Having a baby can be one of the most pivotal moments in life. But, as these women candidly share, it doesn’t always bring a couple closer. The new little guy or gal in your life is pulling all the strings—and you can forget about putting your romantic relationship first. To say it's tough on even the most solid couple is an understatement. And yet, while the challenges of parenthood are immense, the women we spoke with were also positive about their relationship changes. Below, seven women open up about how their relationships have transformed post-baby.

1. We learned that the baby sets our schedules.

Courtesy of Dawn Dais

"The biggest change after having kids was the loss of freedom and autonomy. Pre-baby, we both worked from home and set our own schedules. It wasn’t uncommon that I would text my partner at 4 P.M. and let her know that I would be home late because I was going out to dinner with a friend. We were both very independent.

When the baby was only a couple weeks old, my partner texted me and said, 'I’m meeting with a client, so I’ll be home around 7 P.M.' And I promptly wrote back, 'No, you will be home at 5 P.M. because we have a baby and I’m going to lose my mind if you're out until 7 P.M.' It was a stark reminder that we no longer set the schedule.

For the first few years of having kids, you really feel like you're treading water. You are in survival mode. You aren’t getting enough sleep, there aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything you need to do, and you are constantly overwhelmed. It can be very difficult to give your relationship any attention during this time, because it’s so much easier to push it to the side and focus on more pressing issues—like paying the mortgage or keeping the children alive.

Eventually, things get a little easier and you find yourself coming out of a baby fog. You are no longer treading water, and you even feel like you’ve made it to dry land. But you are in a totally different place than where you started—before the kids came along and nearly drowned you. I think sometimes people don’t stay connected to their partners during those tough first years, and then when things get easier, they find that they don’t have much of a relationship left at all. It can be hard to get back to a place where you make the two of you a priority." — Dawn Dais, 39, mother of two in Roseville, California

2. We lost who we were as individuals—and a couple—for a little while.

“I think that the biggest change to our relationship is really the biggest change in our lives period—which is that your life ceases to be about you. What I mean by that is, once my kids were born, I stopped being Nicole Wilson and started being my daughters’ mom. The early months were so hard for me because I felt like a shred of my former self. My world revolved around someone else's needs and whereas I used to be an intelligent, put-together person, I was now a mom of a newborn, leaking breast milk all over the place and stressing over how many poopy diapers my kid had. And that loss of self occurred in our relationship too. All of a sudden we weren't ‘Nicole and Tim, husband and wife,’ we were ‘mom and dad.’ Things became very transactional. It was like, ‘great, you're home, here's a baby,’ and then I'd run off and try to do something productive before I needed to sit down and nurse again. By the time we could sit down and talk to each other we were so exhausted that neither of us really had the energy for any meaningful conversation.