The task of trying to connect with your spouse in early parenthood takes dedication, patience and a great big dollop of humour. At a time when attempting to drink a glass of water feels like an Olympic sport, it can feel utterly impossible to direct our limited energy towards the needs of our relationship.
As parents today, we are more isolated from our families and communities than any generation before. We are busier, more anxious and apparently having way less sex than our parents ever did. Which is, well… just depressing.
It takes significant work to negotiate time and resources for our relationships. And years can go by where spouses brush past one another in the dark waters of sleep deprivation without ever coming to the surface to connect properly. There is always some other need pulling you away from each other; many times it's a child literally tugging at you. Through a long and arduous journey, that you can read about here, my husband and I have found a bumbling, discordant rhythm toward each other.
We worked hard at learning to communicate constructively and compassionately in therapy and dedicate one day a month to child-free connection. These date-days are rife with challenges of childcare falling through, illness, resentment over who should be in charge of organising said dates, and the general apathy caused by parenting two young kids in this polarising post-pandemic world.
Just last weekend we celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary with two nights away on the South Coast. It was the longest we’d ever left our kids and we were aching for that time to ourselves. The universe stepped in to up the ante and left the whole family bed-bound with the flu for the week leading up to our time away.
We discussed cancelling the trip but the choice was as follows: stay home feeling like shit and also have to entertain the kids OR drop the kids at their grandparents as planned and spend the weekend in the Airbnb recuperating, sans children. We chose the latter option and spent the weekend reading, sleeping and bathing in nature.
Although our expectations of a steamy anniversary weekend were stolen by the flu virus, the weekend was wonderfully restorative and exactly what we needed at that particular moment.
I’ve found that even the lowest expectations will be turned on their head and a sense of humour is needed to avoid the cycle of perpetual disappointment from unmet expectations for our dates.
Even our funnest date so far amounted to less than our glamorous expectations. Miraculously, we were not ill when it came time for our date, which was cause for celebration in itself. We went to Sydney for the night to attend ‘Pub Choir’ at the Enmore Theatre, an audience-based impromptu choir, where you are tasked with belting out pub favourites along with 1000 other people. It was super fun and singing All Night Long by Lionel Richie with a wholesomely diverse crowd of strangers had my oxytocin riding high. My delight was heightened by cocktails and conversation with the witty and hilarious man I was delightfully reacquainting myself with.
The less glamorous side emerged when it was time to go back to our hotel, the booking of which was entrusted to my husband. Since we so rarely stay in hotels, we thought it would be a nice treat to book a room.
Well, now I know what $150 a night will get you at an Ibis Hotel in Sydney. You’ll be wedged between a KFC and a Maccas, the scent of both awakening you in the morning. Though after a few cocktails this feature did appear more of a pro, than a con.
You’ll receive a matchbox of a room with pebblecrete ceilings, lime-green walls and a fibreglass portaloo sealed in the corner, by way of a bathroom. The vanity for said bathroom will be placed on the other side of the room next to the bed, like your own personal bedside water feature. You will not receive any soap, all hooks for hanging clothing will be absent and the window will be sealed shut with no way to invite fresh air inside the closet of a room.
The pièce de résistance appeared as I lay on the admittedly comfortable bed and looked up at the ceiling where the smoke alarm caught my attention.
It was adorned with a fresh bandaid.
To this day, we haven’t figured out why it was there, though I suspect it may have been an attempt by staff or a patron (we’ll never know) to cover the little blinking light. But as I lay there, breathing in the stale scent of the room, the sight of that skin sticker tipped me into manic laughter.
It appeared to me that Ibis Hotels chose an appropriate namesake in the garbage-devouring bin chicken. Although, perhaps that is a disservice to the humble and loveable Australian ibis. We love to poke fun at the bird but we also lovingly claim it as our mascot, a piece of Australian culture that we sardonically celebrate… Like Raygun.
This loving, tongue-in-cheek relationship does not exist for Ibis Hotels. One star.
It was so absurd that I couldn’t help but laugh and it added a little flavour of the unexpected to the date and now makes for a funny story. I will, however, be vetting all accommodation in the future.
Some of our best dates have been the ones without expectations at all. Where we follow our noses and end up drinking beer and playing snooker at Wests, or going for a long swim in the ocean off Flagstaff Point, or simply grabbing a decent meal without the anxiety of trying to eat in public with small kids.
The work it takes to carve time for our relationship rewards us with a sense of ease in our daily life. Keeping our fingers on the pulse of our connection creates a synchronicity in our energy that makes it so much easier to be kind to one another. And when we inevitably fall off the rails and miss a month, we know what we need to do to make our way back to each other.
