Warning! New parents are likely to experience:

Scorekeeping—An exceedingly complex, often relentless, tit-for-tat war waged by husbands and wives over the division of parenting responsibilities and domestic chores.

The Ten O'Clock Shoulder Tap—Considered by many men to be a form of foreplay. A paw on a wife's shoulder is how some men indicate their desire for sex. The Tap is rarely accompanied by a term of endearment or any other verbal form of communication and is seldom well received by the often-sleeping/almost-always-exhausted wife. The frustrated husband, meanwhile, wonders if his wife has pulled a Bait and Switch in the bedroom.

Clash of the Grannies—A high stakes "who will have the greatest influence on the grandkids" tournament played by each set of grandparents. Competitive categories include: the Title Championship (who gets to be called "Grandma"), the Battle for Floor and Wall Space, the Battle for Face Time, and Gratuitous Grandparental Gift-Giving.

The Babyproofers are three women who wouldn't trade their roles as mothers for anything, and they love their husbands deeply. But after living through it and hearing the stories of hundreds of other couples, they know that with young children in the house, you need to block the stairs with baby gates, put plastic covers over the outlets, AND take the necessary steps to safeguard your marriage.

Babyproofing Your Marriage is the warts-and-all truth about how having children can affect your relationship. The authors explore the transition to parenthood in light of their own experiences, with input from their husbands and commentary from men and women across the country. Their evenhanded approach to both sides of the marital equation allows spouses to understand each other in a whole new way.

With loads of humor and practical advice, the Babyproofers will guide first-time parents and veterans alike around the rocky shores of the early parenting years. Don't fall prey to common relationship pitfalls: Babyproof Your Marriage!

Babyproofing Your Marriage

How to Laugh More, Argue Less, and Communicate Better as Your Family GrowsBy Stacie Cockrell

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright ©2007 Stacie Cockrell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061173547

Chapter One

How Did We Get Here?

Parenthood Changes Everything

"I expected to add diaper, pacifier, formula to my new motherhood vocabulary—I didn?t think f*!k and s#*t would feature so prominently!"
—Lisa, married 5 years, 1 kid

"What I get from other women is what I need, and that is help. I don't even have to ask other women for help, they just volunteer. What do I get from my husband? I get a sink full of dirty plates, a pile of dirty clothes on the stairs, and a child dressed for church in a football jersey."
—Katherine, married 8 years, 2 kids

"My wife doesn't understand how important sex is to me. Everywhere I go, sex is screaming at me. There are hot women in advertisements on billboards, and before I know it I find myself imagining Gina down in Accounts Payable wearing a nurse's outfit."
—Thomas, married 11 years, 1 kid

We are three women who love our children. We love our husbands, and they love us. Why on earth did we find ourselves so often at odds after the babies came home? Our pre-baby marriages were really good, maybe even great. So why weren't we talking the way we used to? Why were we bickering? Why were we so infuriated at our husbands' inability to find the sippy cups? Why were our husbands distraught that our enthusiasm for sex had dwindled to "folding the laundry" levels? Were we normal? Or was something seriously wrong?

Turns out we were totally, utterly (even slightly boringly) normal.

We figured this out because we started talking; first to each other, then to a handful of friends, and then, well, things got out of hand and we started writing a book about it. At that point, no one was safe. We accosted total strangers in checkout lines and captive fellow passengers on airplanes. We talked to legions of women who, just like us, dreaded their husbands' Ten O'Clock Shoulder Tap. They wondered what had happened to That Whole 50:50 Thing and why the lion's share of the domestic crap was falling on their plates. We talked to countless men and learned that, like our husbands, they despaired that their wives had pulled a Bait and Switch in the bedroom. They complained that no matter what they did to help with the kids, the house, and the bank balance, It Was Never Enough.

Through all the talking, it became clear that most couples, no matter how happy and secure their marriage may be, find the early parenting years a challenge (on a good day) or even seriously relationship-threatening (on a bad day).

In fact, if you read the latest studies, you'd think we have a national epidemic of miserable parents on our hands. A well-publicized 1994 Penn State study said that, "two-thirds of married couples report a decline in their marital relationship upon the birth of their children."¹ Ten years later, things hadn't improved at all. An August 2005 report from the University of Washington found the same thing.² Most recently, a December 2005 study of 13,000 people published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior said parents reported being more miserable ("sad, distracted or depressed") than non-parents.³

How did so many of us wind up here? And, more importantly, can we do anything to avoid spending the next fifty years of our lives here? Parenthood changes us, and our lives, so profoundly. It changes how we view ourselves and each other; what we need from and are able to put into our marriages. This book is about understanding these changes and how we react to them. At its heart, it's about keeping marriages on an even keel after the baby bomb arrives. It's about the simple things we can do to stay connected as a couple after we have kids.

So, What Is Going On?

During our intrepid journey of marital discovery we learned—much to our relief—that many of the bumps couples might encounter along the way just can't be helped. The emotional, psychological, and lifestyle upheavals that accompany parenthood are unavoidable. They're nobody's fault. We're not necessarily doing anything wrong.

Topping the list of things we just can't help is our DNA, or as we three aspiring evolutionary biologists like to call it, Hardwiring. It took having kids for us to realize that men and women are completely different animals and, as a result, we respond to parenthood in drastically different ways. Our genetically-programmed instincts are at the root of many of our modern-day frustrations. They affect our post-baby sex lives, how we parent, and our relationships with our families, often in ways we're not conscious of. Secondly, there's the inconvenient matter of planetary rotation. Our sixteen waking hours are not enough to do everything we have to do, much less anything we want to do. And finally, it doesn't help that most of us are Deer in the Headlights. We're basically clueless about how parenthood will make us feel. An iron curtain of secrecy hides the reality. No one, not even our own parents, will tell it like it is. (Remember those cryptic comments you heard before you had kids: "Don't have a baby until you're ready to give up your life"? To which you responded, "Huh?") This Global Conspiracy of Silence means that most of us are ill-equipped to deal with the sea of change that a baby brings. No one prepares us for the Parenthood Ass-Kicking Party.

To some extent, we new parents are at the mercy of millions of years of evolutionary biology, the twenty-four-hour day and pure ignorance. These three factors set the stage for the various post-baby disconnects we'll describe in this book. Add in the facts that (a) we aren't very nice when we're tired and (b) we think we can get our lives back to the way they were before kids, and we can find ourselves facing some serious marital struggles. No matter how . . .

Continues...

Excerpted from Babyproofing Your Marriageby Stacie Cockrell Copyright ©2007 by Stacie Cockrell. Excerpted by permission.
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