Marriage Postpartum

Working Through the Rough Spots

By Tamar Weiss

"My relationship with my husband has gone through such upheaval since the birth of our son," says Liora Green of San Diego. "The baby is now 5 months old, and things are just beginning to straighten out."

Along with all the changes men and women undergo when they become parents come the challenges that a marriage will experience after the birth of a baby. What was once a twosome becomes a threesome, and the third party – though a wonderful and beautiful miracle of life – can be extremely demanding: disrupting previous schedules, cutting into couple time and depriving hard-working parents of much-needed sleep.

These challenges of parenting affect a marriage. And common as it is for a marital relationship to suffer in the first months after a baby is born, it can be truly difficult to face. To complicate matters further, each parent may feel that he or she is working harder and sacrificing more than the other for the needs of the family, breeding resentment and contempt.

"So often when my husband would go off to work, I would get resentful," says Green. "He would go and converse with colleagues, he could use the toilet in peace, could eat lunch when he wanted to, and I was left home trying to placate a crying baby, breastfeeding like crazy and catering entirely to another very demanding person." Staying home with the baby was Green's choice, she explains, and though her baby and her husband are the two most important people in her life, sometimes she "couldn't help feeling like I was doing all the work while at the brink of exhaustion."

What also made things hard for Green was that her duties never ended. "When my husband came home he would gladly take the baby – he missed him so much – but then I had to make dinner, clean up. I felt like it was never ending."

Want to see more?

• Trading the Fast Track for the Mommy Track: Is it right for you?
• Learning to Let Go: Coping With the Stress of New Parenthood
• And What Do You Do? When Women Choose to Stay Home
• Babies Today MomsTalk Discussion Board