As I mentioned in my first post, Baby Taylor spent some time
in the hospital because of his condition. During that time, my husband and I
spent about 12 hours every day going back and forth to the hospital to feed
him, play with him and make sure that he didn’t forget who his parents were.
Because the huge sleep debt I was battling and the desperate measures I had
gone to in order to get nourishment into him had caused some mental health
issues for me, I wasn’t allowed to stay with him because the doctors and nurses
on the ward had more than enough to do without having to keep an eye on me too.
But I wanted to spend as much time with him as possible, so I was always at the
hospital by 10am and I rarely left much before midnight. As a result, I barely
saw Toddler Taylor during that time and my relationship with my husband took a
very definitive backseat to everything else. And, thinking about it now, that
is probably where the trouble began.
My husband and I always had a very active physical
relationship, but once Baby Taylor was born and his issues began to make
themselves known and felt within our family dynamic, I had neither the time nor
the energy to engage with him anymore. I had to put my sons’ needs before ours,
because that has always been my understanding of being a “good” mother. It didn’t
occur to me at the time that my neglect of the person who had brought my
children into the world with me would have the cumulative effect that it did.
In early April, on my husband’s birthday, he moved out of
our home. Looking back, we hadn’t been communicating with each other on
anything other than a perfunctory level for months. Our physical relationship
had withered away to nothing. Any time we spent together was on opposite ends
of the sofa, watching TV and ignoring each other completely. I had recently
lost a close family member and was still grieving, but my husband has no
experience of grief, so he had no way of knowing what I needed from him to help
me through it. So, with nothing left to keep us together, he packed his bags
and went to stay with his parents. It wasn’t as simple as that in practice, and
it wasn’t without animosity at the time, but that’s essentially what happened,
and it was only then that I realised what we had been doing to each other over
the months we had spent trying to look after our poorly baby and utterly
neglecting our relationship.
When we first got married, we had only been together for two
years. We were wildly in love and almost unbearably happy, and we decided to
start having children right away while we were still young, full of energy and
before we had had the opportunity to become selfish. Toddler Taylor was an easy
baby. He ate well, slept well and adapted to every routine change without
batting an eyelid. We had our issues and we argued sometimes, but we still made
lots of time for one another. But when Baby Taylor came along just less than
two and a half years later, everything changed. He wouldn’t feed, he was sick
often and profusely, and he refused to sleep. It was, for want of a better
word, exhausting. I battled to breastfeed him, cried more times than I care to
remember over the profound sense of failure I felt that he didn’t want to feed
from me, and I all but gave up on sleep. I became a monster to live with. I was
constantly short-tempered and I lost all interest in my husband because I just
didn’t have time to take care of his needs too. Small wonder, then, that we
reached a point six months later where we felt like there was nothing left in
our marriage worth staying for.
During the time that my husband was living with his parents,
he visited the kids often and he and I found opportunities to talk. We slowly
realised that we still loved each other and still wanted to be together. We
stopped talking about divorce and instead formulated a plan to spend more time
together. I knew it would be hard on me to begin with because it would mean
that a lot of the early mornings with the boys would be my responsibility so he
could go to work at 6am and get home in time to spend a few hours with us
before the kids went to bed and we could concentrate on each other. It hasn’t
been easy, but my husband and I are now closer and happier than we have been in
a long time. It took losing each other for us to realise how much love was
still between us and how desperately we didn’t want to end up becoming another statistic.
The bottom line is that it’s easy to forget why you came
together as a couple when you’re both exhausted from caring for a poorly baby.
It becomes routine to blame each other for every bad day and every broken
night. The “I’m more tired than you” one-upmanship can end up being the default
setting of your relationship. I’m not one for offering unsolicited advice, but
I will say this; if you find yourself in the position of sacrificing your
relationship for a child who needs more help than you can reasonably provide –
whether that’s extra care or a certain medication – reach out. Don’t try to
battle through it by yourselves, because you might end up in the same place we
were a month ago and it doesn’t have to be like that. It shouldn’t have to be
like that for any parent.
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