The Paradox Of Children and Marriage
By: Brent Kocal
Tags: Motherhood, Marriage, Parenting Advice, Fatherhood, Parenting

How We Thought It Would Always Be

I still remember my father-in-laws toast when my wife and I got married.

Actually … I only remember the last line.

He said “Now bring on the grandkids!”

What I didn’t know then … and couldn’t possibly have known then … was that I’d been lied to my whole life.

It was a lie that was drilled into me enough to where I believed it as FACT.

This lie is constructed around the whole concept of what our lives SHOULD be like when we are living them to the highest level.

Find someone you can’t live without …

Get married …

Have kids …

Live happily ever after.

Well … maybe that last part is a little harder to pull off than the first three.

It’s hard because of the lie I mentioned above that was told to me and was undoubtably told to you.

So what’s the lie?

It’s that kids will enhance your marriage.

Before you had kids, you probably looked at them as “marriage enhancers” that would bond you closer together and give you reasons to stay together longer.

My wife and I thought that too … but the OPPOSITE happened when we started having kids.

We started to fight a lot more.

And those fight were WAY more intense than they were before we had kids.

All of the pressure for how we had to show up as parents … show up for each other and show up for ourselves just about broke us.

We just got so wrapped up in our jobs as parents that we had no energy left for each other.

The sexy texts we used to send each other turned into “to do” lists of every place the kids need to be driven to and things one of us needed to pick up from the grocery store or the pharmacy on the way home.

The Friday nights where I would throw on a sport coat and she’d put on this AMAZING pair of leather pants faded into both of us wearing sweatpants and falling asleep on the couch to whatever was on Netflix.

Neither of us even remember when this actually happened …

It was almost like we fell asleep and woke up a year later having become entirely different people.

All you hear about before you have kids is how much FUN they are going to be, then you start having kids and you’re like “really?!”

Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of REWARD in being a parent … but it is definitely not a FUN job.

And that was part of the problem my wife and I faced.

It was a total shock to our systems that the vision we’d had our entire lives of what it meant to be a parent turned out to be completely wrong.

Neither of us really knew what to do and we didn’t talk to each other about because both of us were kind of embarrassed to be feeling the way we were feeling.

It turns out we both thought the other didn’t share our frustration with how difficult a job this was.

We did make it out of that tailspin … eventually.

And it wasn’t just one thing that got us out.

It was a series of things.

We started being a lot more honest and a lot more raw with each other about what we were feeling …

And we leveled up our parenting game.

There was a lot of stuff we were doing with the kids inside of our parenting game that made everything harder than it had to be.

It’s like we were the salmon you see swimming against the current and having to jump up a waterfall at the same time only to have a bear waiting for them with it’s mouth wide open.

Just like that salmon … we were expending TONS of energy.

It didn’t have to be this way (and if you’re feeling like that salmon, it doesn’t have to be that way for you either.)

It turns out there was a way to get our kids to listen to us and be more cooperative that didn’t take all of our energy.

It actually ended up being a hell of a lot easier than what we’d been doing AND it gave us energy we needed to get our marriage back on track.

I talk about how we did this over at https://www.grownupparents.com .

Check it out TODAY!