Urban Drool

As most of you know, the Boy posted a bit of an angst-filled entry a couple weeks back regarding me and my parenting choices vis-à-vis a natural tendency of mine to take after my mother.

To be fair, he cleared the idea of the entry with me beforehand and even asked me to read it before he posted it.

He also asked me to consider posting an entry of my own. A sort-of-but-not-really chance to retaliate and voice my own complaints/concerns/general angst regarding him. And I’ve been working on it, I really have. I think about it and formulate entries in my head and then I shoot it all to dust as I try and put it to paper. And I think I finally know the reason why:

I have zero complaints about the Boy as a father. The Boy is an amazing father. The Boy could not be better as a father.

But wait! Before you all roll your eyes and gag on the sweetness-induced nausea that clogs the back of your throat (don’t you just hate that?), let me rein you back in with this promise:

I have a few complaints about life with the Boy as we SHARE the parenting of the pickle.

To start of with, I really do feel the need to reiterate yet again how tender and instinctive a father the Boy is. He knows the baby’s schedule to the second, yet he also recognizes when she is going to have an off day, with her schedule blown to bits. He navigates the rocky waters of her occasionally schizophrenic personality (screaming her head off with tears running down her cheeks while smiling a huge sparkly smile all at the same time) with patience and love. He is not sent into panic mode by explosive poops, lethargy, a mild fever, teething, never ending crying, etc. He will walk, rock, kiss and coo her fussyness away. He also takes the time to simply sit and bask during her many calm and love soaked “play times,” knowing that precious, loving baby-moments need to be experienced and remembered. He does ALL this, and still manages (most of the time) to have a clean house and finished laundry and dinner ready by the time I walk in the door.

He has done such an amazing job with her that he has become very firmly set in his parenting “ways.” As he should! They have yielded nothing but success.

The problem here is this, and twofold: from the very second I get home and walk in the door, the Boy expects me to

A) be “on the clock” and taking 100% responsibility of care of the Pickle until I leave for
work the next morning


but


B) using the parenting techniques and theories and systems that he uses.

An example: If I have been rocking and nursing the baby and I really need to put her down to either pee or get a glass of water, etc., I sometimes walk over to the Boy and ask “can you hold her for just a sec? I’m going to grab a drink.”

And the Boy shakes his head and looks at me like I have lobsters crawling out of my ears. No, he won’t hold her for 3 seconds, because it’s not his “time on the clock.” And besides (he says) he does “X” while holding the baby all the time. If he can do it, why can’t I?

So instead I put her down (where I am sometimes told not to, she doesn’t like to be down, she likes to be held, no not like that, you know she likes to be held upright, and jiggle her, remember you have to jiggle her) or try and put her in the bouncy chair (you never put her high up enough in the chair, you need to tighten the belt around her more, great, now she’s going to sink down and hit the backs of her heels on the chair, no, you’re not doing it right)

and so it goes…

And I end up rushing around, trying to pee, comb my hair and grab a water in 4.5 seconds so I can rush back and pick the baby back up before she does something that will make the Boy think that I have not cared for her in his way or that, in his eyes, I have made a poor parenting decision.

In basic terms, I am expected to take care of the Pickle every second that I am not at work, but I sometimes feel like if I make one “mistake” or do things differently than how the Boy does them, I will get yelled at by him and someone will come and take my baby away. There is no break for me. I either work at work or I work at home and there is always someone there…looking over my shoulder.

Now, in a sense this seems really nit-picky and yes, more than a little unfair of me. If this is one of the only complaints I have about the Boy, than WOW. I am doing awesome in the whole “supportive partner and tender father for my child” department. Believe me, I know I have struck gold in having the husband and father of my child that I do.

It’s also very unfair of me, because what this scenario really is is a twisted version of your “typical” stay-at-home-mom-vs-work-full-time-dad scenario. The Boy, in this case, is the mom who, having spent 14 hours a day alone with the child, knows everything about the child and exactly how the child likes to be taken care of and I am the unfortunate sod who, in this case, is the work full time dad who desperately craves every moment spent with the child like I am starving and she is a steak dinner and instead that fleeting time that I do get to spend with her is sometimes marred when I am made to feel inferior as a parent in deference to the “stay at home mom’s” superior parenting skills.

I see this scenario (in its more traditional sense) reflected in our dear friends (Mya’s Mommy and Daddy). Mya’s Mommy (MM) has a personality very similar to the Boy’s and a likewise similarity exists between me and Mya’s Daddy (MD). There have been countless times when MM “catches” MD doing something with/to Mya that MM disapproves of. The subsequent lecture and bickering that follows is eerily reminiscent of “discussions” between me and the Boy. The difference here is that MD does not seem to take these moments as personally as I do. I suspect that this is because

1) MD is more easy of spirit and self-confident than I and
2) MD is not suffering from any post-partum issues (duh) and
3) He expects it.

So, unfortunately, there is nothing strange or unheard of in the way the Boy operates with me vis-à-vis the Pickle. It happens all the time between a million first-time parenting couples. The difference here is that I am on the receiving end. It fucking sucks.

I tell you this though: I will never again assume that it is “easy” to be a work full time dad. It seems in our society that all the support/concern, etc. is focused on helping new, stay at home moms. But everyone forgets about the dad. Society just assumes that it is cut-and-dry and EASY for a man to leave a weeks-old baby at home and go back to work. Everyone assumes that he doesn’t need any help – or a sympathetic ear to listen to his thoughts and worries. Everyone assumes that he has no problems whatsoever in the choice that he has made.

I disagree. Whether father, mother, man, woman, whatever - leaving your child is heart breaking.

Not that I compare my experiences 100% with a new dad. I believe a have maybe a little more on my emotional plate than your average new dad. A new dad does not have the post-partum issues that I do, and a new dad does not nurse (obviously). I think my physical connection to the Pickle makes me leaving her much harder than it would otherwise.

I guess all I’m trying to say here is this: It’s not easy playing the role in my family that I do. In fact, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. In it’s own way, it’s 1000% more difficult than the labor and delivery and aftermath of Lucy’s birth day. It’s perfectly awful to drag myself away from this baby that I have waited for and struggled for and lived through perfect hell for and leave her every day. The societal repercussions of how our family works makes it even harder. I don’t think the Boy is doing these things intentionally to drive me crazy. Far from it. I think, instead, that I am perceiving it as a personal attack and unfortunately it is adding to my already existing feelings of inadequacies and inferiority. The Boy is doing nothing that’s really wrong here, he’s just being an excellent parent.

But my inner voices constantly tell me that I am not a good woman and not a good mother because I leave my baby everyday for so long. And having my “mothering skills” observed, frowned upon and/or corrected and knowing that the Boy really does a better job with the Pickle then me most times does not help that any.

…wow. Once again, I become the most self-absorbed human on the planet. This post was supposed to be a complaint about the Boy and instead it has turned into a self-critique. Ah, well.

Thus endeth the most convoluted entry yet written. If you are still here, finishing up the reading of this tiresome entry, Congratulations!