Interview with the Authors

Interview with Stacie Cockrell, Cathy O'Neill, and Julia Stone, co-authors of Babyproofing Your Marriage

Baby-proofing your Marriage - sounds a bit drastic, does having a baby really affect your marriage that much?

Yes! No matter how happy the marriage, men and women respond differently to parenthood. We call it the Great Mum/Dad Divide. There are three main areas of conflict: sex (or lack thereof); scorekeeping, and in-laws.

The Divide is really evident in the bedroom, where mum wants to shut the factory down to care for the most recent offspring, but dad wants sex just as much as he always has, baby or no baby. For most of us, supply can't meet demand. Then, because there is more work to do, we start to keep score about the division of labour; we end up in an endless tit-for-tat argument about who is working harder. Many women feel like their husbands "just don't get it," - "it" being the increased volume of work and the extent to which her life has been upended. Men, on the other hand, think that their wives have turned into control-freak bottle-wielding shrews. And if all that wasn't enough, there's the in-law issue. Before you have kids, your extended families stay on the periphery. Cue the baby and it all changes. Everyone wants a piece of the kid action. The couple can find themselves in the middle of a Family Tug-of-War.

To make matters worse, no one really warns us that these things might happen. We call it the Global Conspiracy of Silence. The seasoned mums don't pull the mum-to-be aside and say, "your sex drive is going to go AWOL," or "your husband will drive you mad because he just won't get it," or "the sleep deprivation will bring you to your knees, girlfriend." There's no real information making it through to the fathers-to-be either. They're even more clueless than we are. So, we can all end up feeling disappointed and frustrated with our spouse because it's harder than we expect. Then, we can't understand why we're irritated with one another when we thought that parenthood would bring us closer together.

Why did you write the book when you clearly had enough to do bringing up all those babies?

We wrote it because we wanted answers to our "what is happening to our marriages since we had kids" questions. We couldn't find a book that gave us the answers, so we wrote it ourselves. There are lots of good books about marriage and parenting, but there wasn't one that addressed this specific time in a relationship, and why it can be such a challenge. There wasn't one that spoke to us in a real way, rather than a professorial way. There wasn't one that gave the guys a say in the matter. And there certainly wasn't one that told us what we could do about it. We wanted some answers, so we started talking, first to each other, then to more friends, and then, well, things sort of got out of hand.

Baby-proofing your Marriage is full of snappy terminology - can you explain what 'Midnight Chicken' is?

It's that time-honoured, late-night battle of the wills where each parent pretends to sleep through the babys screaming. Victory is achieved when one parent (AKA: the sucker) gets up and goes to the baby. When the second kid arrives, a lot of people start playing Advanced Midnight Chicken. They nudge their spouses and whisper, "You're up, I got her last time," when, in fact, there was no last time.

We had a lot of fun coming up with a new "babyproofing vocabulary." Here are some of our favourites:

Julia's Favourites: The Ten O'Clock Shoulder Tap. Because until we named it, I couldn't understand it, and when it was happening, it drove me up a tree. And also The Martyr Badge because oh, I was working so much harder than my husband, and oh, how I wore my suffering on my sleeve. That was me in a nutshell.

Stacie's Favourites: The Training Weekend always makes me smile. Once Ross survived a weekend of non-stop nappy-changing/bottle-feeding (without any backup), the proverbial light bulb went off. He was no longer the man who came home from work 'whenever' and parked 'it' on the couch. Also, given that I worked for ten years before I stayed home, I definitely experienced Whiplash, the feeling of hopping on a time machine and hurtling back to the 1950s. In fact, I'm still trying to find my way back.

Cathy's Favourites: The Mummy Chip because so much of our behaviour as mums is driven by instinct and love. We're hostage to that love and hardwiring. It's nice to be able to say to Mike "It's the Mummy Chip" like it's not really my fault if I do something compulsive. Then there's "The Great Escapees," those husbands who get increasingly creative in their efforts to fly the coop after more kids arrive. Mike was one of those - OK is one of those - he took up fishing when I was pregnant with Maeve. I laughed so hard when I learned that Ross and Gordon's passion for time-consuming outdoor hobbies coincided with the arrival of subsequent kids. That's when we realized it was a phenomenon and came up with "The Great Escapees".

You've clearly done lots of research - Baby-proofing is full of the opinions of ordinary men and women. The male point of view is not usually given so much attention in books about marriage and childcare - did you find the men's comments surprising at all?

Yes. The male perspective was really eye-opening for the three of us, particularly when they spoke about sex. We were amazed when men used words like "reassurance," "recognition," and "connection." We learned that sex is so much more to them than a physical act; it is also how they connect emotionally with their wives. They also talked about the "wheels coming off" and "the sky falling down" when they lost that connection. One guy called it "soul destroying" when he was rejected over and over again. This was news to three of us. Before this book, none of us really "got it." Yes, we knew sex was very important to men, but we never understood why.

Clearly, the book's male perspective has a hit a nerve among women. One woman told us that she read a couple of guy quotes from the sex chapter to her husband and asked, 'is this how you feel?' Turns out it was. She said they ended up having the first real conversation they'd had in over a year. Other women told us they got teary-eyed reading that chapter!

It wasn't just the comments about sex that surprised us, though. The intense, often self-inflicted pressure to provide was a recurring theme. A lot of men also spoke about their frustration with the post-baby lack of freedom, from things as minor as having a sleep in on a Saturday morning to pursuing life long goals. What was lovely, though, was hearing how much these men loved their kids. We realized that guys bond with their babies on a different timetable to women, but that their love is no less intense.

How do you suggest men and women avoid the pitfalls of 'Score-keeping' ?

Divide and Conquer. Unless you have a fleet of staff and unlimited cash, dividing up the household and parenting responsibilities is the only way to reduce Scorekeeping. Make a list of everything that must be done, from bath duty to earning a pay check and divvy it up. Once you've done that, you can take Julia's lead and hand in your Martyr Badge. You'll know that your spouse is working just as hard as you are. And, finally, show a little bit of appreciation for your other half. Think about the 101 invisible things your spouse does on a regular basis and thank them for it: you changed the nappy; you sat in traffic for an hour; you remembered to pick up the dry cleaning ... you get the idea.

The book is full of helpful tips - one of the most notorious being the 'Five Minute Fix' - how did you first come across this useful tactic?

Well, it's not as if we invented it! We just realized that, as sex acts go, this one was totally undervalued by women. It wasn't until we became overworked, time-starved mums that we saw the obvious benefits. You don't have to take your clothes off, the time you spend on it is minimal, and your husband thinks you are a Goddess! When we mentioned the idea at one of our men's focus groups and got a gob smacked, "Good God, that would transform my marriage" reaction, we knew we were on to something.

Finally, is there hope? Do things ever get better?

Yes. In fact, things can get better immediately! When a couple reads this book, they will realize that they're not alone, that everyone is going through the same thing. This realization can improve the marriage dynamic. It takes the all-too-personal sting out of the arguments. Less "why are you doing this to me?" and more "what are we going to do about this?"

When you have young children, a little action really does go a long way. Small but strategic gestures can transform a marriage. Babyproofing Your Marriage has hundreds of suggestions to help couples get back on track. And we don't recommend anything that we haven't tried and seen work in our own marriages. Readers can think of us as their crash test dummies!

Finally, we did get some perspective from married couples whose children were grown. They told us that this is just a stage and that it might just be the most difficult one our marriages will go through. With the simple passage of time, many of the problems we describe in this book will just go away as the kids get older and more self-sufficient. They also told us that ultimately, sharing the parenting experience with our spouses would be the biggest reward of our lives. That's a mantra the three of us recite daily as we try to prise toddlers from our legs, resolve tantrums and race to the shop before it closes to buy, yet another, pint of milk.