I would often hear how much closer you'd become in your relationship after having children.
I'd see the fabricated newborn photos behind smiles and perfect lighting, engorged breasts and awkward poses.
I know, because I have them.
But it’s the part in between you becoming closer that isn’t talked about much.
The confusing part.
Where the love of the child you’ve created fuses you together but can also be the very thing that holds you at arms length.
Where all of a sudden your love for each other inexplicably takes a turn for a greater more powerful love that you’ve never felt before and you accept it, before really being able to process it.
Where you look at each other over the piles of laundry, breast pumps, dishes, nappies, ointments and the distance between you feels like an obstacle course of cumbersome chores and challenges.
Where your hands slide past eachothers to hold onto smaller ones.
Where you’re told to nurture your relationship, but not how to, when in reality the only place for it right now comes last.
Where we have made ourselves smaller in our bigger picture, a new image entirely.
A sedated one, stripped down in it’s unfiltered format.
We don’t talk about that part.
The raw and exposed part that grounds you to the core but also holds you in a state of shock.
Just constant, and no need to align that word to anything. Because that’s what it is.
Constant.
I asked myself, What now?
It wasn’t the deep and meaningful chat I thought we needed. Because this journey we’re on, is that, every day, even without words.
Instead it was the on the surface stuff, the new pieces we were picking out and rearranging around each other. The favourite movie chat, the bad jokes, the light behind the tired eyes that comes with new found discovery.
The fun light hearted stuff.
It was going from living and breathing eachother in our most non sheltered state to putting on some makeup, nice, but old clothes, and sitting across from one another at a restaurant and making the effort to know eachother again.
The small things, the things that still matter.
It’s a new introduction.
No one talks about that.