What Marriage Looks Like With Children

by Rachel Toalson | Messy Mondays

Valentine’s Day for a married couple with young kids is just like an ordinary day.

Maybe you don’t think Valentine’s Day is that important anyway, so this doesn’t really bother you all that much. But me, well, I’ll take any holiday I can get to call a sitter and spend a night out with Husband so we don’t have to wrestle kids to bed. And, also, so we can enjoy a nice conversation without being interrupted every other second. But mostly so we don’t have to wrestle kids to bed.

But it seems like every Valentine’s Day we have a hard time trying to find a sitter. I know it’s not because we have six kids and it’s definitely not because we wait until Feb. 14 at 3 p.m. to make the call because I never know what day it is (Hey. Parents can hardly keep track of their kids, let alone the day.).

Plus, by the time you pay a sitter for watching your kids, there’s no money left, so you’ll just be walking the neighborhood or reclining the van seats and taking a night nap.

On second thought, that doesn’t sound all that bad.

What marriage looks like with children is not anything like what I expected it would look like. I don’t really know what I expected, exactly. But it wasn’t this Punk’d version of life we find ourselves in today.

Husband and I are happily married, at least most of the time—because happy is a transient state. We always work hard on our marriage, and that’s really what counts.

Problem is, our kids always work hard on our marriage, too.

In case you don’t know (or maybe you’re wondering if you’re the only one), here’s what marriage looks like with children.

Date nights in bed.

Everyone’s too exhausted to go anywhere anymore, so you order in, turn on Netflix’s “The Making of a Murderer” and watch while you eat. It’s like a theater that serves restaurant food, except you can lie down if you want and, also, kids will burst into your room wondering what you’re watching and begging to try a fry and asking why do you get to eat that food when all they had was a sandwich and raw carrots for dinner, and, sometimes, telling you to please turn it down because it’s too loud (what are they, the parents of teenagers?). Or sometimes, instead of watching something, you read together, because it’s enough being in the same room, without saying a single word, enjoying the absolute quiet that comes in the last ten minutes before you fall asleep. Sometimes you just sleep, because when all the kids are finally, finally, finally asleep, who wants to stay up till midnight knowing they’ll be up at the butt crack of dawn to tell you they’re starving and they’re going to die if they don’t have anything to eat in the next split second?

In all honesty, I enjoy the date nights in our room. I’m pretty much the biggest homebody you could ever know (biggest, as in I’d stay home for years at a time if Husband didn’t drag me out, not biggest as in large. Although my kids might disagree.). Husband would go out every night of the week if he could take me with him, but I’m just not that much of a see-the-town kind of girl. I’ve seen it once already. He knew what he was getting into the night he proposed and I refused to go onstage at our local theatre after a beautiful production of “The Nutcracker” ballet and he had to drag me, seething, up the stairs just so he could get down on one knee. Didn’t back out then. Can’t back out now.

Conversation in spurts.

It’s very rare that when my husband and I sit down to have a conversation we actually get to finish it. Even if the kids are all locked outside, someone will come pounding on the door to say that they need to poop or they need us to kiss a bleeding scratch or you should have heard that fart—it vibrated the whole trampoline! So, when you’re married with children, you get really, really good at picking up conversations where they left off. When you’re a parent, one conversation with your spouse can last whole weeks, because sometimes you forget completely what you’re saying when one of the kids knocks your knees out from under you with a “What does it mean to sleep together?”

This is where date nights at home come in handy. When kids are tucked away in bed and dreaming their kid dreams, it’s the perfect time to talk to each other, because no one will come knock on your door. Problem, is, you have to stay awake until all the kids are asleep, and we rarely make it that late.

A fight could last forever.

Remember what I said about those conversations? Yeah, that makes fighting difficult, to say the least. We don’t have any concerns about disagreeing in front of our kids, because we think it’s good for them to have a healthy relationship with conflict (depending on the conflict, of course), and it’s beneficial for them to witness a healthy model of conflict resolution. We have rules about arguing (no name calling, no walking away, no swearing). But if kids aren’t paying the least bit of attention and they walk smack dab into the middle of a fight, asking for some milk because they’re “so thirsty their mouth is dying,” you’ll lose your train of thought before you can even tell them they’re interrupting something important. Which, in some cases, is a good thing, because most of the things we fight about are stupid anyway. Whose responsibility was it to turn on the dish washer? The kids were tardy again today because we slept an extra five minutes? Yes I did tell you this yesterday? Stupid.

Thanks, kids, for interrupting and jolting me back to reality.

Sex is…well.

Maybe you’re uncomfortable with the S word. So let’s just change it, for propriety’s sake. Let’s call it Playing Chess.

You have to know what kids will do to a Chess Game. It’s pretty much what they do to everything they can get their hands on: deconstruct it, little by little. Right in the middle of an epic Chess Game, they will knock on the door to ask what day tomorrow is because they need to know if it’s library day or not, since that changes everything for them tonight. Sometimes you’ll forget to lock the bedroom door, which is usually where you Play Chess, because everyone’s asleep anyway, and some straggler will come bursting in, and you better hope you have some covers to throw over that Chess Game, because they’re going to see some pieces they shouldn’t.ever.see.

Good luck trying to figure out what kind of move you were going to make when they’ve finally gone back to bed.

So, yeah, kids change a lot of things. But you know what they also do? They introduce us to a depth of love and selflessness we may never have known otherwise. Husband and I have grown to love each other more truly and deeply in these years we’ve been sharing the raising of our children. I understand him differently today than I understood him before kids. He understands me differently than he did before kids.

And if all this weirdness is the price we have to pay for a more passionate love all these years later, we’ll surely take it.

Just remember to lock the door before you get out the Chess Board, m’kay?