Finding love, getting married, buying a house, and having 2.2 kids where mom wears an apron and dad clenches a briefcase is an outdated advertisement for people still on AOL.
I am forty seven years old. I am not married. My girlfriend is thirty six. Our daughter is five months old. She was born into a pandemic. She hasn’t seen many faces other than ours. We are both therapists. We work from home.
And we’re one and done. 1.0. No 2.2. Not interested in The Brady Bunch life. Now that we’re out of the first few months of survival mode where you lose complete sense of who you are and our life plane has stabilized, we are finding balance and ourselves again. We are both equally active in the childrearing and upkeep. I do dishes and change diapers while she gets her yoga class in. She breastfeeds and takes Logan on walks while I go to the gym and get my motorcycle rides in. We travel. Go out to eat. Play with sex toys. We are back. (Quick note: “Back” is not easy. It takes lots of work, that becomes a lifestyle. Not just a decision.) And now that we have found ourselves again, nothing has really changed before Logan came into our life save less sleep and planning when you need to shit.
Your priorities may have shifted. Your life lenses may have changed. You will be pickier on how you spend your time. But who you are, where you’re going, and how you take care of yourself should not change because you have a child now. I am writing this blog post because many don’t make it back. Instead, they enter the long dark hallway straight into the American nightmare.
Marriage ->kids -> losing yourself -> Drift in the relationship -> Staying in it just for the kids -> Kids grow and leave -> You don’t know yourself. Or the person who is now sleeping in the other room. You’ve spent half your life unhappy and disconnected from self because you put your children above you — tracing something sold to you by commercials and a wrinkled blueprint passed down from your parents.
Once you have children, it’s no longer about you. You will not be able to do all the things you did before. Your life is now over. It’s all about the kids and family now. No more colored pencils to color wildly outside the…