People assuming new fathers are a bit useless

[AlmostaMamma]

Has anyone else noticed this?

I’m currently extremely pregnant and the comments from friends/family/acquaintances/colleagues regarding having a newborn have been fascinating.

“You’ll want to batch cook, as you won’t be able to cook anything for the first few weeks.”

“Make sure you stock up on XYZ, as you won’t be feeling up to doing any laundry.”

“You won’t be feeling up to any housework, but you’ll be too tired to notice the mess.”

Also lots of stuff about having to deal with everything for the newborn by myself.

I have a husband. He’s a competent adult (I wouldn’t have married him otherwise) who is capable of household chores and generally does more of them than I do. This will not change post birth. And, apart from me being the one who breastfeeds, we’re going to be splitting infant care pretty evenly.

It’s 2023, so presumably this isn’t a massively unusual state of affairs. So why do people say this nonsense? It was mildly amusing to begin with, but it’s starting to make me tetchy.

I did and would recommend all of these pieces of advice you find being old fashioned OP. Not because my DH was useless but we wanted to be able to enjoy our new baby together.

DH only had two weeks paternity leave and so much of that was taken up by midwife appointments and family visiting. It was nice to be able to pull something out the freezer once we had shut the door. When we had been up all night and busy the next day, it was nice to know we had stocked up on extra baby grows and were not going to run out if we didn't put a wash on etc.

After the paternity leave was over, he came home at 6pm on a few occasions to find I had done nothing around the house. I’d not managed to get showered till 2pm and eaten nothing but biscuits because the baby was demanding that day. No problem, he rolled up his sleeves, grabbed a freezer dinner and cracked on or he took the baby and I cracked on.

They are small for such a short period. Why is it a weakness to prepare ahead so you can take it easy and enjoy it?

Well, that's not usual.

My DH is amazing in the house, but he is self employed and the current project he is working on means he is in zoom meetings for hours, then working late into the night. He's very focused on working hard to provide the best life your us and I appreciate his value in this too.

I know he'll still do all the daily cleaning and he's said he'll do the cooking too. But I'm being realistic, so I'm still batch cooking and have a cleaner coming in weekly.

I'd rather he dedicated the time he needed to work and our financial future than cooking and housework.

We just worked things out ourselves and changed what didn't work, no I don't get this useless male routine

And especially 'he never does anything' after the first child so the bright idea of the century is going on to have a few more with him

Well I'm going to follow up my own post here for posterity.

I batch cooked. My food was bloody delicious.

For the first two weeks I didn't really go in the kitchen much.

My husband did all the cooking, laundry etc, until the point where I actually felt like doing it rather than endlessly feeding/cuddling baby.

I do all night wakings because EBF (we stupidly listened to advice about bottles so has been a battle to get him taking them), but my husband made sure I got some proper catch up sleep every day when needed (even if the baby was howling for me). Now he's taking a bottle, I can ditch him with my husband first thing and get a couple more hours.

I started taking 15-30m walks by myself pretty much immediately after birth, just for some headspace. After 8 weeks, was feeling up to leaving baby for up to 1.5h, now up to 5h is easy for us before baby gets clingy for me again.

Have had mostly hot tea. Only went cold twice.

Bad points: husband found switching from a fair share of chores to ALL chores difficult. He's been totally good about our incredibly brief/intermittent sex life, but his love language is touch, and he greatly missed cuddles at first. He went on a 4 day stag do at one point, and I travelled up to stay with my parents. It didn't go badly, but it did highlight the incredible difference between our lives at the moment.

Interested to see how it goes with SPL.