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Family meetings helped Melissa Petro feel like a team with her husband. (Author not pictured.)
- Melissa Petro is a freelance writer, teacher, wife, and mother living in New York City.
- When she had her first child, she was overwhelmed - and by the end of her first year as a full-time mother, she found her marriage in crisis.
- Her and her husband started to have family meetings, a time they set aside every day to split up work and share information. They have an agenda they stick with, and talk about money right off the bat.
- This system can have big benefits for parents - and it's made Petro feel like she's truly part of a team.
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When our first baby arrived, I was overwhelmed with joy and gratitude. I was also just plain overwhelmed. Meeting the needs of a newborn on top of managing the housework, while weathering hormone-fueled feelings typical to new mothers but foreign to me, including the ambivalence I felt having put my career on hold to do endless piles of laundry, seemed impossible.
All this stress - exacerbated by sleep deprivation - led to countless arguments between myself and my husband.
Instead of carving out the time to work out the logistics of parenting and talk through the feelings that came with it, we blew up at one another in moments of stress. These spats often occurred in the middle of the night, when our newborn wouldn't stop crying and everyone was exhausted. It was then - at four in the morning, Oscar screaming his head off in the other room - that we'd find ourselves airing old resentments, clumsily expressing our feelings, and attacking one another's parenting styles. I felt resentful, misunderstood, and alone. By the end of my first year as a full-time mother, our marriage was in crisis.
Jancee Dunn, journalist and author of "How to Not Hate Your Husband After You Have Kids," can relate. Struggling to cope with the impact that becoming parents had on her relationship, Dunn turned to the latest relationship research, and solicited counsel from some of the country's most renowned couples and sex therapists in order to figure out a way to resolve her and her husband's larger issues and fix their family while there was still time.
While there's no quick solution to the marital discord brought on by parenthood, Dunn says, there was one simple and concrete idea suggested again and again: the family meeting. It's a solution my husband and I have also learned to rely on.