Hank Baskett & Kendra Wilkinson
Hank Baskett & Kendra WilkinsonI just love Kendra Wilkinson and Hank Baskett. They're such an adorable couple and seem to genuinely love one another. However, recent talk about their marital strife has me feeling worried for the couple. Marriage is HARD, especially the first year; so I'm pretty positive that when you add the first year of parenting to the first year of marriage, you have a much more difficult situation -- if not an almost impossible one.

Are Kendra and Hank making a case for waiting to have a baby?

Kendra and Hank got married in June 2009, after dating maybe a year or so, and by December 2009, Baby Hank arrived. That's just six months of marriage, in which Kendra was pregnant the entire time. Granted, the couple has had some extra stresses in their lives this past year -- their celebrity lives (all caught on tape for her reality TV show), her struggles with postpartum depression, her sex tape scandal, and their long separations due to his job.

However, if they planned parenthood a year or two after they got married, the first year might have gone a lot smoother and allowed them time to figure out who was going to live where and travel where and take care of the baby and so on. Unplanned pregnancies happen, I know, and everything can turn out just fine in those cases; however, planned pregnancies can have their perks, especially when you're dealing with two people getting to know each other as husband and wife and learning to balance two very big careers.

An insider told In Touch that the couple has been sleeping in separate beds, and Kendra has become somewhat reclusive.

She is somewhat depressed, she doesn’t even like going out for drinks with her girlfriends anymore. She just wants to stay home with the baby.

Many people think they’re going to get a divorce. It’s not a question of if, but when.

Now, obviously, Kendra and Hank can't turn back time and do anything differently. Baby Hank is already here! So it's great to hear that they are taking the time to do some "repair work" on their marriage. The couple left baby Hank with his grandmother and headed off on a getaway to Hawaii together. Such a smart plan.

Having a new baby can bring a couple together in many ways, but caring for baby also has its way of putting a wedge between you as well, generally because one parent (usually mom) is the main caregiver. I know there were times in those first months that my husband headed out to work, and he might as well have been headed off to Club Med, based on how separate I felt our lives felt and looked. It felt like he didn't understand what was going on with me and my new life as mom, but I'm sure he had his own emotional struggles going on inside.

My husband and I took a four-day trip away together when our first son was about 15 months old, and I remember feeling like I couldn't get enough of my husband -- talking to him, laughing with him, sitting in silence with him. All those things we hadn't been able to do in a quality way for more than a year. And truthfully, I think I was able to slip right back into that feeling so easily because we were together for several years before we got married and married a couple years before we had a child. That made it easy to slip back into "two" after suddenly being "three" (the third always attached to one of us). I really think it helped.

Wishing Kendra and Hank and all you other first-year parents the best of luck. What you're doing is hard, but it will get easier, and you can find your way back to your partner after baby. I swear.

Do you think it's helpful to wait awhile after getting married to have kids?

 

Image via SplashNews