Babyproofing Your Marriage

I got my first review product from Parent Bloggers. It was a book called Babyproofing Your Marriage, by Stacie Cockrell, Cathy O'Neill, and Julia Stone. After reading the book, I am certain I would actually be friends with them if I knew them in real life because they tell it like it is and seem to be such cool people. My youngest baby just turned three, but in light of my resolution, I was really excited to read it and see if it had any great tips for me. I am a super fast reader. When I got it, I actually read the whole book in one day. I could not put it down once I started reading. It was filled with page after page of examples that were so real and spot on that I got worried they might have had some sort of spy camera in my house for the "what not to do" parts!

As I was reading, I placed post-it notes on the pages I wanted to mark to read again later because they contained something I needed. I stopped when it became clear that this would be just about every page.


see all the post-it notes hanging out?


The book talks a lot about score keeping, which I confess that I do. Scorekeeping is hard to explain (although there is a clear definition in the book), but mainly involves someone carrying a mental list of how things are not equal and how they have done more than the other person. The division of responsibilities with children are not always equal, but keeping score of the inequalities is never helpful. I keep score (not intentionally) of how much I have had to deal with during the day, and when my husband walks in the door from work I am already irritated with him for "getting to" go to work and not having to deal with whatever I dealt with during the day. Not so fair, and it seems obvious, but it took reading it in a book to make it clear in my head that it is harmful to our marriage for me to do that. Obviously I know that going to work is not a picnic, but I tend to forget that when I do my scorekeeping. Since he doesn't seem to keep score at all, while I do it constantly, he loses my little game every time. In reality, we both lose. Note to self: We are supposed to be on the same team!


If my husband reads the book, I really hope he reads the part about "helper" behavior versus "partner" behavior. I don't want to feel like he's doing me a favor when he does things around the house or with the kids. It isn't that the thing itself bothers me, it is that him feeling like it is a "favor" makes it seem like it was expected to be my responsibility in the first place. As if he feels that it is beneath him to do whatever the thing is. Rationally, I know that isn't what he means, but that is how it feels.


I don't want to go into detail about my sex life, but the chapter in the book is spot on if you switch the husband and wife roles for us. I am definitely the man they are talking about in the chapter. We are pretty evenly matched most times, but right after a baby is thrown into the mix, I turn into the man for a while while he just wants to sleep. My best friend and I discussed this chapter and she said it was eye opening to her to read why a man feels the way he does about this subject. Definitely something that made some things clear about why my husband and I do what we do.


I was happy to see that we do a lot of things right, but then as I turned the page feeling smug like we were doing better than other couples at the whole marriage thing something would come up that was exactly us again. It was as if they had spy cameras in my house taking notes of what we do that doesn't work. Thankfully, the book also gives advice to make changes to put things back on the right track. After all, I married him for a reason and don't intend to have the same fights over and over until the kids go off to college!

One paragraph had a question in it that made me laugh out loud because I have discussed this with my girlfriends recently. The question was "Do you really want him to be one of your girlfriends?" The answer my girlfriends and I had all decided on was no, but sometimes yes. I don't want my husband to be a woman. Sounds pretty logical, because in fact I married a man. When I read the chapter though, it became clear to me that although I say I don't want him to behave like a woman, sometimes I sort of wish he did. Unrealistic expectations on my part set my husband up to fail and then I can get mad. Most of the time what I am frustrated about has nothing to do with him. Being a parent is a frustrating job. My husband becomes an easy target for me to vent my frustrations on, especially with all the things I have saved up from all of my score keeping.


The book touches on something that I clearly remember as my first fight with my husband after we had a baby. He wanted to go play poker or something (I can't remember what it was) and I was scared to death to be left alone with the baby. He asked my permission to go. In my hormonal state, the fact that he asked my permission, as if I were his mother, pissed me off more than you can imagine. We had a huge fight about how I don't want to tell him what he can and can not do. He is his own person, and I don't want to be his boss. The simple fact was that if he had just said he was thinking of going and asked me what I thought, it wouldn't have been an issue to fight about. We could have just discussed it. Since he posed it as a "mother may I" type of request, I felt like the warden who was trying to imprison him (as they say in the book). I don't want to feel like I am trapping him into spending time with me. I want him to want to be here. The book gives clear guidelines on how that can happen. It also points out something that I figured out after my twins were born. If you think about things differently, sometimes they don't seem as bad as you thought they did.

Even though we do a lot of the harmful things in the book, we also have a lot of things all figured out. After our first baby, we handled the in-law issue the way the book says to. It would have been helpful to read this book before our first baby was born so that we didn't have to stumble through and figure it out on our own though. My good friend is about to have her second baby, and I'll probably buy a copy of this book for her. The tips seem helpful before any babies are born, but almost essential when adding a second baby (or more) to the mix.


I am hoping my husband will read this book because I really feel it gives insight into what the other sex is thinking when they do certain things, and in some situations that helps to diffuse it and turn it into a non-issue. What it all boils down to is communication, which after a baby is born gets harder and harder to accomplish. I don't feel my husband and I are doomed. This book is very reassuring that with a little bit of work, a marriage can stay strong no matter how many kids are brought into it. All the tips provided seem like common sense once you read them, so it seems easy to follow them and achieve success.