In her next column for The Latch, Sydney ‘mumfluencer’ and Instagram personality, Amy Gerard, answers one of her more commonly asked questions: ‘How exactly have your children changed your life?”
People ask me all the time, “How much do kids really change your life?”. Well here’s a helpful and cute comparative essay I’ve prepared for your reference.
Looking a little closer at some of mine and my husband Rhian’s favourite romantic holidays, I’ve taken the liberty in letting you know what these occasions looked like before we welcomed three kids into the world, and how they look now.
Valentine’s Day Before Children (BC):
You lay in bed imagining all the romantic things you can plan to do for your partner. Will you cook him dinner in your favourite lingerie? (Probably not because you hate cooking). But you will buy a mass-produced sentiment card written by someone else but write your own lovesick puppy words about how you’ve never known a love like this before.
You’ll buy a new dress, make sure your hair smells extra good and floss twice. You’ll wear his favourite perfume and buy him a few shirts from his favourite shop. Dinner will be somewhere special that holds a significance to you both, or it might just be pizza and a bottle of red on the beach while you watch the sun go down. You’ll gaze into each other’s eyes and you’ll kiss passionately with tongue. If you are feeling adventurous you might even have spontaneous sex or go for a skinny dip at night when the beach is deserted. Fellatio to really let him know he’s loved.
Valentines Day After Children (AC):
Wake up to obnoxiously loud anal acoustics. He hits you up for a quickie but your libido is holidaying in Mexico so you fight over who has to get up to the baby first. You’ll get a text message saying “Happy Valentine’s, babe” so you send one back letting him know that Bobby has just hand-fed Kobe one of his poos and Valentine’s Day can piss off. No one gets a card. Sit on the couch moaning like a farm animal because you’ve begun menstruating. An Instagram memory of you loved up six years ago on Valentine’s Day pops up and you repost with “together forever”.
Birthdays BC:
He sends messages to your girlfriends asking for help to buy you the perfect gift. He sends you little text messages to tell you to keep ‘birthday date’ free because he’s organising something and you’re going to love it. You feel giddy with excitement and happiness. He sends flowers to your work before picking you up. He nails the present, the card is beautiful. He has organised dinner at your fave restaurant and then afterwards takes you to your fave cocktail bar where he has organised all your friends to meet you. You make love all night because you both have the stamina of a pure thoroughbred and sleep in, waking up entwined in each other’s arms.
Birthdays AC:
Spend the day bent over the toilet after one of your kids passes on gastro. You sweat for Australia and almost shit out an organ. You survive on Hydralyte ice blocks and turn into a shade of corpse. Your husband takes the kids out of the house to give you a break to sleep. Happy Birthday to you.
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Anniversaries BC:
He sends you little gifts to your work, its an envelope filled with lottery tickets with a note that says: “I feel so lucky to have met you”. You have compiled all of the mushy romantic photos of the two of you and have printed out a photo book that you can look at forever. You send messages back and forth each day saying how you can’t wait to see each other. How lucky you are to have met. You plan a little weekend away where you walk along the beach hand in hand, enjoying baths together, climaxing together etc.
Anniversaries AC:
You both forget. Spend the night trimming your pubes in preparation for the 120 seconds of hushed sex you will have in the pitch black in between children waking up.
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Isn’t it funny how a moment of reflection can help you to see how bloody complacent you’ve become in your relationship? I mean, kids are great, sure, but the only reason you have them at the end of the day is because you and your partner made a choice to bring them into the world.
Probably because you were so obsessed with each other and in love. And yet once they’re here, it’s sometimes each other that you forget about the quickest.
I’m not saying Rhian and I don’t make time for each other, but just writing down these before and after children scenarios has made me realise that we both need to lift our game a little. Horny goat weed, where you at?