Husband says motherhood is easy & every mother has risen a child so it can’t be hard, crack on

[Jobutr]

Recently during a fight, DH said that motherhood is easy, that our boy is chilled and calm, that he sees what we do all that, and that it’s easy and I make it sound harder than it is. He says all mothers do it so crack on with it.
for context, our boy is 5 months and fully breastfed, i do all the nights (baby wakes every 2 h max), put down boy for all his 3 naps (one in pram and 2 in carrier so no sleep for me) and take care of him day to day, make sure he exercises, is played with, changed, talked to, well taken care of. Both families live abroad so no family help.
He’s chilled and calm because he gets all his naps and has a lot of face to face play and contact.
I love taking care of our boy, I don’t complain. I just want to be valued for all the work sometimes. It feels a bit hurtful to feel like motherhood isn’t valued and that it’s so easy to raise a baby, by someone who doesn’t do much alone time with the baby.
Am I exaggerating? Is it so easy? Would you want your partner to be supportive?

You are right that it’s not easy, but the reason PP picked you up on this is that people with chilled babies have this really irritating view that it’s something they have done, rather than their good luck not to have a colicky, allergic, refluxy baby who screams all night and half the day.

I get it- if my second had been my firstborn, I would have been very impressed with my own astonishingly excellent parenting skills. I hope I would have had the good sense to keep this to myself.

On the issue you asked, you sound to be absolutely rocking it as a mum. Your husband doesn’t have a clue about how hard that all is, and the sooner you start pumping and insisting he picks up half the nights and weekends the better.

It's funny how men who say childcare is "easy" and "just sitting on your arse" are never keen to actually undertake this alledlgedly easy task.

You were obviously also very lucky with chilled kids. I get it, my second was that way. Don’t kid yourself it was your amazing parenting skills though or judge others for “not finding it easy” if they’ve got a colicky, reflux baby that will scream blue murder for most of the day and night.

Well his contribution was over in about 30 seconds...he sounds like a dickhead

He's a dick

I guess it’s lucky you have an easy baby because you do have an arsehole for a husband.

Might be worth reminding him that the dinner plate size wound you had internally from giving birth is still healing…… and sleep deprivation is a form of torture and he’s “chilled” because his needs are met- if he was hungry/tired/uncomfortable etc he wouldn’t be chilled- he would very much be screaming and it’s because of your nurturing that his needs are met.

I would put money on him not doing night feeds

*for clarity I am not suggesting that anyone who doesn’t have a chilled baby is not meeting their needs- just that a baby who is hungry/wet etc is very unlikely to be chilled!

My ex never really said this directly but I could tell from little passive-aggressive comments over the years that this was what he thought.

And then along came Covid and his workplace got shut down and mine was fully flexible so I became the main breadwinner and he had to look after the kids full time.

Cue tantrums and shouting about how difficult it was and he wasn’t cut out for this and how he was “doing everything” while I “sat on my arse” in my home office all day.

You might think this would have turned a light on for him, but actually no. Once life returned to normal he was telling people how nice it had been for him to spend relaxed family time with the kids, completely ignoring the reality that I had ended up giving him huge amounts of help to parent while also working full-time.

When a man does not inherently value parenting, he will never see you as his equal.

My kid was a dream from birth and it was a piece of piss but my husband wouldn't have dreamed of saying something as abysmal as this.

That would fuck me right off

That’s so hurtful

How much parenting does DH do @Jobutr

It isn't easy, you make it look easy because you work hard at it. I agree with pp, he needs a couple of days alone with baby to figure it out.

I'd hazard a guess you have siblings, parents and a "village" who rally around in support.
It's completely different if both sets of parents are no where around and you don't have a support network.

For me, babies were easy but motherhood in the longer term is HARD.

Babies, I really enjoyed and felt were a very gentle introduction to motherhood (and no, I didn't have unicorn babies, and my second had colic etc).

When they got older, it got harder and at 5&7 it's still hard.

I feel like my brain doesn't get a moments peace, and they STILL don't sleep well. It's the relentlessness of it that I find most tricky.

Irrespective of if it's easy or difficult, he should be being more supportive especially you are finding it hard. Lots of women do find babies hard, and he's being very insensitive to you. One of the reasons I found it fine was probably because my husband equally shared the nights with my first who was bottle fed. Whereas you do it all (as did I with my bottle refusing second) and it is harder that way.

Ps: don't assume that he'll have an epiphany if you leave him with baby. He may find it tricky, but he may not! I found it fine, my husband found it easier than me and was great at doing things like baking & cleaning the kitchen all whilst baby was in the sling on his chest, whereas I wasn't so good at multitasking.

Leave a pile of expressedmilk and go out for the whole day.

Or mothers are different and find some parts easier than others.

I feel the same as pp and no, don't have both sets of parents around me.

One of them was a colicky baby who screamed all night, luckily that was the first, the other two weren't so bad.

"Ah great. In that case, I'm going away for the weekend with my mates. Here's the baby."

He is so lacking in empathy. The biggest deal here is that having given birth, your body is completely different and hormones are all over the place! Give me a 5 month old now and I'd probably cope OK but 5 months post birth and I'm in recovery

Yes well you're wrong, we had zero help. Actually, I lie, my husband's dad babysat one evening when my kids were 2/3/4. In fairness, even if my shit family didn't live five hours drive away, I wouldn't have let them babysit my kids.
I didn't work though so didn't have the big rush each morning or all that pressure. I don't know how working mothers manage it, they might think going to work is easy in comparison though. It's like we all find different things hard.

If you are finding things tough OP, I'd second the other posters recommending take off a day and let your husband look after baby for the day. After all, he finds it easy, so it'll be no problem for him.

I think your H needs to rethink that statement. Hopefully he just meant it because he is stressed, under pressure with something like a bereavement or anything - otherwise if it is just a statement he believes with his whole heart, he is not being the supportive person you need him to be.

I had a highly sensitive baby who doesn’t settle easy since being a newborn. I probably would have told my H to sleep with one eye open if he said anything like that to me.

People are completely missing the point going on about how easy they found it being a mother. It's completely irrelevant.

This is about a father not appreciating the mother of his child. It's about a father who opts out of parenting his baby and justifies it by gaslighting his partner into believing that it's no big deal because raising a baby is 'easy'.

People using this thread as an opportunity to boast about how easy they found motherhood are helping him do that. So for me, the only applause you're going to get for banging on about how you single handedly raised multiple babies without breaking a sweat is a very slow hand clap.