I had a murky idea about what family life was going to be like. I hadn’t thought about it a great deal, but I did have a few ideas: I thought families stuck together, that we were going to grow the love, that my husband and I would be Sexy Parents and life would just rock on.
It didn’t work out that way for me.
We had gone from smoking hot to comfortably numb in a few short years, and the rest of our adult lives still loomed ahead. Nobody else seemed to be settling for this kind of compromise. Friends all around were waving goodbye and heading off to become single parents. Single ‘momdom’ seemed infinitely more glamorous than the years of domestic bickering that stretched endlessly before us.
I felt like we were on some sort of well-greased path to relationship demise – a slow-but-steady slope upon which the mundane was replacing the magical.
I came to a point when I just wanted out. I delivered the news somewhere meaningful – in the mid-dle of that long strip of road between Bloemfontein and Smithfield. The one with all the potholes. My husband hit six of them in our new car. If it had just been three, I could have zipped my lips. But six? I got out of the car, wrestled the kids away from the DVD player and, over their screams of outrage, I told my husband that I was leaving him – for good this time. And off I walked, kids in tow, triumphant with my newfound freedom.
I didn’t care that I had left my purse in the car. I didn’t care that my children hadn’t consumed anything but Smarties for the last four hours. I didn’t care about anything. I just wanted to walk away. I wanted to be footloose and foxy again. It seemed far easier than endlessly compromising who I was in a relationship.
My moment of liberation was short-lived. I was a mere twenty metres down the road when a thorn pushed through my sandal and I texted my husband to pick us up. Years later, he told me that he had almost missed the text, he was so busy organising a celebratory braai for that evening.
I went on to write about the trials and tribulations of motherhood in my first book, Hey Baby! The Hip New Mom’s Guide. While doing a call-in talk show, giving advice to new parents who had read the book, I found that I was asked a lot of questions, many of which were about how to handle a baby during the first year. But there were many more questions about relationships. These questions came from both men and women, and all of them were asking the same thing: How on earth can we make our relationship survive the life change of parenting?
And that’s what I wanted to know. I wanted to know not only how my own smoking-hot love af-fair could survive having children, but also how my husband and I could discover a new, deeper and more meaningful relationship – the kind of partnership that is made possible only by the experience of having kids together.
So this book really started as an honest-to-goodness search for a way out of what I saw as the strait-jacket of ‘relationship suburbia’.
Two kids – check. House in the suburbs – check.
Garden – check.
SUV – check.
Gym contract – check.
Book club – check.
Total Suburban Mom nightmare – check, check.
My husband and I were completely unprepared for what it meant to be parents. Neither of us knew how to be a mother and a father and have a great relationship. Our only real models were our parents, and they had come from a completely different era. We knew that we needed to find our own way if we wanted to get through this.
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