Finding 'Us' again (without the kids)
A road trip to a wedding and a chance to hang out as a couple
Hello Restless Ones,
I hope you’re having a stellar week?
I’m writing this today from a hotel room in London - gearing up to give an adventuresome talk at a conference tomorrow to 200 tradeswomen - yes, tradesWOMEN. Plumbers and electricians and all sorts. I’m pumped for it!
This week’s post is about a recent road trip to a wedding. And there were many, many reasons that it very nearly didn’t happen. But I’m so glad it did because it gave the space to reflect on the scary topic of maintaining a romantic relationship when you have kiddos.
As always — let me know your thoughts in the comments - I love me a good natter in that comment box, I do.
Lorra love to you all, stay Restless and catch you next week,
Anna xx
Finding Us Again (without the kids)
It’s 11pm and I’m driving down a dark and winding road in Gloucestershire. I should be in bed. In fact, ordinarily, I would have been in bed by 8.30pm because this, as a mother of three small humans, is my bedtime.
But tonight is different.
Tonight, I’ve just finished giving an after dinner talk. I’m on my way home to collect Jamie and we are then… driving to Yorkshire.
Say what? Yes you read that right. Yorkshire. If you’re not from the UK, I’ll say that Gloucester to Yorkshire is A LONG WAY. Well it’s 4 hours. That’s a long way when you live on a small island (to North Americans, this amount of driving is, of course, ‘just down the road’).
Five minutes from home, I pull into a petrol station to fill up the car. I drop Jamie a WhatsApp while I’m paying for the fuel. The message reads:
‘Ello’ Darlin’ — I’ll pick you up in 5 mins. We’re going on an ADVENTURE!’
When I arrive home, the house is quiet. There aren’t any lights on and I know exactly where Jamie is. Asleep. He was planning on having a ‘tactical’ nap before we made the journey north and I’m arriving home earlier than expected.
(I also know that Jamie’s tactical nap will have involved watching at least 2 hours of a (any) Denzel Washington movie on Netflix before deciding he really should get some sleep. So he’s probably only just gone to bed.)
It’s now 11.30pm. I creep into the house and find Jamie upstairs — out cold on his back. Eye mask on. Ear plugs in. White noise machine playing. Hands placed over the covers like some kind of stunned, sleeping squirrel. I give him a gentle nudge to wake him and then wait approximately 3 seconds before turning all the lights on and crashing around the room like and excited puppy. Because… WE ARE GOING ON AN ROAD TRIP!
The invite to go to a friend’s wedding, up in Yorkshire, came in a few months back. My friend — the bride to be (who once described tears as ‘chemicals’ and told me she didn’t understand why people cry) sent an exceptionally detailed the invite via WhatsApp, which read:
Wedding. 28th June.
That was it.
My reply was, of course, ten times longer than the invitation and with a barrage of photos of my kids (not because she asked for them) but that is why our friendship works. I over share. She under shares and then I tease the rest of it out of her. She is one of my oldest friends and I very much wanted to make it to her wedding. For her, but also for me. And for Jamie too.
In the past four years, Jamie and I have only spent one night away from the kids together. When I was 26 weeks pregnant with the twins, we escaped to a local hotel, hoping to squeeze in a last night of indulgence before our family of three became a family of five.
Of course, the twins chose that evening to rotate themselves so that they were both laying sideways across my stomach (as opposed to head down or bum down). It was very uncomfortable, but it did count as a relaxing night away… sort of.
And beyond that, we have only had one date (a single freakin’ date!) in the past two years.
I’d heard about this happening. About the changes in a relationship after kids, but, along with many other things about parenthood, I closed my ears to it. That won’t be us, I thought. How could it be?
Well, apparently it could.
Our eldest, Storm, was just six weeks old when we had our first scary us moment.