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Parenting and Partnership: A Fresh Start For Your Marriage

Is your marriage feeling the impact of the challenges that come with parenthood?

Parenthood doesn't have to mean the end of your love story. Parenthood is just the start of a new chapter in your marriage. Your marriage can have that spark even while you're raising kids.

Don't let yourself get jaded or believe that marriage has to be hard after you become parents. You can learn how to balance love and parenting and make your marriage even better than you imagined. Parenthood was never meant to come between you and your love.

While society may lay out a traditional roadmap for us — education, career, serious relationship, marriage, and family — the reality is that marriage is not a finite goal. It's a journey of growth, evolving with time.

The Excitement of Beginnings:

From the early days of envisioning a life together to the...

We all know being a mom is HARD.

And they say that if you think you're failing at it, then you're doing it right.

It's particularly tough trying to raise your kids differently than how you were raised. You try to implement conscious parenting approaches in your home and it feels so good when you notice positive changes, but it absolutely takes a lot of mental effort to be this intentional.

However, did you know there's a style of parenting that goes beyond conscious parenting? I sure didn't until I chatted with this week's guest, Cara Tyrrell!

In this week's episode of The Marriage & Motherhood Podcast, I interviewed Cara Tyrrell to talk all about what collaborative parenting and how it works.

Cara Tyrrell is a Vermont based Early Childhood Educator, Collaborative Parenting Coach, and the founder of Core4Parenting™. She is the passionate mastermind behind the Collaborative Parenting Methodology™, a birth-to-five, soul and science based framework...

Parenting is hard enough, what if you have different parenting styles than your husband?

That can make things feel exponentially harder when both of you feel like you're undoing what the other's trying to do.

In this week's episode of The Marriage & Motherhood Podcast, I interviewed Danielle Bettmann of Parenting Wholeheartedly.

Positive-Discipline certified parenting coach, Danielle Bettmann, empowers parents to crack the code of their strong-willed child's personality, meet their deepest core needs to improve their behavior, and find new levels of patience. An early childhood educator, certified teacher and home visitor, Danielle now equips parents from all over over Zoom! Host of the well-loved podcast, Failing Motherhood, she's passionate about eliminating shame from parents' vocabulary, reminding them they are the parent their kids need. She is also a mom to two daughters, wife of 13 years to her high-school sweetheart, and an avid fan of sunshine and coffee.

In...

Conflict is actually good for your marriage.

I think a lot of you will probably agree with me on this, in that Disney movies, and all those fairy tales really ruined us in terms of how we define a happy marriage. Growing up, all the way up until probably the last five, or six years. My idea of a happy marriage did not involve conflict. It didn't involve arguments. I thought that if you argued that meant that your relationship was not healthy. Lo and behold, in my experience of conflict in my marriage earlier on and in my past relationships, there were a lot of conflicts. Anytime I got upset or annoyed or something didn't meet my needs, or I felt disappointed in some sense. There was conflict. That led to a lot of different beliefs from me, in my head, my lovely mind. It created a lot of drama for me. Beliefs, like, “Oh, I'll never find someone who fully gets me.” It was just a lot of back and forth a lot of conflicting beliefs around a conflict in...

Who is responsible for your happiness?

I don't know about you, but I thought whoever I was dating was responsible for my happiness. In fact, I used to pride myself in being this super chill, low-maintenance kind of girlfriend or partner, and when anniversaries roll around, or any kind of thing to celebrate, Valentine's day anniversary, birthdays, you name it, I would get upset. I would get upset for not having my expectations met. Expectations that I never shared, by the way, because I wanted to be this other version of a person. That was not true to who I was and what I wanted. I, for some reason, would judge people who needed this. Something that shows that that person was a big deal. I thought that if I wasn't like that, I was better, but I wasn't being honest with myself. 

I would get upset because they wouldn't do anything. Or they would just, get me a card, and then we go out to dinner. I would have this inner conflict inside, where I'm like, “Well, I'm...

How is your marriage impacted by how you deal with emotions. 

How you deal with your emotions has such a huge impact, and for something that affects so much of your life, how you deal with your family, how you deal with your friends, work stuff, community, strangers, you interact with your marriage, and your kids. It's really surprising why we're not taught this in schools, why is that not a requirement? For students? Why are we not taught emotional awareness, emotional intelligence, and effective communication? Can you imagine if, if we grew up learning that not just from experience, but actually learning it? Can you imagine how much drama we could have avoided or prevented in our lives? From recess, and quarrels, to relationship challenges, that would fix a lot of drama in our lives. On the marriage front, imagine all the times you would have spent connecting instead of feeling disconnected and distraught. If I could go back in time, I wish that I would have...

We're gonna be talking about how self-care really impacts your marriage. 

Every single relationship if I'm being honest. If you don't know, I help unhappy moms who feel lost in their marriage to be happy again, and a lot of times, we get to that place of feeling lost, because we're no longer getting our needs met anymore. If you have that go-to coping mechanism of stepping into a victim mentality, you might ask yourself, why aren't they giving me what I need anymore? Why did they stop? What happened here? And what we really should be asking? On top of that question is, what have I done? To get us here? Not from a place of blame, but from a place of awareness? What part did I play? To get us to where we are right now? Because it takes both of you to get there. 

We tend to feel lost in our marriage. 

Because our partner stopped doing something, and why did they stop doing that thing, because we stopped being the person that they married. Right? We are all...

When you think of ways to work on your marriage, society has pretty much defined the go-to route as couples counseling.

Counseling is great, however, what if your husband doesn't want to go or what if it doesn't work? Does this mean that your relationship is doomed?

If neither of those work, don’t give up, there are other options out there for you!

To name some... there’s marriage coaching, marriage retreats, marriage workshops, and marriage classes!

If you're in a situation where you feel lost in your marriage, you're unhappy and you don't know what to do next and counseling is not an option, your marriage can still survive and thrive! Your fate is not doomed for divorce or indefinite misery because the most widely known option (counseling) isn’t available.

If you are thinking, “well, my partner didn’t want to go to couples counseling so how would any other method work?” Let’s dig deeper into that question.

We Only Have...

How To Know If Your Marriage Needs Work

 Marriage is not always sunshine and rainbows. If you walked into marriage feeling that was the bar that you had to meet, let’s abolish that thought. Marriage, just like everything in life, goes through seasons. It’s the same in motherhood, where there are times it feels like everything is smooth sailing and then something happens and you're thinking, “I don't know what the hell I'm doing.”

Marriage goes through seasons as well. There is so much pressure put on a marriage. We expect our partners to be a certain way and to meet our expectations and make us happy. We're not always doing this intentionally though. Sometimes it's very much unintentional. Even being a marriage coach, I go through this as well. I was subconsciously expecting my spouse to do things I never shared I wanted or I had this unrealistic expectation that I was holding over him.

Where Are You in Your Marriage?

We have so much...

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Why is marriage so hard when you have kids? 

Relationships are hard in general. We're all walking around with all these different ideas of what it takes to be in a relationship, what we think is normal, and what we think is healthy. Sometimes we think both are the same. We grew up with our parent's marriage being the prime example of what we think it means to be in a relationship. How do they love each other? How do they show that? How affectionate were they with each other? How do they communicate with each other? How do they handle conflict? How do they prioritize each other? How did they communicate with you? How did they handle conflict with you? How did they react to you when you were expressing your emotions? Like when you were crying a lot, when you were angry, or when you were frustrated? What about when you were happy? Were you even allowed to express your emotions outside of happiness? Personally, my parents were not comfortable with emotions....