To be appalled at how most couples share childcare of a newborn?

[lmcc13]

I’m in a same-sex couple with my wife, together for 7 years and married for 2. We were delighted to add to our family four weeks ago when my wife gave birth to our beautiful baby boy. Becoming a parent, I’ve noticed lots of people (friends, colleagues and strangers) sharing anectdotes about their own parenting experiences. The thing that has shocked me most is how unequally caring for a newborn seems to be shared between the couple. We don’t have any other gay parent friends, so I don’t know if this is different in same-sex partnerships, but amongst straight couples it still seems the norm for the stay at home parent (exclusively mums in our social circle) to do the lion’s share of the work; during the day, in the evening and at night. I keep hearing “well of course if she’s breastfeeding, there’s not much you can do to help” and “well, I have to get up and go to work in the morning”. I find both comments infuriating! My wife is exclusively breastfeeding, and I am now back at work, but the list of things I can contribute towards raising our son is long. I clean and tidy the house, get shopping in, load and unload the dishwasher, change 95% of the nappies when I’m home (including all the night nappy changes), sterilise the breast pump when she expresses...etc etc. I’m up in the night every time the baby cries to change the baby, help my wife into the feeding chair, then later burp the baby and settle him back into his cot. And, like most of our friends and colleagues, I have an office job - I might be tired and incoherent at work occasionally during the day, but I’m not solely responsible for a human life! Unless the working parent drives, operates machinery or cares for others (nurses, teachers etc.) I refuse to believe that they can’t share in the exhaustion too. Very long rant, sorry! I think I’m just a very disappointed feminist to realise that parenthood seemingly transports many women back to be 1950’s. Why are women allowing this to happen, and why aren’t men stepping up more?

I agree with you, OP. There's too many women saying snippy things like "I didn't need to be helped" and "It really doesn’t need two people to do the night feeds". Lots and lots and lots of first time mums really DO need help. Hooray for you if you don't, but the expectation that the mum on maternity leave can have a nap during the day (which is impossible with some babies) or the WOHP is the only one driving exhausted (which is bollocks when mums who feel isolated are frequently told to get out every day - not everyone lives in a lovely friendly town/city with loads of activities within walking distance, some people live in tiny rural villages without decent pavements and HAVE to drive to any activities, and to go to medical appointments, HV weigh ins etc) is completely ridiculous to my mind.

You see women on their knees, often posting on MN, while the lives of their husband or partner continues with little or no impact - in fact, loads of men think their lives should actually get EASIER while their wives are on maternity leave because she should, as well as doing all the night wakings and looking after the baby during the day, also do the evening meal, cleaning and shopping. Then people wonder why PND is increasing and new mums feel incredibly lonely!

I don't know why people can't be kinder and more aware that not everyone finds parenting a breeze. I daresay all of that is possible with an easy baby, or if the mum is resilient/experienced and had a birth without complications and no subsequent health issues. But I had a LOT of health complications and a hideous birth, and DS had reflux and colic and screamed whenever I wasn't holding him, detested the sling, and wouldn't sleep unless he was on my or my partner's chest. So no naps, got virtually nothing done during the day, and we slept in shifts holding him. Every day during that awful time, I thanked God that my partner considered it all his responsibility as much as mine.

If the men can't get up because they couldn't cope with tiredness in their 'super important job' (which every man excused her seems to have), then what happens when the woman goes back to work, and baby is still waking?

If you are both working full time then obviously you divide the night waking between you as appropriate.

A baby waking at a year old isn’t the same proposition as a baby waking at a month old though.

I went back to work full time once my children started school. One of our D.C. suffered from night terrors and wasn’t a good sleeper. We’d take turns.

As for all men here having “super important” jobs. Given the demographics of MN there probably are a reasonable proportion of DH’s (and MNers) who do indeed have responsible jobs.

Apart from anything most people (especially SAHPs and people on Mat leave) need their partner’s income and can’t be quite so cavalier about anything which might put it at risk.

We are adoptive parents so also a bit more non-traditional in the sense that neither of us gave birth to our babies.

Both came to us at an age when there were still night feeds etc. and I took time off work with DC1 (DH was a student/looking for a job though so was at home a lot) and DC2 (DH took a month of shared leave at the end).

Neither of ours were up all night but as I say there were still night feeds. We shared these pretty much equally. Same with nappies/bathing/washing/housework. Now more or less the same with school stuff, activities, making sure there's clean uniform, doing reading practice.

I think it is slightly in our case due to not having that biological trauma/need of giving birth/BF but it's also due to having married a grownup.

The only thing I wish he'd get his act together on is kids' clothes - not being able to work out which drawer they go in, or who's grown out of what, is very irritating!

I hear you, OP.
If I’d had more support from dh I don’t think I’d have had PND. And he was still better than many!

Presumably you'd really judge us, OP, because my DH has only just gone back to work seven weeks after the birth of our baby (teacher who went straight from paternity leave to summer hols) and he's still been sleeping in the spare room since DS was a week old! I'm EBF and quickly found that apart from nappy changes there was nothing for him to do in the night - so I started just ringing his phone for those (though DS hasn't done a night poo since about 4 weeks when he went from pooing after every feed to pooing once a day, so then that stopped too). My goal when feeding in the night is to stay as close to asleep as possible - I have a nightlight on all night so no need to switch on a light, DS is in a next to me cot so no lifting him about, and I now feed lying down nearly always (this did take me a few weeks to get the hang of). I try and stay just about awake so I can get him in the next to me (but we're set up for safe cosleeping in case I don't), but that's it. The last thing I want is someone talking to me, bringing me tea, etc. And this may just be my baby, but the few times I've handed him over for burping I find that the baby who will happily snoozily go from mummy's boob to mummy's shoulder and fall in a deep sleep there will wake up and be quite unhappy if passed around at that point! I didn't intend for the nights to be so unequal - and I do think it's the one huge disadvantage of EBF - but trying to make him 'do his share' in the night would be choosing a less efficient system to make a point. It also would have made it harder for him to do essentially every chore but feeding in the day, which he has been! I also think this (too much hassle to make a point) about expressing - DS has one expressed bottle a day because I'm worried about him not taking one when I go back to work (at six months, when DH will then have four months shared parental leave - does that redeem us at all in your eyes, OP?!) but I hate it - it turns one job (me feeding the baby) into two (me expressing, him feeding the baby) and I'd knock it on the head if I wasn't worried about bottle refusal.

Goodness I was expecting everyone to have the same reaction as me which was "awwww bless you sound lovely". No wonder the OP has vanishe

She doesn't sound lovely, she sounds smug and lecturing and irritating.How fucking dare she come on to a parenting site and tell thousands of women that they are letting her down as a feminist and how disappointing we all are, based on her FOUR fucking weeks of parenting as a non birthing parent?

The arrogance is incredible.

I mean, one of held him on our chest while the other slept, of course!

I'm also in a same sex relationship, and when our first child was born I'd say we shared things pretty equally. But I'm with most others on the night time getting up. I barely opened my eyes during night feeds, and would enjoy the silence while baby and I both remained half asleep. Nappy was only changed at night if absolutely necessary.
Once we'd discovered cosleeping I could just roll over, shove a tit in her general direction and go back to sleep.

(Oh and DH is more likely to wake up if DD needs us in the night - DS never really does any more - or if I wake he wakes too. Thank goodness for that given she vomited in the middle of the night twice on holiday!)

Tbh op I think mostly people just cope the best way they can. There are so many variables so it will probably look different for every family and every baby.

Me too allypally. It's a typical AIBU pile on. When a woman posts saying that because her DH works, he doesn't get up at night, he gets ripped to shreds.
When a woman posts saying she does get up, that she considers herself an equal partner etc, she still gets ripped to shreds.
This place is weird.

Happyandshiney, my young toddler is waking more in the night now than at a month. She was a great sleeper at a month, now not so much! Don't presume they are all the same

The point is though, it's all very convenient how these men are 'so important'. It gets wheeled out to excuse them from household tasks, childrearing, taking their share of children's sick days, even whether they can change their name. All very convenient indeed...

YABU OP. The vast majority of new parents are muddling through and doing their best whatever that is. Why would you want to judge people at this time of their lives?

My husband and I shared the load, but that didnt mean him getting up needlessly in the night and us both being tired. But I woke him if I needed support. He stayed up later with baby, so I could get some sleep at that point. Even now our daughter is 18 months, he gets up most mornings with her, unless he's on an early shift, baths her and is totally hands on. I do most of the day to day stuff, but I'm the one who has the time (usually!) as he is at work all day. It's what works for individual families and we communicate well about it to ensure we're both happy and neither feels under appreciated.

I don't know if this is a useful post, but I think it might be, so bear with me.

When my DD was born, I was in a really weird limbo place, because I wasn't a birth mother but I wasn't a dad either. Lots of nice people tried to tell me I was 'honorary dad'. But you do feel weird. You go to baby group and naturally other women want to chat to you about how's the feeding going, how was your birth, is your husband helping? And you feel a fraud unless you quickly explain the situation, at which point their attention (again: quite naturally) shifts away from you because they want to talk about the stuff that looms so large when you have a newborn. OTOH, if there are men there, they usually don't seem to want to talk, and if they do, my experience (just my personal experience, I know!) was that they automatically default back to treating you like the 'mum' of the couple anyway and assuming you won't want to be included in talks about going back to work or whatever.

So you end up saying (and doing) things like 'oh, well, I do all the night wake-ups,' because you can talk about that to other mums. You can't talk about other things. And having a newborn is quite lonely, so you want to be able to talk.

The OP probably isn't trying to be sanctimonious - she might be feeling isolated from 99 other Mumsnet threads about newborns where she feels as if she can't join in, and she might be just wanting that ordinary chatter about babies that is a lifeline when you have a tiny one and it dominates your life.

It all passes by so fast, but in this early stage I think it can be really isolating being unable to join in conversations easily.

It's a typical AIBU pile on. When a woman posts saying that because her DH works, he doesn't get up at night, he gets ripped to shreds.

To be fair I suspect a woman who said that she wanted her DP to get up at night to 'help her into her nursing chair' would get a tough time of it too...

YABU for two reasons. Firstly because it is ridiculous to be 'appalled' by the choices two consenting adults make about how they run their household. And secondly because you are completely unnecessarily 'helping' your wife to share in the exhaustion. Who actually needs help into a chair? Seriously. When the mother is breastfeeding the only thing that will result in the other parent waking us two exhausted parents instead of one.

You also underestimate how important some people's jobs are. On a fundamental level, in most families, they are an important source of income. In a general level most jobs with any degree of responsibility are important. For example, my husband is a solicitor. If he screws up because he is tired his clients could go bankrupt or their companies could be put into insolvency or wound down resulting in thousands of people loosing their jobs. The same could be said for many professions that serve businesses. Our accountant screwed up recently and our tax bill is three times what it should be. We're on the brink of bankruptcy at the moment because he made a mistake.

My baby is 12 months old. Husband works 65 hours a week and does 95% of night wakings. Judge that as you will.

Agree with you op it's depressing.

It makes me laugh that people are outraged at the thought of their partner being tired for an office job, yet apparently it's fine to be looking after a tiny human life on no sleep! It's like we are are conditioned to accept that this is fine as unfortunately it's the way it has been for so long.

help my wife into the feeding chair ha ha ha ha ha! You're joking right?

She's had a baby. She isn't fatally ill.

I think that's a really helpful and thoughtful post (as always - I still remember how kind you were to me when I was struggling with miscarriage and an academic job!) LRD. On a tiny scale I felt a bit like that when talking to other mums because DH was at home for the first seven weeks - it just was much easier for me than most people (other mums would be talking about not being able to have a shower and I'd know I could hand baby over and have a half hour bath whenever I fancied, for example) and that sometimes made me feel out of place and like I couldn't join with conversations even though I wanted to talk. For me that was a very 'my diamond shoes are too tight' problem, but I can see how it would really affect you when it's on the scale you're describing.

Racecardriver, and yet a lot of women are solicitors, and go back to work whilst the baby wakes in the night, and somehow they manage. Is it only impossible to do on less sleep if a man is doing it?

When a woman posts saying that because her DH works, he doesn't get up at night, he gets ripped to shreds. When a woman posts saying she does get up, that she considers herself an equal partner etc, she still gets ripped to shreds.

This place is weird.

Consistency is not its strong point

OP, I hear ya. And I agree it's appalling how little many DHs get away with. In the early days, even when bfing, it's a godsend to have someone helping with nappies, drinks, etc.

You sound great. Congrats on your lovely baby.

You are very sanctimonious OP

^^

I can't be arsed beyond that really.