Before becoming a parent, I spent years coaching people in corporate environments, walking alongside leaders, teams and new and expectant parents as they navigated organisational and interpersonal challenges. It became clear that every challenge is, at its core, a relationship challenge, shaped by the beliefs, fears and behavioural patterns we absorb from early caregivers.

These inherited patterns tend to rise and intensify as we become parents, asking to be healed.

When my husband and I were expecting, we prepared in all the ways the world told us to: we read the books, attended the classes and bought the gear. What we weren’t prepared for was the evolution of us – the emotional intensity, the miscommunications, the quiet resentments that grow when two people are sleep deprived and stretched thin. Like many couples, we assumed our struggles meant something was wrong with us. We blamed each other, pulled away when it felt too hard and disappeared into the all-consuming care of our child.

But nothing was wrong with us. We were merely caught in the societal myth that parenthood cannot be prepared for and left unprepared for the relational transformation it demands.