How Does Having A Baby Change Your Relationship

With a three-year-old in the house, everything is breakable. Or, at the very least, spillable. (The most expensive toys in the world can never be as interesting to a young mind as a big bag of uncooked rice that can be poured all over the kitchen floor.) Thus begin the Tidying Up Years. Valuable heirlooms, if fragile, are better off sold or kept in a safe or, possibly better still, stolen and claimed on the insurance. Parents of small children find it amazingly easy to fake burglaries, as their house tends to look like that all the time anyway.
 

How Does Having A Baby Change Your Relationship

PC no. 456: 'Oh, God they've smeared shit on the walls.'

Tearful householder: 'What sort of people would do such a thing?'
 
At a year old Junior is unlikely to talk, beyond the odd word like 'dog' or 'catamaran'. (So will be unlikely to give you away to the police in the scenario above.) But he or she can follow conversations and make the odd sound to fill the gaps. You can read simple stories to your baby, let it play with non-toxic crayons which it will eat, and encourage it to stand unaided for a second or two. Soon this baby will be a baby no longer, but a toddler. You won't be ready for that, either.
 
For the pressure does not let up. Once or twice in this blog I have used phrases like 'being past the worse which may have been interpreted by a few, sad, literal-minded readers as implying that everything calms down after a while. What I should have written, to maintain absolute accuracy, was 'being past a worst', because you are barely past one particular worst before two or three more start bearing down on you. 

Only Enforcer Dad, Absentee Dad and rarer beasts like Bigamist Dad seem to escape this process. The rest of us, mothers and fathers alike, must accept our fate. You start dreaming of alternative lives you might have led. You wonder what would have happened if you had had babies with that woman, instead of this woman. (Exactly the same, I guarantee.) You imagine yourself traveling light, with just a passport and an old rucksack, having wild new adventures every day, not missing home a bit. You remember happy nights in the boozer with all your other miserable single friends. You envy young people and the witless, doomed way they seem to drift through life.

Women think such things, too, or their womanly equivalents. But they are better at hiding it. That is to say, they are better at pretending that they have never even imagined that anyone could think such things, and that anyone who does is reprehensible to the point of criminality. The Tiredness Olympics were just one event. These days you are competing in a full decathlon.
 
Children change a relationship. How can they not? In the early stages of your relationship, your beloved's responses to you broke down roughly as follows:

• Love 14%.
• Amused tolerance 17%.
• Thinking of having your babies 23%. 
• Looking forward to changing your hairstyle, clothes, furniture etc. 38%. 
• Faint concern at the back of her mind that she can do better 8%. 

And after a year of parenthood:

• Sighs of disappointment 31%.
• Raging certainty that she could have done better 43%.
• Wondering what on earth she was thinking of 15%. 
• Contemplating adultery/divorce/murder 11%. 

And this is without you having done anything to provoke her. Or anything at all really. To find out more, you can check out How Does Having A Baby Change Your Relationship.