“I Love You… But Also Please Get Away From Me” Marriage, Motherhood, and the Beautiful Disaster No One Warned Us About
I Love You…
But Also Please Get Away From Me
Marriage, Motherhood, and the Beautiful Disaster No One Warned Us About
By Deidre Lopez
Most women walk into adulthood with a quiet script running in the background a mix of assumptions, hopes, and imagined futures stitched together from childhood memories, romantic movies, and whatever examples we grew up around. We think we understand what marriage will feel like, what motherhood will demand, and who we will be inside it all.
And then life… real, unfiltered, unrehearsed life that begins unraveling those assumptions one experience at a time.
Some of us expected harmony and found irritation.
Some expected partnership and found uneven loads.
Some expected motherhood to unlock a magical softness and instead discovered exhaustion powerful enough to make you question your sanity.
We don’t talk about these truths nearly enough, not because they’re shameful, but because they’re unglamorous, and somewhere along the way we started believing that honesty makes us ungrateful.
But here’s what’s real:
Most of us love our husbands deeply and sometimes still want to scream into a pillow because of them. Most of us adore our children with our whole hearts and still fantasize about a quiet room where no one says “Mom!” for fifteen minutes (or more). Most of us crave connection and still need space so badly our bones ache for it.
This is not failure, or selfishness, or a sign that your marriage or motherhood is broken.
This is the human experience. All of it. The whole messy, contradictory, extraordinary thing.
Where the Patterns Begin
My own expectations were shaped long before I ever walked down an aisle. I grew up in a house where love and survival were tangled together, where my mother’s voice could shrink you in a heartbeat and her silence could last weeks, a kind of emotional exile that leaves a child guessing which version of themselves is safe.
She worked hard. She provided. She kept the house running. But she didn’t have tenderness to spare, and the affection she withheld became its own kind of lesson: Don’t need too much. Don’t ask too often. Don’t take up emotional space.
Every woman inherits something from her mother, whether she meant to give it or not.
Maybe your mother gave you warmth you now struggle to replicate.
Maybe she gave you a standard you feel guilty not meeting.
Maybe she gave you wounds you’re still stitching back together.
Maybe she gave you strength that came at a cost.
For me, she gave me the blueprint of over-functioning, of earning love through service, of believing silence meant stability even when it hurt.
And without realizing it, I carried those patterns straight into my marriage.
Marriage: The Glorious, Maddening Mirror
I married a good man; steady, hardworking, loyal but also a man who retreats into silence when he feels overwhelmed or unsure. Not angry silence. Not punishing silence. Just the quiet, distant kind that feels eerily similar to the atmosphere I grew up in.
In the beginning, it didn’t bother me.
But marriage has a way of amplifying the parts of you that haven’t healed.
Add in kids, exhaustion, responsibilities, and two very different emotional languages, and suddenly the gaps become chasms, not cracks.
We’ve had countless conversations about division of labor, emotional presence, communication, and support. And change does happen, sometimes even beautifully, but only for a week or two before life creeps back in and the balance tilts again.
And that’s when the thoughts come in that no one really talks about:
“Is this normal?”
“Do other wives feel this alone sometimes?”
“Would I be happier single?”
“How can I love someone so much and still feel so worn down by them?”
It’s the part of marriage no one warns you about the part where love is steady but compatibility fluctuates, where partnership is real but uneven, where affection exists alongside irritation as natural companions.
You’re not broken for feeling both.
You’re human.
Motherhood: The Love Story and the Identity Theft
As if marriage wasn’t complicated enough, motherhood arrives like a tidal wave no one can fully brace for. And it’s not the glossy version we’re shown - the soft-focus, slow-motion images of a mother smiling over a sleeping baby.
No one told me that my nipples might crack and bleed from dryness. No one told me I might go days without a shower. No one warned me about the mental load: the remembering, planning, soothing, monitoring, anticipating that sits like a weight on the back of your skull 24/7.
No one told me that I would lose myself so completely in caregiving that I would forget what made me happy… or that once I remembered, I would realize I wasn’t that woman anymore.
Motherhood changes everything! Your body, your mind, your priorities, your sense of self, your marriage, your relationship to time.
You can adore your children and still need them to stop talking for five minutes.
You can cherish motherhood and still fantasize about disappearing for a day.
You can love their stories and still want to yell,
“There are TWO adults in this house and both of us know where the juice is!”
This doesn’t make you a bad mother. It makes you one who gives deeply. And anyone who gives deeply needs space to breathe.
Marriage + Motherhood = Emotional Whiplash
The truth is that marriage and motherhood collide in ways nothing can prepare you for.
You go from lovers to co-parents overnight. You go from prioritizing each other to negotiating whose turn it is to wake up early. You go from being touched with desire to being touched with sticky fingers and endless demands.
Your husband might still see you as the woman he married; the one with energy, spontaneity, softness while you’re standing there held together by caffeine, dry shampoo, and the sheer willpower of a woman who hasn’t peed alone in eleven years.
Sometimes you look at him and feel a wave of love. Sometimes you look at him and feel the urge to pack a small suitcase and check into a quiet hotel for one night. Sometimes both on the same afternoon.
This is normal.
This is real.
This is life.
And Here’s the Part No One Says Out Loud:
I have issues in my marriage. Not catastrophic ones. Not the kind that make headlines. But the kind most couples live with quietly:
miscommunication
imbalance
emotional disconnect
support that slips, returns, slips again
partnership that requires constant recalibration
love that is deep but not always easy
We try.
We talk.
We adjust.
We backslide.
We repair.
We do it all again.
It’s not perfect.
It’s not hopeless.
It’s human.
Healing happens in layers, not in finales.
Sometimes we reconnect.
Sometimes we reopen old wounds.
Sometimes we grow closer.
Sometimes we simply coexist.
Sometimes I want him near.
Sometimes I want him very, very far away.
And I stay.
Not because it’s perfect but because love isn’t measured by ease. It’s measured by effort, by history, by small moments that pierce through the chaos: a hand reaching for mine when I’m crying silently, the kids’ laughter filling the living room, the quiet recognition of “we built this” even when we’re tired of each other.
Life Is a Beautiful Disaster
Life will crack you open and rebuild you a hundred times before you’re done living it.
Marriage will challenge you in ways you didn’t sign up for.
Motherhood will stretch you into a person you don’t recognize.
Your body will change.
Your tolerance will change.
Your identity will change.
Your needs will change.
And in the middle of all that change, all that noise, all that exhaustion
you will experience moments so pure, so luminous, they feel like grace:
A child climbing into your lap with total trust.
A milestone reached with eyes shining toward you.
A hand from your spouse that says, without words,
“I know today was hard.”
These are the moments that make us stay.
Not because it’s easy,
but because the love is real… even when the life is messy.
For Every Woman Reading This
You are not alone.
You are not doing it wrong.
You are not ungrateful for wanting space.
You are not broken for feeling overwhelmed.
You are not failing for questioning your marriage sometimes.
You are not a bad mother for needing silence.
You are not the only one who wants to run away sometimes
and then stay forever.
You are human.
You are tired.
You are loving through your wounds.
You are surviving seasons no one prepared you for.
And you are doing better than you think.
Life is not meant to be perfect.
It’s meant to be lived -
honestly, messily, bravely,
with love that survives the chaos
and grows in the cracks.
