Your Love Life, Your Child's Happiness

As a working parent, I often feel guilty that I don’t have loads of down-time with Fiona and Molly. We have an early dinner together shortly after we all arrive home, and then whip through the bath-book-bedtime routine. Both kids are usually sawing logs by 8:00. That means I’m often clocking less than three hours with my kids in the evening. Doesn’t seem like a lot.

By the time the kids are asleep, I’m exhausted. I wake up at 5:00 am or sometimes earlier, and so I barely have time to walk the dog and open the mail before I’m also ready to hit the hay. (Don’t tell the sleep training people this, but I often fall asleep cuddling with my love chunks as they drift off into dreamland. When that happens, the rest of my night is pretty shot, as I am loath to really rouse myself for, say, a nice evening jog.)

I am married to the children’s father, in case you were wondering. Did you notice that “have meaningful conversation, then crazy sex” with my husband didn’t make it to the end-of-the-day task list? Unfortunately, there is little time to even talk to my hubby other than what we can get in at dinnertime. Once I called him from my cell phone – he was at home and so was I –while I was walking the dog. No one told me before my princess-perfect wedding that marriage would be so logistically difficult. And certainly no one told me that dizzyingly fun weekends with the love-of-my-life would dissolve so quickly into a constant stream of negotiations. Are you taking the kids to school tomorrow or am I? Will you walk the dog tonight while I fold laundry? Are you going to clean the kitchen or, humph, shall I?

Maybe it is different for more traditional couples, who just do their “pink jobs” and “blue jobs,” as my grandmother says, without daily negotiation. Or maybe it is different for couples where both partners do 50% of the childcare and housework—my friend with the best sex life of anyone I know always says that “foreplay starts at 4:00 – with him starting dinner.” (Or maybe it is just different for Ayelet Waldman, who has four kids, a husband who does half the childcare and housework, a star-studded career, and hot-deeply-in-love-sex with her husband all the time.)

But if you are like Mike and me and the 67% of couples who have a big drop in relationship happiness and a “big increase in hostility,” after kids arrive, you probably only have about 20 minutes to talk to your co-parent at dinnertime, and it is usually spent briefing each other on things like ear infections, school concerts, and carpool schedules—while cleaning up spilled milk and refereeing arguments (or as is the case in my house, nixing potty talk).

Unless we get in a fight. Then, somehow, we seem to find the time to share our innermost feelings. While the kids delay getting ready for bed, we argue in barely controlled voices over the kitchen sink. Which, finally, brings me to my point: parental conflict isn’t good for children’s happiness. And not having any time to connect in a routine way is a recipe for disaster – it makes a logistically difficult marriage an emotionally thorny one as well.