will be like until you're in the middle of it. In our case, I had some suspicions about how Lee's painful childhood history would be triggered by parenting a child if she didn't feel strongly attached to that child, and it turned out that I was right on the mark but I hadn't anticipated how hard it would be for me to deal with her responses. There were some things from my history that we thought would be emotional triggers for me, but the teen whose experience overlapped them from a different direction ended up learning a lot from what I had to say and using me as a resource for several years to come. (Sorry that I talk about a lot of this obliquely; it's not my story and it's hard to know how to say what's going on without saying too much of what's going on.) We now have an excellent relationship therapist, and that's been a wonderful thing. She's good at reminding us to put on our own oxygen masks first, saying that each of us needs to prioritize herself first, then the relationship, and then the children, which is not to say that they get ignored but that we need to have ourselves as individuals and as a couple healthy and secure before we can really be effective parents. So we're working on that! So much boils down to communication, though, and when Alex was waking me 20 times a night and Lee was so frustrated