Our first child is nine years old. The last one is three years and we have three children. What it means is that for the past nine years, I and my husband have never been alone. We’ve been married for ten years. We counted ourselves lucky when we returned from our honeymoon with a pregnancy. We didn’t have time to be alone after marriage though that was our plan.

We wanted to enjoy our new marriage until maybe two or three years before we started making babies. We made plans to travel, see new places as a married couple. We didn’t want to be separated by anything because at the altar when we were exchanging vows, we were told we were one. One means one body and a body travels or goes places in full and not in halves.

We were happy about the pregnancy. We don’t get to decide when God should bless us so though it went against our calendar, we accepted it with our two hands.

We were raising a pregnancy so we were mostly home, watching the kicks of the baby and listening to the sound of his movements while forgetting the world outside. When the child finally arrived, we couldn’t be with ourselves any longer. He was always in our midst receiving the attention we would have given each other if he weren’t in the picture.

Raising a child makes you a parent and being a parent is a different thing. It’s different from being a husband or wife. It’s an added role that requires your presence as long as the child is with you. So we dedicated our presence to our newborn child forgetting who we were from the start. When he cried, we stopped everything. When we tried to cuddle and the baby wanted breast milk, we stopped and fed him. Slowly, being a husband and a wife got relegated to the background. We became full parents armoured with baby responsibilities.

Babies are addictive. Once they begin to grow, you want to replace them with another baby. So we had our second and later the third followed. Two is a company. Five is definitely a crowd so our house became a crowded place where lovers couldn’t hide to do their thing. I remember there was a point in our lives where we forgot what sex was like. We went for a month without realizing we hadn’t been intimate. It’s not our fault. Our third had come and was mostly sick and crying every night and day. How can you have a libido when your baby is crying?

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One thing about us, we forgive ourselves easily and don’t try to be hard on each other. We are not the couple who will count each other’s wrong or point fingers and say, “It’s your fault we are not having sex. You’re always tired.” Or “You don’t give me attention. It’s always about the children.” We never do that because the children are the responsibility of both of us.

When they vacated for the Xmas last year, I told my husband, “Let’s send the kids away.” He didn’t like the sound of it until I toned it down, “I mean they should spend this Xmas somewhere else. They can go to your parents or mine. I can even take them to my sister. She will love to host them.” He asked, “All three of them? Won’t they be a nuisance?” I responded, “Once they’re not here, we won’t care what they become to whoever they visit. Let’s be selfish this once.”

On vacation, we packaged them and sent them to my elder sister who had two kids of her own. When we got back home and threw ourselves on the bed, we slept like we’d been beaten. We woke up at 9 p.m. and looked for something to eat. The TV belonged to us. The chairs, the floor and everything around us were ours. There was nobody to tell us to change the channel to where they were showing Baby Shark. We watched a movie. We stayed apart as if we were strangers. We had forgotten how to act like lovers. I moved into him and we cuddled. It felt different. We were relaxed. We didn’t expect anyone to walk in on us. All night it was just us and our newfound freedom.

The next day we went out. We stayed out all night and didn’t want to come home. We felt what it’s like to be just married couples without the responsibility of parenthood. We made love. In the hall. In the kitchen. In the bath. We made love wherever we felt was conducive. We were having the time of our lives. We celebrated Xmas alone for the first time in ten years.

We missed them. The house felt empty without them but we spread ourselves to occupy the empty spaces they left behind.

Xmas is over. School will soon reopen. That means they’ll come back home very soon. I asked my husband, “When are we going for them?” He answered, “Are we supposed to go for them? I thought…” “You thought what?” I retorted.

We both burst out laughing. Don’t get us wrong. We love our children. We will do anything for them. In our next lives, we will choose them again in the same order. The only thing we will do differently is give ourselves the time and permission to explore our marriage before they come.

My husband said, “If only your sister lived close, we would have sent them to her once every weekend so we could be us again often.”

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I agreed with him. I agreed with him again when he said we should be intentional about ourselves going forward so that what we have started doesn’t go dim. He misses me and I miss him too. We’ll give everything to have this moment last forever but very soon, we’ll go back to being parents again. This time around, we’ll go into it with a strategy—a strategy to block time for ourselves, to remind ourselves who we used to be before parenthood stole all we had from us.

—Mrs Addison

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