You’re not at breaking point, but you’re far from enjoying marital bliss. And the pressures of parenthood, life admin and constant juggling mean your partner feels more like a coworker. Stuart Heritage and Robyn Wilder, married for 10 years, reveal how they survive the grey area of the daily grind...
Stuart says
If you ever want to get a snapshot of your marriage, I urge you to look at the texts you send each other. Ours do not make for optimistic reading. Just yesterday, Robyn’s texts to me included, ‘Are you doing pick-up or am I?’ ‘Can I borrow £40?’ and ‘Do we have chips?’ To which my heart felt replie swere, ‘I am,’ ‘Sure,’ and ‘Yes’. That’s it.
Clearly, this is not how we envisioned our lives. We spent the first years of our relation- ship travelling and laying in at the weekends and sharing impenetrable inside jokes. But gradually we’ve become little more than colleagues in parenting. Which isn’t to say that we don’t do nice things for each other any more. It’s just that nice things largely involve letting the other one rest, which means we’re rarely actually in the same room.
So that’s not great. But also, that’s just how this part of life goes. All my friends with kids, all the parents at the school gates, they’re just as trapped. They’re all grinding through the thankless, endless churn of putting everyone else first. It’s draining and there are times where you not only lose sight of who your partner is, but who you are too. But it’s part of the job.
And what’s the alternative? We’re all trying to raise our kids to be better than us, because they’re going to replace us. That takes work. And if that means spending a decade or so exclusively texting your partner about the school run at the expense of spontaneous bunk-ups, it’s worth the sacrifice.
Also, and this is a big thing, it’s important to remember that this stage is temporary. A few weeks ago I ran into an old school friend, who I’d lost touch with when he had his first baby, at 17. Now his kids are adults and he spent our entire chat telling me about all the amazing holidays he gets to go on with his wife now that his kids have grown up.
So, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe not tomorrow. But there will come a point where the ceaseless exchange of logis- tics will end and I’ll get to explore the world with my wife. I can’t wait to meet her again.
Robyn says
This month, Stuart and I celebrated 10 years of marriage. And by ‘celebrated’ I mean ‘briefly floated the idea of a second honeymoon before our children distracted us by freestyling a competitive rap battle that a) was about diarrhoea and b) ended in tears’.
But this sort of thing has been par for the course for our marriage from the very beginning. I was five months pregnant when we married, about to pop when we left London for the suburbs and, by the time our first son arrived, we were still living half out of boxes. But as we began the bleary-eyed ascent up the steep learning curve that is parenting a newborn, we – like most new parents – developed a workable rhythm. One of us held the baby while the other worked, slept or ate a still-warm meal, then we’d swap.
And this rhythm is something we’ve been able to adapt and fall back on when external support hasn’t been available during chal- lenging times. Which have included, in no particular order, minor assault, redundancy (me), two parental terminal illnesses, one family house fire, two parental deaths, two life-threatening births, chronic illness, anxiety disorders, one truly awful family holiday in rural France, and even a period of disability (me) that halved our household income, scuppered our plans to move and lumbered Stuart with most of the parenting.
I mean, it’s the stuff stress aneurysms are made of, or would be if Stuart and I didn’t have each other’s back. One useful trick we deploy is something I call an ‘unsafe’ word – like a BDSM ‘safe word’, but you honk it out to alert your partner to the end of your teth- er. Like a safe word, an unsafe word must never be weaponised, faked or ignored. And it needs to stand out, so if you’re thinking of co-opting one, may I suggest ‘gazpacho’?
Fortunately for us, my health is improving and the weight of our marriage is starting to swing back so we can share it more evenly. The challenge now is how to step back down out of the emergency mode we’ve been in. When it comes to raising our kids, I want to set the example of enjoying life, not just hunkering down through hard times.
Now our children are a little older and the pressure is a little less, perhaps we can start to enjoy the good life, however tentatively. Maybe it’s time to start talking about that second honeymoon again.