5 tips for supporting your partner when they have a baby (and it isn't yours)

If you're visiting a new baby, this article at Offbeat Mama is a good starting point. But if one of the parents is your partner, it's probably not enough. You're not just visiting a baby, you're meeting an important new member of your family, and the worries about overstaying your welcome, or intruding at an emotionally vulnerable time probably don't apply. So, what should you do, and what can you expect?

After attending PolyDay for the second time, I'm aware that this might be an increasingly common situation in my community. You might be years off starting a family of your own, still looking for your perfect co-parent(s) or even be resolutely child-free, but the more relationships we have, the greater the chance is that one of our partners is at a different stage of life, or makes different decisions to us.

So you might not be ready to have children, or even want them at all, but now you have them, by proxy at least.

Either you are supportive of your partner's choice, and try to be involved with their new family member, or you risk drifting apart. Evolution gives new parents a one-track mind, so unless you're part of this, there's a good chance that they just won't have time for you.

So, if you decide you want to be a source of support, and a part of your partner's new family, how should you do it? You're in a better position than most of their friends, as not only do you probably know them better, but the intimacy that you have means that they may be more comfortable accepting your help and falling apart in front of you. My husband advises new parents to have no one around for long unless you would be comfortable crying in front of them, but you probably fall into that bracket, right?

1. Offer to help with nappies
If you've had a baby, you'll understand why I'm saying this. If you haven't, you'll probably be scared of the yuck and of doing it wrong. But most new parents haven't had a great deal of experience with this skill either, and now they have to do it 6-10 times a day. It's terrifying. So, if you're confident, offer to change a nappy, perhaps asking for supervision. If you're unsure, offer to help or ask to watch, so you can do it on your own next time. Even with poo, it's not that bad, I promise, and once you've done it (and the baby's parents can see you can do it), you'll feel much more comfortable with the idea of baby care, and become a much more useful source of support.

The parents might turn down your offers of help. Maybe they're uncomfortable having other people care for their new child, or maybe they're trying to be polite. They will definitely appreciate the offer. There won't be many people who feel comfortable or willing enough to offer, so it shows your commitment to both your partner, and keeping involved in this new person's life.

As time goes on, the parents will become more confident, and nappies will become less of an issue. But your early involvement will be a sound investment in keeping your bond with your partner and their child.

2. Feed the parents.
If you're visiting the new baby in hospital, after the birth, bring food. The mother and her birth partner(s) will be starving, and struggling to survive on hospital rations. Giving birth is hard work, even for the people who are just there for support, and it's likely none of them had a chance to eat much (or sleep at all) during labour. If you don't get a chance to ask them what to bring, cake and biscuits are usually safe. This is not the time for salad.

If you're visiting at home, bring food. New parents struggle to find time to eat, let alone prepare food. It can be hard to accept care from friends or even family, but you're probably used to caring for your partner, so they will probably be grateful of a cooked meal, or even a sandwich. Recovering from birth and beginning breastfeeding takes a tremendous number of calories just to keep on an even keel, so I guarantee that help in this area will be welcome, whether your partner is the mother, or just the co-parent who is trying to care for her. I had people bringing me plates of food, snacks and hunks of cake continuously for the first four weeks, and dear God it was amazing.

You know your partner better than most, so you'll know what sort of food they'll appreciate. Just make sure it takes little or no preparation, and if possible, can be eaten with one hand.

Oh, and if you ever see someone breastfeeding, offer her a drink.

3. Help around the house.
New parents might still feel like they have to 'host', but hopefully, you'll be close enough to both of them to be able to pitch in without them becoming uncomfortable. Someone did our washing up without asking when Small was two weeks old, and I'm still grateful. If you see any little jobs that need doing, just do them, and if you have the time to do anything more, ask if you could run a hoover around, or hang the washing out. Again, this is the sort of help that would make most people uncomfortable, but it's much easier to accept from someone you love.

4. Get comfortable with your new family member.
Get comfortable cuddling them, making faces, singing songs, patting and rocking them to sleep. Cuddling them as you dance around works with most newborns. The more confident you get with these new skills (and calming and keeping babies happy is definitely a skill!) the easier you'll find it both to support your partner, and stay an intrinsic part of their family.

Personally, in the first few months, I was usually desperate for a break from the dratted child (sorry, Small...) so was much happier when someone offered to hold her so I could throw on some washing, than if they had offered to help with the housework. Sometimes, what I really wanted was to have a bath with the bathroom door closed, so it might feel that just holding the baby isn't enough of a help, but your partner might be both grateful of the break, and happy that you want to spend time with their child.

5. Be aware that the ground has shifted
If your partner has just given birth, you'll know not to expect sex for a while, but even if your partner is the mother's co-partner, you might not be sharing a bed. The baby is the parents' priority, and newborns need parenting 24 hours a day. Everything is different now, and the space the two of you had before has gone. It will take time to work out how things have changed for you both.

It's not easy to predict how the recovery will affect the intimacy between you and your partner, even if your partner isn't the one recovering from the birth. The first few weeks are overwhelming, but it will get easier. There is a reason everyone tells you that they grow up so fast. It's a cliché, but they really do. It may seem almost impossible for you to find space to be with your partner now, but things will change incredibly quickly. The two of you can find a way to reconnect, but you'll need to be patient and gentle with the parents, and don't push it.

There is also no exaggeration to the cliché that your life is never the same again after having children, so you can't expect your partner to give you what they used to. But don't see this as a bad thing. Supporting your partner as they settle into parenthood will bring you closer in a new way, and when they're able, they will be even more delighted to support you with your life changes, whatever those will be.

Being a part of a person's life right from the very beginning is a peculiar and rare privilege, and so even as things between you and your partner are changing, new opportunities for love are blossoming. Enjoy it. They grow up so fast.

Demeter by Carol Ann Duffy

Where i lived – winter and hard earth.
i sat in my cold stone room
choosing tough words, granite, flint,

to break the ice. My broken heart –
i tried that, but it skimmed,
flat, over the frozen lake.

She came from a long, long way,
but i saw her at last, walking,
my daughter, my girl, across the fields,

In bare feet, bringing all spring’s flowers
to her mother’s house. i swear
the air softened and warmed as she moved,

the blue sky smiling, none too soon,
with the small shy mouth of a new moon.

from The World's Wife

Where do you find the time?

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers - ALBJ, An Open Book, More Than Nuclear, One Sub's Mission, Post Modern Sleaze, and Rarely Wears Lipstick - will write about their views on one of them. This month, our topic is "Daily Life" - visit the other blogs to read the other perspectives on this topic.

"Where do you find the time?" This is the question I'm most often asked when I tell other mothers about my relationships. I don't always manage, I tell them, but this is why it is worth it

There are several different ways and places that we spend time together. Tonight, it works something like this.

My boyfriend and I have a date. Before I became a parent, this would mean I would go to his place, he would cook dinner, we'd have sex, plan to watch a film, talk too much, realise it was too late, cuddle up, and go to sleep. We rarely went out together. Now, it works differently. I check with my husband, (as me going out means he must stay in), and I put the date into our calendar.

Before my husband and I were married, when we lived more than 50 miles apart, I would plan our time together carefully in advance. I would think about food, drink, clothes, hair and makeup, daydreaming about that first touch, that first kiss. We took care to show each other our best faces, and tried to make our limited time perfect. After many years of living together, we still plan our time together in this way, but only rarely. We see each other every day, and so our days are filled with little, unplanned moments of intimacy that make planning ahead less of a necessity. In some ways, my relationship with Jemmy is locked into the old model: even though we have been together longer than any of my other relationships barring my marriage, the structure doesn't change much. Our time together is always precious, rarely casual. The terminology the polyamorous use to pin down these differences rarely seems satisfactory, but whether you call it primary and secondary, domestic and non-domestic, live-in and not, the two are just different. With my husband, there is always tomorrow, but with Jemmy, there rarely is.

And like I used to when my husband lived far away, I daydream about our time together. I imagine how he will smile when I open his front door, how it will feel when I touch him and take him into my arms. My husband and I rarely embrace the way he and I do any more, which might sound sad, but it's not. It's bittersweet to see your lover after a separation, even if it's just a few days, and so this fervency makes up for lost time that I don't lose with my husband. With him, there is no bitterness to make up for.

If Jemmy and I are going to have dinner together, this means my husband has to handle both dinner time and bed time for our daughter. There's a strange pull of freedom and guilt to that. In any case, the last thing I do before leaving the house is feed Small, and I do so, praying that she will go to sleep easily without me. She's usually had her dinner by this point, and might even be in her pyjamas ready for bed, depending on when I leave. I say goodbye to them both, and my husband sends Jemmy his love.

I still don't leave my daughter often, or for long. Evenings at home are not the same; even without considering the knife-edge of awareness that she is asleep upstairs and could wake up at any time, there are always things I need to do. At his house, I'm off duty, but still at home. He cooks me dinner, he fetches me a drink, and I can't spend the time with the housework of parenting, preparing for the next day. There is no baby upstairs. We would like to spend more time all four of us together, as a family, but sometimes, I need this. It's worth making the time for.

The evening probably passes much as you imagine it would, with the subtle differences that make all relationships unique. At some point, I start to become more aware of the time. There are consequences to staying out late. My daughter might need help to sleep; my husband has work in the morning, and I don't want him to be tired, or to feel that my time with Jemmy creates a burden on him; and I rarely get more than a couple of hours sleep at a time, so feel an urgent pull to bed as the evening wears on. And I won't be sleeping at this house.

As we say goodnight, he tells me he wishes that I could stay, and we talk about the indeterminate future, when the demands of parenting will have lessened enough for this to be possible. We remember waking up together, lazing around his house over breakfast before getting dressed. But not tonight. It's a wrench to leave him after so few hours, but I'm running out of time.

Back at home, my husband is waiting up for me, and I think how incredibly lucky I am to be loved by these two men. Our daughter is asleep beside him, and I climb into bed between them, taking care not to wake her. Without any conscious thought we find ourselves in each other's arms, the high-pitched sounds of her breathing behind me. It's strange and beautiful to leave them both and come back with fresh eyes. Although just a moment ago I was wishing to be elsewhere, now, I wouldn't be anywhere else.

No rules? No such thing.

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers - ALBJ, An Open Book, More Than Nuclear, One Sub's Mission, Post Modern Sleaze, and Rarely Wears Lipstick - will write about their views on one of them. This month, our topic is "Rules and Boundaries" - visit the other blogs to read the other perspectives on this topic.

Most of what is written about rules in polyamorous relationships concerns rules designed to limit secondary relationships or to protect the security of a primary relationship. A particular (and valid) concern is that sometimes rules are put in place before the secondary relationships even exist, and so at least one of the people who will be subjected to them can't be consulted and it doesn't seem fair to place restrictions around a relationship that doesn't even exist yet.

A couple might decide that they will go on dates no more than once a week, or maybe just that they will never organise dates on a Friday. They could insist that they will never allow their primary partner to sleep alone, that they will each have the power of "veto" over the other's new relationships or maybe that potential new partners must be actively approved. There are all kinds of rules that people in polyamorous relationships (especially newly non-monogamous ones) might create to protect their own relationship by limiting their others.

I'm not going to write about those sort of rules, because we don't have them and we don't want them. The stability of my marriage has honestly never concerned me and so we didn't design any rules to protect it. And now, my relationship with my boyfriend and my husband's relationship with his girlfriend bring nothing but good things into our lives, so why would we want to limit them with rules?

But there are limits around them. We haven't purposefully chosen rules or boundaries to limit them, but they do exist. The most obvious ones are there because we have a baby.

Having a baby means that my husband and I need to ask the other's permission before we go out on dates, because the other will be on their own with the baby. It means that we can't go away for more than a few hours without creating a serious imposition on the other. It means that I can't stay at my boyfriend's place overnight as I used to, or even be away from my daughter for long. She certainly can't be left alone, and more specifically, she can't get through the night without me. Becoming a parent has placed all kinds of limits around my life, and the more I try to pin down exactly what those limits are, the more they look like that list of hypothetical rules that I said we didn't want.

We may not feel the need to restrict our secondary relationships, but they've been restricted anyway.

I think that the goal of trying not to restrict relationships before they begin is a good one, but I don't think it is always as practical as some people think. I think everyone has limits in their lives that can restrict or even stunt the success of their relationships. Some of those limits might be there for practical reasons, like a mortgage or a demanding job, and some might be there by choice, like the desire to become, or not become, a parent, or the desire to spend a certain amount of time with an existing partner.

Things change. My boyfriend is being patient and understanding with these restrictions around our relationship, partly because he knows that they are reasonable and necessary, and partly because he knows that Small won't be a baby forever. Life changes, and so the space we have for other people changes too. If you want an unlimited amount of space so your relationship can take its most natural, unrestricted form, it's probably best not to date parents, or the polyamorous. And definitely not both.

Personally, I don't want that. The limits that restrict my relationships are there because of the shape of my life, and I want my relationships to be with people with equally full and interesting lives. I know that my boyfriend and my husband's girlfriend love and cherish my daughter, despite the limitations she has created. The things that restrict your relationships might also be the things that make life beautiful and interesting.

Jealousy and breasfeeding

I'm late to comment on Erica Jong's article in the New York Times, Is Sex Passé? but one thing jumped out at me: when listing all the various ways that women have supposedly given up sex for motherhood, she says that if you 'breast-feed at all hours' then your partner 'knows your breasts don’t belong to him.'

Well of course he knows that, I thought. He doesn't need me to breastfeed to know that my breasts, like the rest of my body, belongs to nobody but me. Is this real? Do people really think like this? When we're in a committed relationship, do our partners 'own' our bodies?

To some people, it seems so. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on Beliefnet goes so far as to compare breastfeeding to adultery, as the mother 'gives her breasts to her son and takes them away from her husband'. So only one person can use your breasts at once, and if the baby gets them, Dad will just have to go without.

This is partly a problem with the oversexualisation of breasts (as I blogged about before) but I think some of this comes from an over-enthusiastic application of monogamy: for some, sexual exclusivity translates into ownership.

When I ran this idea past my husband, he was genuinely baffled. The idea that my breasts ever 'belonged' to him, as Jong said, or that he might be jealous of our child's access to my breasts was something that hadn't crossed his mind. Of course, seeing as he doesn't ask for exclusive access to any part of my sexuality, it's hardly surprising that non-sexual contact with my body doesn't bother him. But I hope that you don't need to be polyamorous to have a problem with this level of entitlement. Surely you can be monogamous without expecting your partner to actually belong to you?

Ultimately, I don't think this is a problem with monogamy, but I can see that perhaps a more open-minded attitude to relationship structures might help. When, like Jong and Boteach, your monogamous principles are challenged by the normal, healthy act of breastfeeding, it probably isn't the breastfeeding that's causing the problem. If people had a broader view of the different kinds of ways in which we can love, perhaps they'd be able to choose monogamy without feeling conflicted when they use their breasts to care for their child. (And as we're so far away from the WHO's goal of exclusive breastfeeding until 6 months, and continued breastfeeding until at least 2 years, we need all the help we can get.) Then, maybe, we'd be able to ditch the old-fashioned notion that sexuality and motherhood are somehow antithetical.

Needs and wants

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers - ALBJ, An Open Book, More Than Nuclear, One Sub's Mission, Post Modern Sleaze, and Rarely Wears Lipstick - will write about their views on one of them. This month, our topic is "Needs/wants" - visit the other blogs to read the other perspectives on this topic.

When it comes to our relationships, what do we need, and what do we merely want? In most cases, I think it's a false and maybe even unhelpful distinction.

Babies don't know the difference. Gina Ford, The Baby Whisperer and other parenting experts advise against feeding babies whenever they cry, because if babies got what they wanted, they might end up being fed so often it exhausts the mother. They just don't need milk this often. Far better, they say, to stretch the distance between their feeds to 2, 3 or even 4 hours to make sure that they are really hungry, and will take a sufficient "good" feed.

Two weeks ago, a study was published that suggested that scheduling or stretching out their feeds in this way might actually lower their IQ. Babies who were fed on demand (whether than was with a bottle or the breast) performed significantly better at school, even when their parents only demand-fed because they couldn't handle sticking to the routine. Feeding to a schedule is also associated with childhood obesity, as babies are trained to take in more milk than is comfortable to encourage less frequent feeding.

So if you have a baby like mine, who fed erratically, often more than once an hour, is satisfying this hunger just a want, or is it a need?

The same study found that to a certain extent, Gina Ford and The Baby Whisperer were right - feeding your baby to a schedule results in mothers who are better rested and who report feeling less tearful and overwhelmed. Making their child wait made them more likely to get what they wanted.

So, to put it bluntly, as a parent, you have a choice: sublimate your own desires, or stunt your child's intelligence and health. When it comes to going to the toilet, waiting for a more convenient place to pull the car over, or leaving my dinner to burn, I sometimes choose me. But what having a baby has taught me about my own needs and wants is that a lot of things I thought I needed, like unbroken sleep, I could actually do without. I still want more sleep, of course, but I'm surprised at how little I actually need.

Which is why I think that when it comes to romantic relationships, the distinction between wants and needs is misleading. Some of the things that you thought you needed, you may discover that you can do without, as I discovered I could do without sleep for my daughter. But if you don't want to do without them, do you need to reframe it as a "need" to make that desire valid?

When people ask us why, if my marriage is so happy, do we need other partners, I say that I don't. It's not that I need other partners; I just don't need monogamy. I could do it - I just don't want to. Why is it necessary to need other partners for me to seek them out?

There is a risk, I suspect, that separating out what you need from what you merely want could make it easier for you and maybe even your partners to to treat these things as "not important". Just because you don't need something, (whether that is a daily phonecall or a regularly cleaned bathroom) it doesn't mean that it isn't important - as I've shown, ignoring what babies want might have very serious consequences. Fellow "Poly Means Many" blogger, Polly Oliver has written about how she values a certain degree of selfishness in her partners, and I think she's right. It's healthy to want things. My daughter wanted food more often than I was told she would, and it turns out, she had good reasons.

But just as giving up what you want can be a bad idea, you might need to put aside some of the things you had previously labeled as "needs" to keep a relationship that's important to you. It can be so so worth it, as becoming a mother has shown me. I have so little of the things I thought I needed, but am happier and more fulfilled than ever. Even if I still wish I got more sleep.

Jealousy

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month six bloggers - ALBJ, An Open Book, More Than Nuclear, One Sub's Mission, Post Modern Sleaze, and Rarely Wears Lipstick - will write about their views on one of them. This month, our topic is "Jealousy" - visit the other blogs to read the other perspectives on this topic.

March's topic was on Jealousy: a very common topic when discussing polyamory. I wasn't able to take part, but please have a look at those who did!