By Gail Anderson

Pregnancy usually brings couples closer together. We feel more bonded to our partners as we experience the excitement of creating a new life, dreaming about our new future as a family. We spend vast amounts of money and time shopping for the baby, preparing the nursery, and planning for the day of birth. It can be a really fun time.

So we bring our babies home and find that the first few weeks are kind of like a honeymoon. The babies are so wonderful and except for being tired, we are still managing pretty well. We still have enough clean clothes, bills don’t need to be paid yet, our friends have been feeding us, and our moms have cleaned the house.

The days stretch into weeks and then into months and one day we wake up to find that we feel so disconnected from our partner. We are tired and there are never enough hours in the day to get everything done, not even time for a short conversation about our day. It’s like living with a stranger, only it’s a stranger that we fight with over the smallest things. Silly things that never bothered us before. We find ourselves wondering what happened to all the hope and excitement that we felt during our pregnancy.