#2 - Adding in the Child to Your Relationship

When we were starting out in our relationship, all I knew was our life together as a couple. We lived 3000 miles away from SD and BM. FDH would call his daughter every day and I was basically an observer of that relationship. He visited her every 2 months and I went with him a couple times. I kept my distance a little bit from SD & he even accused me of being stand-offish with her. Truth was, our relationship was so different when we were with SD that I didn’t really know what to do. His focus was about 90% on her & I was an observer. So, observe I did… I really watched the two of them together and started to appreciate how strong that bond was. This was true unconditional love…. If she was happy, he was happy and vice versa. I learned a lot of valuable lessons just from watching them.

Lesson: Let the love come first. It’s ALWAYS a good thing to let more love into the universe. If you try, you can feel it coming from them and they start to become a part of you and you start to become a part of them…. Just by doing nothing but letting them be together and accepting a very beautiful thing just exactly as it is.

We finally made the move to be closer to SD. FDH still works away and the only time he’s home, we also have SD with us. I did feel left out and wanted him to spend more time with me. I talked to my sister, who is a family therapist, about it; honestly, I expected her to back me up and do the whole “he needs to put your relationship first” bit. To my surprise, she gave me a reality check… turns out that nuclear families struggle with the transition from “couple” to “family” too.

Her real-life lesson: Raising a young child really is almost all-consuming, it takes so much energy that couples rarely have time just for each other. Parents dream together about a time it will be different, but at the same time they get a lot of joy from the family-stuff. She told me to decide if that’s a life I could deal with or to get out & that expecting my FDH to find enough time to be everything to everyone (daughter, me, work) was ridiculous. So now, my approach is when SD is awake we are in family mode; but she has to have a bedtime and after that, we have couple time. Most of the time, we’re exhausted and that amounts to housework, an hour of TV and a glass of wine, then bed... sounds pretty normal. When he moves here permanently, we’ll have week on/week off and will have time alone together, which is a luxury nuclear families don’t have. And I do enjoy the family time…. Mostly.