I think the if we're talking about a key to success, if we want to give someone from this episode a takeaway to go through all of the things that we just described, to endure all of that in the last ten years, let's say. with the first seven years just being us, yeah, hanging out in Philly, having fun and being crazy young kids, you know. The next ten years after that. marriage, kids, life, business, home, all of that. Patience and grace is the key. And within that, that lends itself to flexibility. You have to continuously reanalyze your priorities, reassess your goals. You have to sometimes every day be intentional about what the priority is for that day. Because here's the thing: the squeaky wheel gets the grease, right? The thing that needs you the most is what's going to draw you to it. But sometimes The wheel's not always squeaking and it still needs a little love. Yeah. And I think that that's hard to find what that blind spot is. You might think that everything's okay and it's really not, or and that might be different tomorrow than it is today. And I think the priorities are constantly in flex. And so you need to be patient. You need to have grace with each other and your children and your business and your marriage. Because tomorrow could be a different day than it is today.