When Your Marriage is Young - And So Are Your Children

I posted on Instagram and Facebook last weekend that my sweet friend Angel Penn is hosting a 28-day marriage series on her blog this month. She graciously invited me to write for her series, and I hope that if you find yourself in a challenging season in your own marriage right now, you can be encouraged as I share my story and all that I have learned this past year. The season may be hard, but God is still good!

My husband and I married on March 15, 2014, fully willing to welcome a baby into our family whenever the Lord saw fit to bless us with one (but likewise fully convinced that it would be a little while before that did happen!). You can imagine our surprise then when, on May 15 – our 2 month wedding anniversary – we found out we were expecting! Our daughter, Anna, was born on January 11, 2015, two whole months before we even celebrated our first wedding anniversary. The transition to parenthood was a very smooth one overall, for Anna was a very laid-back baby who hardly ever cried and who slept like a champ.

The real challenge to our marriage began 22 months after Anna was born, when her little brother, James, made his arrival on November 29, 2016. James was as different from Anna in nearly every possible way – while Anna was never gassy and I could eat anything I wanted while nursing her, James was extremely gassy (and fussy!) until I discovered his egg and dairy intolerances and cut those out of my diet completely. While Anna loved to sleep and was sleeping all the way through the night at 8 weeks, newborn James slept only in 45 minute increments unless he was being held, and only then would he sometimes go for stretches of a couple hours. This resulted in my husband and I hardly ever sleeping in the same bed together during those early weeks and then, even when we did, we ended up co-sleeping with James for the first few months just so that we could get some sleep.

The gas, the cries, the food issues, the severe sleep-deprivation, the lack of time alone with my husband (and therefore lack of intimacy!), the touch of postpartum depression I had for a time, and more – it all resulted in my feeling very separated and distanced from my husband. It didn’t help that for the first couple months postpartum I hadn’t yet realized why James was so gassy, so Owen and I went without our monthly date nights because I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving such a fussy baby with anyone else to have to care for. I had never felt so alone, so desperate to be with my husband, and yet so distanced from him. That distance led to my becoming easily frustrated with him for little to no reason, snapping at him, and finding it incredibly hard to find very nice things to even say to him. To be quite honest, I had largely forgotten the man I married, because through the postpartum haze, I had failed to truly focus on him and remember who he was as a person.

To read the rest of our story along with encouragement I would share with any other mom in the season of littles, head on over to Angel’s blog!