Having a baby and maintaining a relationship is hard work.
As a new mother with a young baby at breastfeeding age, my body felt taken over by the task of breastfeeding.
I remember that if I wasn’t breastfeeding, then I was thinking about when the next breastfeed was going to happen, I was having a spontaneous let down (leak!) when I would think about the baby or I was thinking about how I can give my nipples a break and repair! (Or i desperately needed sleep to recover!)
It was a pretty full-time preoccupation.
Life got measured in increments of time between feeds.
I remember sitting up early one morning after a 3am feed, still rocking on the rocking chair like a dissociated, exhausted robot even though I had already returned my son to his cot (!) and I was thinking “what has my life become? I am now just a milking cow and I will never sleep again.”
This moment, I was NOT thinking about my husband and the needs of our relationship.
I was haggard with exhaustion.
For me, I was a dedicated breast feeder. It took up a lot of time and I was exhausted, but I loved it.
What regularly breast feeding meant for me was that my milk filled breasts looked like the pair of breasts I could only have dreamt of prior to becoming a mum!
They were perky and full and I had a massive cleavage. I was impressed by them. If I wasn’t so exhausted, maybe I would even have been aroused by them too.
The breastfeeding did an amazing job for my physique but it didn’t really do anything for my relationship.
The truth is, my husband certainly admired them and would have loved to play with them but the sad truth was, they were kinda off limits to him. In those earliest days, having one more person touching my body after the baby, was one too many.
As sad as it is to admit it, despite my amazing rack, being intimate was low on the list in those early days with a new baby.
Being a new mum takes up emotional and physical bandwidth.
Adjusting to keeping this new baby alive takes up mental load.
As a breastfeeding new parent, I found it hard to switch my mumma brain off and my partner brain on.
In those early stages I found new parenthood a massive juggling act.
Getting to know the needs of the baby was one thing. Getting used to how to tend to those needs was something else again.
Getting to know what my partner and I needed from each other in this new life was a second thing. Working out how to make it all happen was something else again!
Bloody remembering my own name through the haze of tiredness was a third thing. Trying to recover a sense of myself was something else again too.
New parenthood is a journey. It’s a new map that you are navigating. It takes time to get used to this terrain.
Don’t be put off by the twists and turns, the changes to your body and to your relationship.
The key is to keep talking to each other and working it out as you go.
The only thing that is permanent in this new parenthood experience, is that it is changing all the time.
As your baby grows up and evolves, so too will your relationship.
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