The excerpt below is from our webinar “Challenging Behaviors of Children with DMD”. Thank you to our guest speaker psychologist Dr. Natalie Truba of Nationwide Children’s Hospital. Click here to listen to the full podcast episode.
There’s a reason why the majority of divorces occur in the first four years after having children for the first time. Having children is incredibly stressful and it changes the nature of your partner relationship naturally. Kids take a lot of attention and you automatically don’t have as much attention for yourselves.
For this population – where you have kids who need more overtime and they decline more overtime – that never goes away. Normally your kids get to a place and you’re like, “oh, we can reconnect.” But for these boys that need persists. You can quickly find yourself ten years later, like “we’ve been living different lives, just trying to survive. And we don’t really have this partnership.”
Then that adds stress. Sometimes families dissolve and now that’s even more stressful because caring for these boys with two adults is hard enough, let alone doing that as a single parent.
Expectations prior to giving birth are real. Nobody is going to be like, “Oh my gosh, I hope I have kids with chronic medical conditions that are horrific and gonna cost all this time and money and pain. This sounds super fun.”
No. You have all these hopes and dreams for your kid. You give birth, you’re doing great, and then you start to notice these things over time. And there’s a grieving process. Not everybody grieves the same. Parents grieve differently and that can cause stress in your relationship.
Because you don’t know that until you’re in it. It’s not like you’re sifting there through prospective partners and you ask one, “Would you do if your mom died?” You’re not gonna have that conversation and they’re not gonna know. So if they tell you what they would do, they might actually not do that thing because they have never been in it.
And so we just there’s parts that we just don’t know about another person until we’re in it. And those parts can just sometimes be incompatible.
