Episode 23: What Marriage Really Looks Like When You're Raising Babies and Building a Business
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Erin Leech (00:38)

Hey friend, welcome back to In the Middle of It. As always, my name is Erin Leech, and this week is a personal episode.

This episode is airing on my wedding anniversary. We thought about having Scott come on with me, but yeah, life is life right now and that just did not happen. So I'm still doing a marriage-themed episode this week in honor of my anniversary — specifically about what marriage looks like in these really hard times.

For us, that's the hard season of raising babies and building businesses together and all of life that comes in between. But for you, that could just be raising babies, or building a business, or just being in some kind of hard season personally.

And you might be thinking, why talk about this right now? But I think it really matters, because yeah, it's a little more normalized on social media that parenthood and marriage and everything in between can get really hairy sometimes. You're not necessarily seeing complete highlight reels anymore. But I think even still, the things we see online that are portrayed as not the highlight reel are still kind of highlights in a way. If you're choosing to share it online, it's probably not that bad. The real and raw nitty gritty moments are probably not getting captured to post in a reel — it's going to be stuff that you have to retroactively reflect on and share in some other kind of way. So that's what I'm here to do, because we know that life is challenging when you're raising babies and building businesses, but at the same time it's still really validating sometimes to hear that somebody else is going through some of the same things.

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So let's get into it. Let me just paint a picture of what our marriage really looks like these days. You may or may not see yourself in some of these things. This is not the beautiful anniversary dinner version. This is real life, random Tuesday afternoon moments and stuff like that.

It looks like sitting on the couch next to each other after bedtime, probably in silence, both of you getting the last things done for the day. Laptops open. Some nights you just stay in that parallel silence, but some other nights one of you closes the laptop — or doesn't even take it out at all — and says, hey, I need to talk about something, or hey, how are you actually doing these days? And you have a real conversation with one another.

Sometimes it looks like heated debates over bedtime and what that looks like, or your division of labor at home — who said they were going to do what and when. Debates that feel really important in the moment, but in the grand scheme of things probably don't really matter and probably won't even matter in two weeks.

And along those same lines, it looks like holding your tongue about the little things and seriously, consciously choosing to let it go — because you've learned, slowly but surely, that most of the things that annoy you on a Thursday afternoon are not going to matter in a week. And it's probably not even what you're actually annoyed about. You're just tired. You're touched out. You're two people who are giving a lot to your family right now and running a little bit low.

It also looks like a long hug when you're just passing each other in the kitchen. You finally don't have any kids attached to you for once and you just have a nice moment. And then you move on and go back to the kids.

Or it could look like finally being out running errands by yourself with some kid-free time, and you pick up each other's favorite drink just because you know that when you get back home, it's a little something that will make them smile. And sometimes that's really all you need.

It looks like eye contact in the middle of a laughing fit over something your toddler did, where you just know you're both saying, man, what a life that we have — without saying any words at all.

It looks like forgetting to arrange someone to watch the dogs when you go away for the weekend, because you both have a million and three things on your mind and it's just the one thing that fell through the cracks.

Needless to say, it's hard. These newborn months especially are hard in a way that's really difficult to explain unless you're in it. But it's also all about remembering — not to be corny, but — this too shall pass. For us, we've been through this hard season before. So with perspective, we can look back and say that of the almost three years of Leon's life, those really hard newborn days were just a blip on the timeline. And percentage-wise, it's just gonna keep getting smaller and smaller. So when we look at it like that, it gives you a little perspective that you're gonna be okay, and it's not as bad as it feels in the moment. Before we know it, we're gonna be looking at our Google Photos memories of these days and wondering where all the time went. So let the crappy moments be crappy, be as present as you can in the joyful ones, and know that — for better or for worse, to be a little marriage-punny — it all won't last long.

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And even deeper than that, in these tough seasons — whether it involves babies or businesses or both — underneath all of it, in order to stay truly connected to each other even when life feels full or overflowing, is a lot of intention. Our marriage did not happen automatically. It did not become what it is today because one day we just woke up and this is what we have. It takes a lot of intention. Quiet, not-sexy choices every day to choose each other, choose our marriage, and choose our family.

And the beginning of all of that is just naming where you're at and acknowledging what's going on around you. Specifically, the newborn phase — or really just the early years of parenting altogether — is going to naturally turn you and your partner into co-managers faster than you can blink. That's just the way it is sometimes. You're going to have that roommate era that people talk about, where you're kind of living parallel lives. You're coordinating life together rather than having deep connection. You're delegating things to each other rather than going on date nights. You're too exhausted. It's not even a thought sometimes.

It's just one decision after another — who has the baby, who's making dinner, who took the last middle-of-the-night wake-up, who needs to be where and when. And if you don't acknowledge what that is — that it's just a season, and it's going to fly by — it can feel like you're losing yourselves in all of it. Like the spark you had is just gone.

And yes, this roommate era is real. But it means nothing about your marriage. It just means you have a newborn. That's it. It doesn't mean anything about you or your connection. You just have to acknowledge, yeah, we're kind of in survival mode right now, and that's okay. Soon enough you'll be out of it — going on date nights, having all of the fun husband-and-wife time you used to love and enjoy. And naming it takes a lot of pressure off both of you, because you're not trying to also fix something that isn't really even broken.

You're not failing. You're just in a hard season. And seasons change.

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The other thing I've been really intentional about is learning the difference between little things and real things. This took me a while. I'm still working on it. I have to really consciously make these decisions.

There are things that bother me — about our household, how things get done, the division of labor — that are real and worth talking about. Those conversations matter. Those are important to address. But then there are things that bother me because I'm tired and overstimulated, or I've been holding a small human or been touched by small humans all day and I just don't have any more spoons left. Those things in the moment feel massive and urgent. But almost always, I just have to remind myself to take a breath and hold onto it for a moment before I open my mouth, because more often than not, it's just really not that big of a deal.

I'm talking things like the different ways that we clean, the different ways we view organization. These are things Scott and I have acknowledged time after time. I don't try to change him and how he is because it's not inherently wrong or bad — we're just different. It's not anything groundbreaking. It's literally just like, I don't like the way you folded that shirt. That is not something I'm going to go marching downstairs and bring up, or hold onto until after bedtime when I can address it. No, Erin. Just get over it. If it really bothers you that much, refold the shirt yourself and move on. All those little things like that.

You just have to learn to pause and ask yourself: is this real, or am I just tired? Am I just fed up with something else in life that's projecting onto this moment right now? And more often than not, that's exactly what's happening. Looking at it like that has genuinely changed how many unnecessary — not even arguments, because we don't really argue — but discussions and conversations we have. It's not zero, but it's definitely fewer. And the conversations we do have now are about things that actually matter, like our son's bedtime routine and things that are truly important to us and our family.

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And another big way that we've both made our marriage intentionally better throughout all of the ups and downs is not waiting until something is broken to fix it. The biggest example of this is seeing a couples therapist. Scott and I started seeing a couples therapist a while back — last summer, maybe. And it's not like we see them every week. We actually haven't seen him in a while just because life has been a little crazy. But we didn't go because things were bad. We're not on the brink of separation or anything like that. We went because things were good. Nothing was happening to our marriage, but there were these consistent things that kept coming up that we felt it might be helpful to have an unbiased person help us work through.

We were trying to conceive when we started seeing him, and then I did end up getting pregnant. So we knew that adding a second kid to an already full life would be a challenge no matter what, but we wanted to set ourselves up for the best success possible before all of that happened.

And not waiting until something is on the brink before you give it attention is a little radical, in a way. I can tell, because the second we mentioned it to our moms, they get this look on their face like, oh my gosh, is something happening? And it's like, no, no — we're good. That's kind of the whole point. We're okay, but we know we can be better.

We didn't want to wait until we were drowning before asking for help. We just decided that even though we're good, that's only a foundation. We want to build on top of that and be even better. And I think that's just how Scott and I are as individuals. Thankfully, we complement each other really well there.

And even in business — when you're an entrepreneur, you're not waiting until your business is failing to do new things, make things better, innovate, grow, and scale. You're doing that all the time. So if you're not gonna wait for a business you love to start faltering before you invest in making it stronger, why would you do that with your marriage? If anything, it's even more important.

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And on a relevant side tangent — both Scott and I have online businesses. He also does coaching, he's got a membership and courses and his own podcast, the whole nine yards. And it's been really interesting to go through life together doing all of this at the same time. It's a lot sometimes. You kind of feel like you never have a free moment or you're never fully caught up.

If Scott has the opportunity to give me some quote-unquote free time, he'll often ask me if I have anything I need to get done. And so many times I just look at him like, yeah babe, I have things to do until I die — I'm an entrepreneur, that's just what I signed up for. Because even when I feel like business is rolling and it's this well-oiled machine creating revenue steadily, there's still going to be things I want to do. I'm ambitious, and I'm always thinking of the next thing. So even when I reach what right now feels like a pinnacle of business, there's going to be a new pinnacle at that level.

And when two people both have big dreams and both need time and space and energy to pursue those — plus Scott has an actual career and job on top of his business — plus you're raising babies together, there is an inevitable tension around bandwidth. Around whose things take priority this week and who carries more of the home load so the other can get a window of focused work. We are still figuring this out, especially now that we have two kids. But that is the area of life that has taken the most intention between us.

It is not one person helping another. It's genuinely co-creating this life together and supporting each other with whatever we need — and understanding that when one of you gets to work on what lights you up, the whole family wins. When you share an overall vision, you share the sacrifices, yes, but you also share the wins, big and small. It's not always clean and straightforward, but when your foundation — your marriage — is strong, and there's trust and communication and the occasional extra-long hug in the kitchen, the imbalances feel temporary and worthy. They don't even feel like imbalances anymore, because I know that even though I have a lot of work time in the spring and summer, Scott has a lot of work time in the fall. And things kind of balance out.

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And that's what our experience of marriage in the middle of these crazy newborn, figuring-it-out years looks like. It's messy and a lot of the time mundane, but within that it's also really beautiful. Someday we're going to look back on this wonderful season and — as much as I would love for him to do certain things a certain way, and he probably has the same for me — we still love each other so deeply.

So happy anniversary to my guy, because I know he's listening right now. Thank you for letting me talk about our life on the internet and still loving me for all of it.

And for everybody else, thank you as always for being here. I'm Erin Leech. This is In the Middle of It. And this is your reminder that things don't have to be perfect to be really, really good. I'll see you next week.