One day the marital bed becomes a stadium.
No more romantic wakings in the lovers' nest. Foreign invaders rule it. I open my eyes in the morning to look, not at my wife's tousled hair, but at a determined infant hand extended towards me at point-blank range. My tiny angel confuses my nose with a volume dial, and is thoroughly aggrieved when my private nostril refuses to rotate a hundred and eighty degrees.
I want to cry out to my wife to redeem me, but she is subject to the authority of the elder daughter, who is shaking her awake with an innocent-hearted plea: pancakes!
My wife at this moment, by my best estimate, would rather take a long coffee with almost anybody on earth than beat eggs in the kitchen. And since she has had the morning shift all week, I stretch my sleepy whale of a body sadly, crawl out, and begin another new day.
If that situation is familiar to you, brave parents, I suggest that next time you look under the bed. Something of yours has fallen down there. Bend down — can you see it? There, beside yesterday's aromatic socks, folded in like a bashful cauliflower — your relationship.
From the personal, to the couple, to the family.
At first it is not so complicated. The allocation of resources and the planning of time required to meet the task called adult life is a relatively simple business early on. Whether you are studying, working, or travelling for months, you are occupied with yourself alone.
Then you become a couple, and the arithmetic becomes two-body. Demanding, but manageable, and frequently delightful.
And then children arrive, and something happens that nobody adequately warns you about: the relationship stops being the container of the family and becomes one of its competing demands.
That is the whole difficulty in a sentence. Before children, time together was the default and everything else was carved out of it. After children, time together is the thing that must be carved out — and it is the only item on the list that nobody else will chase you about.
The nursery will telephone if you forget a child. Your employer will notice your absence. No institution anywhere will contact you to point out that the two of you have not had a conversation lasting more than four minutes since March.
Which is why it goes first, and why it goes quietly, and why the couples who survive this period are almost always the ones who treated their relationship as an obligation with a fixed slot rather than as something that would resume naturally once things calmed down.
Things do not calm down. That is the other thing nobody warns you about.