Then there was Dan, hair dusted with flour, standing there with that same knowing look. Our eyes met, and in that moment, it hit me. This is what it’s all about. All of us together. No schedules, no worrying, just laughter and the simple joy of being us.
The cupcakes came out lopsided and burnt, but the proud look on Oscar's face made me realise something: we were messy, but we were ‘us’ messy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
EMMA
It’s funny, life. You drift through it on autopilot for years; same routines, same habits, until something shakes you awake and makes you realise that not everything is as it should be. Then comes the fixing, the learning, the uncomfortable but necessary growth.
I think Dan and I needed these bumps in the road to truly see each other again, to understand where the resentment had been hiding and how to heal it.
Now, we’re on a mission to make this marriage not just work, but thrive. It’s happening. Again. We’re making an effort. We’ve had The Talk, capital T, and decided that we are going to be one of those couples that prioritise each other. You know, the ones who still hold hands after kids, who manage date nights without needing a two-week recovery period. We will be those people.
In theory.
Because in practice? Well, we’re also the parents of Oscar (selectively deaf), Sophie (part-time fairy princess, full-time drama queen), and Ruby (adorable dictator). Prioritising each other is a lovely idea. The execution? A logistical nightmare.
Take last night, for example. Dan and I agreed to have a romantic evening. We planned it. We were going to talk (not about logistics or packed lunches), have a glass of wine, and then, you know, rekindle some passion.
Instead, we spent forty-five minutes trying to convince Ruby that her socks did not contain invisible ants, another twenty refereeing an argument about whether a unicorn could defeat Spider-Man (Oscar was passionately against this idea, Sophie was deeply offended), and then, just as we finally collapsed onto the sofa with a bottle of red, Sophie wandered in, dramatically clutching her stomach and whispering, ‘I think I have the sick.’
Cue an hour of comforting a perfectly fine but deeply theatrical child and a further hour of googling ‘early symptoms of appendicitis.’ By the time we got to bed, the only thing I wanted was sleep and possibly a lobotomy.
Dan sighed beside me, running a hand through his unruly dark hair. I looked at him, really looked at him, and despite my exhaustion, I felt it. The thing. The pull. He’s still the man who makes my stomach flip when he looks at me a certain way. It’s just that these days, the moment usually happens when I’m wearing stained pyjamas and holding a toddler who smells faintly of yoghurt.
‘We’ll try again tomorrow,’ he said, kissing my forehead. ‘I love you, Em.’
‘I love you more,’ I mumbled, already half asleep.
“Now, excuse me, young lady, I am deeply offended,” Dan announced, snapping me out of my sleepy haze.
“Huh?” I mumbled, blinking at him in confusion.
“You can’t possibly love me more,” he said, grinning. “Because there is absolutely no way on this earth that one human being could love another more than I love you.”
“Okay,” I said, half-smiling. “But I feel the same. So what now? Are we… at a stalemate?”
“I suppose we’ll have to agree that we love each other exactly the same.”
“Deal. Daniel, I love you the same,” I declared, trying to sound serious.
“I love you the samer. Mwah ha ha!” he replied with his best evil laugh.
We both dissolved into giggles, tangled up in the warmth of the duvet, until tiny footsteps padded into the doorway. A little shadow appeared, and moments later, our half-asleep Ruby wriggled her way between us like she’d done it a thousand times before.
The truth is, Dan and I have never been particularly good at enforcing the “stay in your own bed” rule. Oscar snuck in until he was six. Sophie would’ve done the same, but she started sneaking into Oscar’s bed instead. And now Ruby’s our late-night creeper and honestly, it’s just easier to let her stay than to keep marching her back to her room. Though, I can’t exactly say it’s doing wonders for our marriage.
I can see how people end up divorced when their kids are little. I really can. Before having children, I thought it was sad, of course, but also a little avoidable. Naïve, wasn’t I? I figured if two people really loved each other, if they were committed, if they were willing to work at it, then surely, they’d be fine. Dan and I love each other. We are committed. We have really tried. And yet, here we are, standing on the edge of something that feels dangerously close to crumbling, again, and no matter how much we scramble to hold onto it, we just keep slipping.
Before kids, it was easy to be in love. We had time, for romance and intimacy. Time to sleep, time to talk, time to just exist as people rather than as caretakers, mediators, snack dispensers, and general household managers. I don’t remember ever having to schedule affection. Back then, we could be spontaneous. If we wanted to go out for dinner, we just went. Ifwe wanted to spend the entire weekend in bed, watching films and ordering takeout, we did. And sex? Sex wasn’t something we had to plan or whisper about in the dark, hoping the children didn’t wake up. It just happened because we wanted each other, and we had the luxury of uninterrupted time to act on it.
Now? Now, we attempt date nights that end with one of us asleep on the sofa by nine. Now, we make plans to prioritise our relationship only for those plans to be derailed by a sick child, an overtired meltdown, or the sheer exhaustion that seeps into our bones by the end of each day. We try. We do. And then we fail, and we try again, and we fail again, and I can feel the weight of all those failures stacking up between us, layer upon layer, like bricks in a wall we never meant to build.
I like to think we’re self-aware enough to know what’s happening. I like to think we are now strong. But even strong people get tired, and I am so very tired. Not just physically, although that’s a given when you’re raising three young children. It’s deeper than that. It’s the kind of tired that settles into your bones and makes everything feel just a little heavier. The kind of tired that makes it easier to snap than to soften. The kind of tired that has me looking at Dan some days and wondering if this is just how it’s going to be now. If we’ll always be two people who love each other but don’t know how to reach each other anymore.
It’s not that we fight all the time. It’s not even that we don’t love each other. It’s more that we’ve become these parallel lines, running in the same direction but never quite touching. Our conversations revolve around logistics. Who’s picking up Oscar from rugby? Did you remember to pay the nursery fees? Sophie has a party on Saturday, can you take her? Even when we sit down together in the evening, there’s this quiet distance, this unspoken understanding that we’re both too spent to say much at all. I miss him. I miss us.
And yet, even as I acknowledge all the ways we are struggling, I don’t want to give up. I don’t think Dan does either. I think we both know that this is a phase, a hard, exhausting phase, but a phase nonetheless. The trouble is, when you’re in it, when every day feels like an uphill battle against exhaustion and stress, it’s hard to keep that perspective. It’s hard to remember that one day, we won’t be drowning in nappies and school runs and never-ending to-do lists. One day, we’ll have time again. The question is, will we still have each other in the way we once did? Or will we have let so many moments pass us by that we won’t know how to find our way back?
