Having children shines a magnifying glass on your relationship. It puts you in a pressure cooker and tests you over and over again. Sleepless nights, whinging, constant demands, evolving responsibilities, mental load, overwhelm… the list goes on… and on and on.
It can be really, really challenging. You can start to feel like house mates, or ships passing in the night and bouncing between ‘look what we made together’, ‘I miss you’ and ‘I can’t stand you right now’.
It can feel terrifying as the months tick over and your relationship moves further and further away from what you knew and loved.
If it’s your first baby, every day is uncharted territory and you are often filled with an overwhelming sense of ‘what have we done?” And ‘is this our life now’.
Something that has really helped me over the past few years of parenting are podcasts. So I wanted to share 6 podcast episodes that have really stuck with me.
6 podcast episodes to help navigate and nurture your relationship through parenting.
From park chats to parenting podcasts, mums lunches to pilates classes… the mental load of motherhood and unfair division of responsibilities seems to be the biggest pain point in modern parenting relationships. The resentment is real.
‘Hierarchy of prioritising our relationships is one of the most common struggles that mums experience. How do we take care of our relationships, how do we prioritise us vs everyone and everything else?
Often mums sacrifice themselves for the preservation of their relationships.
We don’t have to go first. We don’t have to juggle our priorities in a way that is always us at the top because that’s not realistic for life as mum.
Our relationships are always in motion.
Part of our job isn’t to find balance or perfect hierarchy, or who comes first or how everyone fits in. Our job is to be in tune with and in touch with our relationships and regularly be rebalancing them.’
‘This is the first time in history that the survival of the family depends on the happiness of the couple. If the couple doesn’t nurture itself there is no family. You don’t stay married cause you have to anymore, you can just leave.
The only thing that holds the couple together is the relationship quality. If you don’t have that then there is no family… You can’t ‘just fall out of love’. It’s not the way it goes. Love is a verb. You conjugate it. Actively, in many tenses. It’s a practice. If you stop doing all the little things: hellos, thank yous, acknowledgements… all of that cushioning, when that thins out, it means that you have not been conjugating the verb. Love is not a permanent state of enthusiasm that just exists.’
I absolutely love John and Julie Gottman, their relationship, the way they communicate and their method for supporting couples. Their goals are to are to disarm conflicting verbal communication; increase intimacy, respect, and affection; remove barriers that create a feeling of stagnancy; and create a heightened sense of empathy and understanding within the context of the relationship. They role play conversations and provide so many valuable tools that are easily applied to your own relationship.
This is an older episode which starts with a discussion about the pandemic. There is just a section in this episode which has really stayed with me. This section starts at 6:30 and Brene discusses the 50/50 myth or the ‘Family Gap Plan’.
This episode is packed with wisdom for anyone navigating relationships. Jillian’s insights on relationships that face challenges—especially when children come into the mix—are brilliant. She explores how we manage stress both individually and as a couple, and how supporting our nervous system can help us thrive through the hard times of parenting and relationships.
We acknowledge the maternal wisdom passed down through matrilineal lines across all cultures, embracing the knowledge and traditions shared between women for millennia. From Crone to Maga, Mother to Maiden.
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