August 23, 2000 - Wednesday
I had an interesting phone conversation today with a good friend and business acquaintance who I see a just a couple of times a year at industry events. She's been a mother for five years, with a lovely blonde daughter who by all independent accounts is charming, happy, and very well behaved. I've always been impressed by her apparent motherhood and child-rearing instincts and have enjoyed hearing her opinions, methods, and strategies on the teaching of young persons. A month after Harry was born she had a second girl and our conversations are now often much more about babies than business.

And, that was the nature of this call. We inquired with common congeniality about the status of each other's offspring, but the intrigue soon increased when she asked how our marriage was doing. While that obviously begged the question about her own marriage, assuming a serious problem would be overanalyzing the directness and frankness I have come to enjoy in our discussions. Her marriage is by no means on the rocks, nor is ours, but we went on to explore the typical strains that affect marriages when there's a new and demanding family member around.

This being her second experience caring for a baby, she compared the two occasions, noting how much more work it seemed this time. She even made the half-serious and surprising, yet again frank, comment - with no disrespect or malice toward her new baby - that if she had understood the difficulty of a second beforehand, she might not have chosen to have another child - this from a woman who claims to want five. But, it was the stress on a marriage that was our main topic. It's certainly common enough to hear of marital stresses after babies enter a scene, but it's easy to dismiss such anecdotes thinking that's other people and other marriages and that nothing serious will happen "to us." And, it turns out that's usually true. The problem, it seems, is not the serious, but rather the many minor episodes that ultimately take a toil on the two-person relationship. Where once a house or a shared life ran smoothly with familiar habits keeping things comfortable, the demands of a baby often mean meals are at different times, or more items are misplaced around the house, or the trash or food scraps aren't disposed of as quickly as would be best. Top off these otherwise petty annoyances with and radical change in sleep habits and the loss of much of the exclusive attention two people once paid each other, and you have the recipe for bickering and frustration. And, while I think Harry's mother and I are doing very well, it would not be honest to say I wasn't acquainted with these issues.

One wonderful characteristic of my friend, though, is that she's not all moan and groan. Instead, we talked about the reality of such problems and what to do to keep everybody as happy as possible given the dramatic life changes. We talked about the oft-heard advice for parents to go on dates, but she made it sound much less cliché, with personal experiences like dropping her baby off in her older daughter's room for a "date" with her husband in the living room, or how when they had their first they would drop her off at some friends for an hour just to go get an ice cream cone together.

It's important, she said, not to wait too long between dates, otherwise the expectations of a long-awaited night out can ultimately ruin an evening. While Harry's mother and I did not find that the case for our evening together, it does remind me that it's been again two months since that night at a B&B and perhaps we should be more diligent about time together. Of course, it's not easy to take time away from Harry and for my friend it's even harder with two girls. She's working again, like Harry's mother, though admittedly my friend now works exclusively from home. Yet, she says it's still hard to fit everything that needs doing into a day. Fortunately, her marriage is not in any trouble, yet perhaps that's not fortune after all. She's simply perceptive enough to notice the realities of life in a dynamic family and clever enough to enjoy the process of keeping it that way.


Comments, opinions?