Four and a bit months in, parenting is easier than the newborn phase but definitely not easy. My latest insights on going to work every day (no evenings or weekends off!) at the hardest job in the world are centered around communication, compassion and confidence.
Insight #1: Having a baby makes mountains out of molehills all the time: you have to step up your Communication game
Differences with your partner that were points of attraction and inspiration, Habits that were quirky or cute, Perspectives that promote personal growth and learning when tackled with the curiosity they deserve – all these things can become bloody battlegrounds once you have a baby.
Why? Firstly, you’re sleep deprived, which reduces your patience to razor-thin margins. Secondly, you’re overwhelmed with errands – there’s never enough time in the day to get stuff done and errands linger on the to-do list way longer than they used to. Before, the lingering was usually due to procrastination. Now what I get done in a day is limited by:
- What can be done one-handed during brief spells when I can divide my attention – very brief since babies typically want 100% of your attention when they are awake
- During naps of unpredictable length
- With the cognitive prowess of someone who’s greatest desire in life is a nap
As a result, I’m always behind on my to-do list and trying to attack errands when I get a spare moment. With so much going on, it’s easy to end up only talking to your partner about errands and nothing else, and this lower level of communication lets misunderstandings fester even more around differences.
My insights on what can help
Talk more to your partner: set aside time to talk free-form, big-picture, problem-solve and challenge structures of your life that you think can’t be challenged etc. etc. i.e. communication that isn’t just immediate and tactical. If you don’t set aside the time to talk, it doesn’t happen and the issues fester OR the communication happens in the form of 3 am outbursts when one of you (pretty much always the breastfeeding partner) is going off about stuff that is just offensive and not even the point. If you can afford marriage counseling as a regular thing, I imagine that would be even better as it involves a trained objective third party and more than that is a discipline mechanism for you to actually talk to each other.
Insight #2: Having a baby strips down any illusions you had about gender equality in the world: you have to practise greater Compassion
Now obviously we are such a long way away from gender equality and everyone reading this blog knows that. Women make 80 cents on the dollar, and do a ton more housework and childcare than men on average. Yadda, yadda, yadda y’all know the statistics. BUT for a sweet few years, without children and with a progressive feminist partner, you could almost entertain the myth of the 50-50 partnership. We’re different. I’m lucky, you may say to yourself as you read grim articles on all the various gaps and penalties based on sex/gender. Then you have a baby and reality hits.
Firstly, there’s a biological basis to all of this. If you’re the breastfeeding partner, you will get screwed over. Then throw in the seemingly innate high level of attention to detail that women often have and the very low tolerance for their baby crying. Then throw in the fact that society does everything possible to bolster instead of balance out nature’s given biases: paternity leave is typically much shorter than maternity leave and typically taken when babies are a bit easier to deal with. With all of these ingredients, you have yourself the recipe for a 70-30 relationship at best and with a giant side of resentment relish.
Moreover, expectations for mothers and fathers are totally different. For women, we’ve made the incredible expected, and expect things that take enormous effort to appear effortless. In one of her essays in the book “Amateur hour: Motherhood in Essays and Swearwords“, Kimberly Harrington notes: “We hold ourselves [mothers] to intense and impossible standards. We, of course, don’t do this alone. Our culture has set the bar so high that it’s hidden in a place where we’ll never find it. And conversely, the bar for fathers has been set so low they can easily step over it on the way to the bathroom”
These unequal expectations are further exacerbated by the fact that a lot of the work mothers do is “maintenance work” which is 100% essential but undervalued. In her book, “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” (one of my favorite books), Jenny Odell gets us to think deeper about “productivity”:
“Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way”
– Jenny Odell in “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy”
My insights on what can help
Chore charts and communication will get you so far, but unless there are major structural social and workplace changes (think level of Universal Basic Income, a year of parental leave for all genders, affordable high-quality socially funded childcare etc.), women will likely be doing more work than men. For the foreseeable future, the best thing to do is acknowledge that women do more and acknowledge it often. Not because it’s placating or pandering, but because it’s true. Reassure your mom friends they’re doing so much. Do it often but only if you can do it sincerely. And treat yourself with compassion as much as possible.
Remind yourself that maintenance work is REAL work and is the stuff life is made of. Loading and unloading a dishwasher, doing laundry, cleaning the fridge are real to-dos that should be celebrated at the end of a day. They’re actually more productive than a lot of the busy work and paper-pushing that many modern office jobs entail.
If you have the power, campaign for policy changes and new cultural norms in workplaces and governments. Men need more paternity leave – the same amount as maternity. We should be balancing out biological biases, not accentuating them.
Insight #3: Having a baby can invite a lot of judgment: you have to step up your Confidence to a whole new level
People pass judgment on all manner of things parents do, starting at pregnancy. How to go about labor and delivery, breastfeeding vs formula feeding, how many activities your baby does, pacifier or not, walker or not, sleep training or not, how much screen-time your kids have…the list of stuff that has become so loaded with cultural memes around what a “good mother” does in American parenting is exhaustingly long (and often not particularly evidence-based).
Take the big decisions around work-life balance, for example: For stay-at-home moms, there’s unpleasant spiel around setting feminism back, or “wasting their talent” etc. For working mothers, there’s unpleasant spiel around being selfish or loving your kids less. This is all BS, of course. Running a house and raising children well requires immense talent and skills, and working mothers love their kids just as much. To work at home or work at work is WORK, and these are personal choices affected by so many nuanced factors that most people that are not your partner have very little visibility into: your economic situation, your health, opportunities life throws at you, your earnings potential, your love language, your risk profile, your preferences on how to spend your time, your retirement plans etc. If someone isn’t intimately involved in your life, not only is it not their place to judge, they probably don’t have a very well-informed opinion anyways.
My insights on what can help
Every now and again I feel extremely burdened by feeling judged about various things. I don’t know if it’s so much as others judging me or me judging myself. Either way, it’s not a great way to feel. I suggest reminding yourself constantly that parenting is hard. Just because “everyone does it” and has done for millennia doesn’t make it easy.
Give yourself grace and compassion, and trust yourself. You are the captain of this ship of your life. You know it inside-out like few people do. The haters are like pirates on boats far away passing commentary on your ship from seeing pieces of it through blurry binoculars. Another great piece of advice I got from a lactation consultant: manage your content diet. If something triggers you or upsets you, try and manage not going there often. This means staying off Facebook groups or mommy blogs that are extolling things that aren’t right for you.
You’ll be dammed if you do, dammed if you don’t. So you might as well do what you want and be dammed with confidence!
