After months of shopping, preparing and just plain waiting, your baby has finally arrived. It’s amazing and anxiety producing all at once. Adrenaline carries you and you partner for a little while. Maybe a grandparent or two comes to help for a bit.
As the days and weeks pass, you may be noticing that, while you’re quite possibly seeing each more than ever, you may not actually be spending much time together. Like the baby gear that seems to multiply overnight, baby-related tasks seem to touch everything. There’s no You, as an individual. There’s no Us, as a couple.
Perhaps even more frustrating is the quality of time that you have during those few moments together. Let’s just say, well, quite possibly these are not your best moments. You may barely recognize the “self’ that you have become. You may have prided yourself on navigating difficult family and social situations well in the past. However, you may now be finding that you are the person in the picture who is “out of control.” The fact that you are a parent now may leave you especially shaken and confused by these emotional responses.
Let’s recognize that “out of control” for one person may look quite different for another. We may need to define terms to see if this is truly a serious situation. If you’re concerned that things are really at this sort of level, please reach for help. Call your doctor – primary care, gynecologist, psychiatrist, therapist – it honestly does not matter. If you don’t get a satisfactory answer, go to your local emergency room. (Yes, even during COVID). For both your health and the baby’s well-being, if things are truly bad, please take the time to get the help you need.
Many new parents fall within another gray area that includes reactions and behaviors that we never thought ourselves capable of – but which stop short of truly serious mental health issues. Still, the zero to sixty pace of the escalation in the “discussion” can be disturbing. While it may seem imperative to keep going back and forth until the presenting problem is solved, progress is unlikely to occur until both you and your partner are in a calmer frame of mind.
Taking a break can really help. The break should have a defined end, so that you and your partner do not go off into your corners for an indeterminate amount of time. It’s so easy for this to happen in our busy lives. Add the desire that many of us feel to avoid difficult conversations and conflict, and there’s even more incentive not to come back to the table to hash things out quickly. But, as hard as it is, when you and your partner break, you should set a time no more than a day away to continue the conversation.
So what to do on this break? Checking in on your breathing is critical. Slow things down. Take in lots of air in nice long breaths. Tune into your thoughts. Quite possibly they tend towards a victim stance? This is only natural when your fight or flight responses have been activated. However, it is much more productive to consider your contribution to the situation, not your partner’s. Tuning into your own unmet needs might also help you down a pathway towards a more productive follow-up conversation. Physically soothing yourself can really help. Consider, in particular, things that might activate your five senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting. For sure, eat something (healthy) if you’re hungry! After a productive break like this, you and your partner stand a much better chance of having a conversation that attests to your love and commitment to each other and your relationship.