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Review: Babyproofing Your Marriage

Tuesday, 28 February, 2012

I don't want this blog to turn into a “Mommy” blog or a parenting blog (although the content of recent posts suggests otherwise). Once more I reflect on how my blogging has changed—how it used to be an outlet, a way for me to process my life, a platform from which to express opinions, an efficient means of sharing things with others, and so on—and yet as I said in an earlier post (I forget where), Twitter has taken up much of those functions. Nevertheless, whereas Twitter is characterised by brevity, my blogging is not (as you could probably tell from my last post, which clocked in at around 5,000 words). It's not that I feel like every post I write now needs to match that length; it's more that I feel like I need to have something to say before I put anything up here.

At the same time, however, I'm a lot more time-poor—or rather, I prioritise my non-Astrid time so that I'm focusing on writing (of which blogging is a part but not the whole) and resting (so that I'm more energised for the time I do spend with Astrid). This means that any time I spend blogging is backed by a conscious choice to work on this rather than something else. (It's the tyranny of life: it forces you to choose because you are limited. I wonder if in heaven we will truly be limitless and thus able to pursue all the roads we fancy in the duration of our eternal life.)

Today I choose not to work on the Writing Projét Dujour, but instead review a couple of books that I've found helpful—for parenting, yes, but also for marriage, art, creativity and writing. I'm reviewing them fast (I'm just trying to capture my initial thoughts about them instead of crafting a “proper” review the way I would for some sort of publication), so I'm probably going to miss a lot. But hopefully you will get the gist of why I think they're helpful. Anyways, here goes.

The first is Babyproofing Your Marriage by Stacie Cockrell, Cathy O'Neill and Julia Stone. I've talked about this book before, but I think I mentioned it when I was only part-way through it. I found it through Babyology, who also did a brief review of it, and their post was enough to get me looking for it on the web and reading excerpts before deciding the subject matter was important enough for me to purchase myself a copy.

Why did I think the subject matter was important? It's the only book I've come across that's about the impact of babies on marriages. (If you've heard of any others, please let me know in the comments!) The transition to the third “stage” of life (married to married with kids) is hard (and hard to describe beyond painfully simple adjectives like “hard”). I think it's significant that Judith Wallerstein names it as the third task procreating marriages must master in order to be successful (see The Good Marriage):

To embrace the daunting roles of parents and to absorb the impact of Her Majesty the Baby's dramatic entrance. A the same time the couple must work to protect their own privacy.

All parents go through this adjustment, whether they're open to talking about it or not. It's just that most of them are not. I suspect that people's closemouthedness on the subject is for several reasons:

The adjustment inevitably involves conflict between you and your spouse because becoming parents opens up new areas of conflict hithertho unexplored.
The conflict makes newbie parents feel like crap because they think they ought to be doing well at this whole parenting thing. After all, they've read all the books and thought about the theories, so why are things going wrong between them?
The world makes you think that having a child completes a marriage—that things will only better the more your family grows. Then when things don't, you start wondering if there's something wrong with your family (or if there's something wrong with you).
Any discussion regarding the specifics of this period of change (from husband and wife to father and mother) inevitably involves the specifics of your spouse—how she is as a mother, what he does as a father, and so on, and airing that sort of subject matter outside the marriage always feels like a form of betrayal.

The thing is (I think, anyway) this sort of closemouthedness isn't doing our society any favours. It gives people unrealistic expectations about parenthood—so that when people become parents, they feel disillusioned and disappointed about what they've gotten themselves into. (This TED talk by Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman comes to mind: they end with a plea for parents to be more open with each other and the world for this very reason.) It also causes struggling parents to put up a front and pretend everything's okay instead of being honest because they are afraid of the negative consequences of honesty (e.g. judgement, condemnation, other negative things people might think about them upon learning about this, that or the other).

Anyway, what I love about Babyproofing Your Marriage is that it tells it like it is in all its ugly and painful glory. The book starts by describing the whole mess—what a marriage often looks like after the first baby's arrival in comparison to what it was like before, and what's happened to both husband and wife. Then the bulk of the book's chapters focus on these major areas of conflict—

Scorekeeping (who does what and how much)
Sex (I love the subheading of this chapter: “Coitus non-existus”)
Grandparents (both sets)
What happens when you have more kids
Priorities

—before summing up and helping you feel like your marriage and your parenting isn't as bad as you think it is.

This is what I love about it:

It made me feel like we weren't the only parents in the world going through this because (as I said) all parents seem to go through it to varying degrees.
It made me feel like we weren't the worst parents in the world.
It captured how things look from both the wife's and husband's perspectives really well. (Obviously for me the husband's perspective was fascinating.)
Some of the solutions were really helpful (particularly in the chapter on scorekeeping). I didn't agree with all of the solutions, but I thought the thinking behind their approach was good.
I loved the little quotes they included from other husbands and wives. Some of them were really witty. Some totally nailed it. But some were just interesting because they gave you a tiny glimpse into their marriages and how they operate (which is something I also appreciated about The Good Marriage).
It's really funny to read in places. (However, Christian readers should note that it's coming from a non-Christian worldview and therefore there will be things you won't agree with.)
It's really quick to read: the writing style is engaging and chatty (and a bit American and self-help-y), but because it's well written and oh so relevant, it makes you want to keep reading.
It contains bits I'm still thinking about—for example,

Marriage is one of the few things we can ignore without immediate and dire consequences. If we ignore our job, we’ll get fired. If we ignore our kids, they’ll starve. But if we ignore our relationship, our spouse can live off the scraps for a pretty long time. (p. 242)
I loved the chapter on having more kids because it helped you see the terrain ahead—what life is like and how other parents handle it (that's the “giving in” and “surrendering to the chaos” part). I love the table they've got in there that lists the number of children you have across the top, and then down the side it has things like “Number of children's birthday presents you will have to purchase in any one year”, “Number of children the grandparents will be willing to look after” (the answer always being “one at a time”).
I loved the honesty—not just from the three authors but also from others they interviewed. It was refreshing, helpful and often very funny. It made me want to be the same.
It provides much-needed perspective—that is, that the early years children's lives are demanding, yes, but then the day comes when they all the leave the nest and the child-free years stretch ahead of you (which is one of Wallerstein's other tasks to be mastered: learning to be a couple again during the retirement years when your children have grown up and gone). The season of parenting feels long, but in comparison to the rest of your life, it's brief. So enjoy it.

I want to finish off this bitsy review by mentioning one more thing: don't read this book before you have a baby. It won't really be helpful to you then because it will be like reading marriage books before you get married and thinking, “My husband and I won't be like that. We won't fight. We'll be good communicators. We're good at resolving conflict,” and then you get married and experience married life with all its pimples and go, “Oh.” One person I know who read the book before she had kids found it really negative and unhelpful. I personally think it becomes more useful at around the six month mark—when you've had a bit of time to see how having a baby and becoming a parent has affected your life and your relationship with your spouse. (By then, however, you may have no time to read …)

Okay, time to end this. I leave you with two bits of further reading: