Raising my babies while they raise me

Before Liam and Hannah were born, I thought my life was perfect. I enjoyed my job, I loved my husband, we were living a reasonably comfortable life and my biggest worries were what we were going to eat for supper that night, or how I would explain a splurge shop when we were supposed to be saving diligently. When we decided to start a family, I thought that things could only get better. And they did, but not exactly in the way I had expected… Our real life journey began somewhere in 2008 when I eventually conceived after trying for six months. Liam was born in 2009 and he was perfect and wonderful in every way. Even the sleepless nights, the constant exhaustion, the arguing over every.single.thing with my husband and the depleting savings account, did not matter to me. We were totally in love and besotted with our bouncing baby boy. He made up for how hard it really was. Having a new baby put a strain on our marriage as we both began to realise that we couldn’t pack Liam away into a cupboard when we wanted to go out with our friends, or when he was miserable from teething, or when we both just wanted to sleep while all he wanted to do was cry! As we grew closer to Liam, we grew apart from each other… the time we’d once dedicated to each other, was now been split between our son, between the increasing bills, between balancing work and having a baby and trying to maintain a social life of sorts. We fought a lot as we struggled to adapt to our new role as parents. No sooner had we just started to get the knack of it, I discovered I was pregnant again. By the time I found out, I was already 12 weeks along and Liam was nine months old at the time. It came as a huge shock, we were not ready. I remember crying in my gynaecologist’s office as I watched my squidgy baby swimming on the sonar scan - already fully developed with 10 fingers and toes. She thought I was crying in happiness, but really I was devastated. How would we afford another baby? How would I look after two babies? Would I have enough love for this baby who I didn’t even want? What would this do to my marriage? What would this do to Liam? I was still breastfeeding, Liam was still waking at night and I had just started a new job. It felt like my life was going up in flames and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I took much longer to bond with my pregnant belly, and even though my husband was very supportive and we believed that this was God’s will, I still battled to come to grips with it.