For better and for worse and through raising the kids
Kids have their own unique way of relaunching a couple back into the same navigational power struggles that usually come at the beginning of a relationship. Janice D'Arcy and I discussed the way that kids plunge us back into old conflicts that we may have thought were over.
Here's an excerpt:
“There’s a romantic phase of parenting (mixed in with the exhausted/delirious/mommy-daddy brain phase) when we are getting our sea legs and marveling at the transition from couplehood into parenthood. But soon the power struggles sneak up, e.g. when to move a baby to her crib; how long to breastfeed; or how we handle child care arrangements.
“Increasingly, we seem to be a kid-focused culture, so it’s easy for relationship growth to be put on the backburner for a time, even years, until there’s very little left between two people to salvage.