Dana Bedford Hilmer - Blindsided by a Diaper: Over 30 Men and Women Reveal How Parenthood Changes a Relationship

For
Dave, of course
and
Zach, Mikey, and Danny
I love you all the way up to Pluto and back

foreword

Ann Pleshette Murphy

The voices in this book are hoarse with exhaustion, loud with laughter, shrill with anger, and wild with love. They echo down familiar corridorssome dark, some warm, but all illuminated by high-wattage intelligence and unflinching candor. Its not easy to get couples to open up about their life together as parents. Oh, sure, theyll entertain you with a funny story about some Lucy and Desi moment during those first exhausting days when they knew absolutely nothing about babies, but its the rare mom and even rarer dad who willingly shares the heartbreak along with the hilarity; who invites a total stranger into their bedroom or shines a big, bright light in their own eyes and says, Look, this is what its really like. This is how our relationship has changed. Whether these stories soothe or shockand there are plenty of both in this bookthe messages that emerge are poignant, funny, inspiring, and wise.

The thirty-two men and women who share their relationships with us in this book do so from all stages of their parental development, so their perspectives are diverse, their experiences varied. Listen carefully and you begin to pick out melodies that echo from one essay to the next. Or they may be songs that youve sung yourself, perhaps only in privateor that, as a woman, you thought were exclusively mothers tunes. I felt that way reading Michael Finkels essay Welcome to the Babyhouse, about putting his life on hold for the sake of his daughter and experiencing that bittersweet cocktail of resentment and reward. Ive always maintained that guilt is endemic to motherhood, that dads rarely wrestle with feeling derailed by fatherhood, because they tend to pick up where they left off before their baby arrived. But all of the fathers in this book write me wrong. They may not feel exactly as their wives do, they may seem a bit more breezy or browbeaten or bewildered, but their lives and their relationships have clearly been turned upside down by the children they adore.

As the title of this collection implies, parenthood knocks you sideways, catapults you into a world that may feel wildly out of control or wonderfully chaotic but rarely resembles the path you thought you were on. Together. For life. Suddenly the person you love most in the world seems to be orbiting in a different galaxy, or at least hes not the dad you thought he would be; shes not the patient, loving partner you pictured cradling your baby. In fact, you may look over and wonder, Who the hell are you? And the answer may be as simple and wise as Beth Levines discovery that Bill and I were not the same person after all. Whether parenthood provides a sense of shared purpose or puts you at decidedly cross-purposes, it forces even the most loving couple to reevaluate their roles and to negotiate an altogether new definition of we. As several contributors discovered, the very things you adored in your mate, his spontaneity, her self-confidence, may make you want to run screaming from the room, let alone the relationship, once there are children in the house.

But dont imagine for a minute that theres no way to be prepared for the changes in your relationship postpartum. As these insightful, articulate writers reveal, the clues are everywhere. If you or the person you love manages anxiety by compulsively organizing life into lists or, when overwhelmed, tends to explode, shut down, or get drunk, then chances are those behaviors will surface big-time once youre parents. If your relationship was characterized by a kind of joined-at-the-hip, match-made-in-heaven bond, then accepting that your soul mate cant actually read your mind after all can come as quite a shock. But as each and every one of the contributors in this book will attest, if you take the time to pay attention to those clues, to say clearly and unapologetically what you do want (him: more sex) and what you dont want (her: more sex), to nurture your relationship, then youre going to open yourself up to the greatest gift parenthood provides: the opportunity to rediscover and love each other in ways you never imagined. For Sandi Kahn Shelton, that meant learning to date her husband again; for Rick Marin, it meant learning to be the good husband for William Squier it meant embracing his wifes religion; and for Susan Cheever, it meant realizing too late that the best thing she could do for her son was to stay married to his father.

If you are reading this as a new parent, come back to the book in a few years and the stories will read very differently; the words will be the same, of course, but your take on the world will be entirely new. How can it not be? Every single day of parenthood forces us to juggle the practical along with the ineffable, to strive for connectedness along with autonomy, to quarrel and question and, in the end, to let go. Along the way we hone muscles, develop skills, make mistakes, and learn, as these contributors confirm, that we are not alone.

Children change the prescription on the glasses weve worn comfortably for years. And as we struggle to accommodate this new and slightly dizzy vision of ourselves and of our lovers, were bound to bump into one another sometimes, with painful results. But as Lisa Unger aptly puts it, Parenthood is a kaleidoscope; the picture shifts with each turn of your wrist, with each change of light. What you see depends on how long you linger on any given moment. Like that kaleidoscope, this book allows you to glimpse parenthood and your relationship from dozens of shifting perspectives, to eavesdrop on conversations that feel at once highly individual and totally universal.

Try on your new glasses, and see for yourself.

introduction

Dana Bedford Hilmer

My husband and I have been together for more than half our lives. We met in college and for the last twenty-one years weve had lots of time togetherto frolic, talk, romance, and listen, time to just be a couple and share an incredibly carefree, spontaneous life in the postcollege playground of New York City. It seems as though weve always been Dave-and-Dana, Dana-and-Dave.

Then we had a baby. And after that another, andwell, then another. In six years, we have created a brood of three beautiful little boys and every day we are astounded and grateful. But now the couple who enjoyed the nightly restaurant bop is lucky to finish a conversation or get out on the town alone half a dozen times a year. I realize how much life has changed, we have changed. And much of this change has caught us quite by surprise.