The change that doesn't always get thought about

A baby arrives, and there is suddenly an enormous amount to do. Nappies to buy, bottles to wash, meals to make, washing to put on, appointments to remember, and a baby who seems to need something every few minutes. Your partner is exhausted and recovering from the birth, and you want to be there for them. You are working out what the baby needs, what they need, and what needs doing next.

So you get on with it.

Perhaps you go back to work and find yourself thinking about the baby all day. Perhaps you take on more at home. You learn how to settle the baby, where everything is kept, which delivery slot is easiest and how to make dinner with one hand. You start thinking in terms of what needs doing rather than how you are feeling. There isn't much opportunity to stop and ask yourself how you are, and you don't really notice that you haven't.

For dads and partners, all of this comes built in. When a baby arrives, the attention goes to the baby and to the person who gave birth. They may need a huge amount of care, particularly in those early weeks and months, and you take on the role of supporting them and keeping everything else going. Two thirds of new dads say they hide how they are really feeling.¹ Nearly half feel their own struggles do not count next to their partner's.¹ It is not difficult to see how that happens.

If your partner is struggling, there may not feel like much room for you to struggle too. If the birth was difficult, your experience of what happened may not seem to count. If the first weeks have been a blur of feeding and almost no sleep, you might not mention that you are running on nothing as well. If someone in the house is frightened or overwhelmed, one of you needs to stay calm.

So you become the person who gets on with things, and getting on with things can work remarkably well for a while. It can feel good to be useful. When everything else feels unfamiliar, there is something reassuring about a list of practical jobs you can actually do. You can change the baby, make the tea, go to work, do the shopping, fit the car seat. You can focus on what needs doing and leave the rest for another time.

Except that parenthood isn't only a practical change. It changes your relationship, your routines, your sense of freedom, your understanding of yourself. You may be surprised by how much you miss your old life, even though you love the life you have now. You may find that you miss your partner, and that you don't know how to find your way back to each other now that so much of your attention is taken up by the baby. You may feel proud and frightened, excited and lonely, sometimes without quite knowing why. And if you haven't had much opportunity to think about any of it, it can be difficult to know what you are feeling at all.

Becoming a parent is a psychological change as well as a practical one. You are not simply adding a baby to the life you already had. You are finding your way into a new role while adjusting to the fact that your relationship, your work, your time and your sense of yourself may all feel different.

This is something you might tell yourself you should just get on with. You will have time to think about it later. When the baby sleeps better. When work is less busy. When your partner feels more like themselves again. When life settles down. But sometimes life doesn't really settle down. It changes again.

This is where having some space of your own can help. Not because your experience is the same as your partner's, and not because your needs should compete with theirs, but because you are going through a transition too.

Therapy can provide somewhere to stop for a moment and notice what has actually been happening. You don't have to arrive knowing what you want to talk about, or even feeling that anything is particularly wrong.

When there is a lot going on, our capacity to think about what we are feeling can become quite limited. Having another person alongside you can make it possible to slow things down, to put some of the experience into words and to begin to understand what might be underneath the practical busyness.

You may discover that you are more frightened than you realised. Or that you are grieving something you hadn't really acknowledged losing. Or that you feel further away from your partner than you expected. Or that you are enjoying parenthood enormously and still finding parts of it incredibly difficult. There doesn't have to be a problem to solve, and sometimes it is simply helpful to have somewhere that your experience can exist too.

Because when you are so focused on supporting your partner, it can be surprisingly easy to forget to ask what this enormous change has been like for you, or to make space for it.