Lose The Kids; Find The Love

Jimmy and I have been together for almost 13 years. We’ve been married for over 8 years and for the last 6 of those we’ve been parents. We’ve shared life’s highs and lows, we’ve figured out how to raise small humans together (sort of) and we’ve worked our asses off to build a life that we’re proud of, that keeps us and our tribe safe.

The only problem is that, somewhere along the line, amid the births and mortgages and jobs and tours and all the other adulting stuff, we lost us. We didn’t realise it was happening until we stopped one day and realised that, since the kids had been born, we’d had no space to be a couple. Just the two of us. In six years, we’d spent one night together away from the kids. One night. Sure we’d had date nights but we spent most of those too tired to talk about anything other than life admin and we’d mostly end up bickering about money by the end of the date. In six years, we’d not had one lie in together. We were bumbling along, but instead of being on the same paths, we were on parallel paths and worryingly, those paths were getting further and further apart.

When I was thinking about what to get Jimmy for his 40th, I wondered, after the year that we’d had, whether it was time to take the bull by the horns and overcome all our anxieties about money and leaving the kids and book a trip. I knew that if I ran it past him, we’d come up with a million reasons to not do it. And there were a million reasons to not do it: our parents are elderly and it’s a lot to ask them to watch two young kids for 5 days, could we afford a trip, were we in the best place emotionally to be thrown together without the kids to distract us? I didn’t know that answer to these questions, but I did know that I really wanted to spend some time alone with him, away from the kids and the house to see if we could be more than just co-parents and flat mates again. Could we be a couple?

I’m not going to lie; I was nervous. Very nervous. I’d committed a lot of time and money to the trip and I was scared that, left to our own devices, we might discover that actually, there wasn’t any attraction, or passion left. Perhaps we’d gone too far, perhaps we were just great co-parents who would always love and respect each other but perhaps wouldn’t be in love with each other. The anxiety grew as it got closer. I started to worry a lot about whether my parents would be ok with the girls. My mum has early stage Parkinsons and my dad is a liability at the best of times. Was it too much to ask of them? They knew of the difficulties Jimmy and I had been having and they assured me, no, it wasn’t too much. They wanted to do it.

The day came and we were ready. Saying goodbye to the girls was hard - they knew we were going away but as we’d never left them before, they had no real concept of how long five days was. Billie knew it was a pretty long time and she struggled the most. Bo was happily stuffing her face with chocolate buttons before we’d even shut the front door. My dad drove us to the airport and the anxiety didn’t fade. I was stressing out and starting to panic that this was all going to go wrong.

It was only when we were eating lunch at the airport that I realised I was relaxing. I was carrying one bag. Just one. We’d eaten a whole meal without having to get up eleventy-billion times to go to the bathroom or to peel a kid out from underneath another table. We’d talked about stuff that wasn’t to do with kids - television shows we’d been watching (yep, we live in the same house but don’t watch the same things), our friends and what they were up to, what we were going to do in New York.

He was different too. I’ve always felt that Jimmy has always been so fully engaged with the kids at all times, that it left me feeling left out and isolated. With the kids not even being an option, he was Jimmy the bass player with the sexy head of auburn hair and the good banter. He was the man that was my boyfriend, not the man that was the father of my kids.

We spent four glorious days in New York, holding hands, making love, eating great food, exploring a city that we’d both spent a lot of time in but never together. We spoke to the kids and talked about how we missed them, but their absence opened up so much room in our emotional psyche that for the first time in a long time we saw each other directly. There was no battle for our energy and attention; instead we didn’t have to be anything for anyone else except be ourselves for each other.

I’d be lying if I said that we’d managed to bring this back home. Of course we didn’t. We are back into the thick of it and wondering where that time went but the important thing was that we had that time. Now, when I’m feeling distanced from him or close to strangling him, I can remember what New York was and what we are, still, deep down after all this time. Sure, we may not get a chance to really see each other that much when we’re busy getting kids ready and working and managing the business that is life, but we know it’s there and having had the chance to see it and feel it - even if briefly - has reaffirmed my faith in our relationship.

We’ve committed to taking that time more. It almost certainly won’t be 5 days in New York (although I am 40 in 2021, so Jimmy…what you going to do?!) but even if it’s a house swap with my parents in Devon or me going to join him on tour for 2-3 days then we’ll do it because it’s important to remember what was once there and even more important to feel it.