Here in Seattle, we recently had several days that never got above freezing. It was in the high teens for some of them. It was truly awful. With a baby at home who, when fussy, can only be appeased by walks in the front-facing carrier, it was a tough several days to get through. On one of those days, our electricity kept briefly shutting off. Pipes were bursting at schools and restaurants. A coworker mentioned that she doesn’t even own a legitimate winter coat because we aren’t used to these conditions here. But there’s always at least one person in the Zoom meeting or in line at the post office who’s from Minnesota, and they won’t be able to sleep at night if they don’t let everyone around know that this is nothing.
Everyone hates that person.
Things can be hard even when they’re harder somewhere else. The pinched nerve in my neck from sleeping weird can hurt even if somebody else broke their foot. My miscarriage isn’t any less devastating if somebody else has had three.
Just because new parenthood is almost definitely harder for mom, it is still hard for dad.
As the mother, my body is the one that gave and gave of itself until new life emerged. If breastfeeding, it’s probably the mother up throughout the night feeding the baby. It’s most likely the mother dragging herself out of bed each morning when the baby wakes and needs food again. It’s the mother whose hormones are surging and plummeting and loosening her joints and scrambling her brain. It’s the mother whose vagina or abdomen has been stretched wide and stitched back up. Breastfeeding mothers can’t take medicine when they’re sick and they can’t hit the coffee too hard when they’ve been up all night.
When my husband complains that he’s tired, that he didn’t sleep well, I feel immediately irritated. I’m so tired, every day. Until recently I hadn’t slept through the night in well over a year. And now that I can sleep through the night, I wake up obscenely early in order to take advantage of the only possible time I can have to myself all day, and I consider this time absolutely vital to my mental health. And I try not to complain about it, because complaining won’t make me any less tired. When my husband complains that he’s tired, it feels to me that he doesn’t realize that I’m always tired. It feels to me that perhaps he expects to not be tired, and is disappointed that today that isn’t the case. That he doesn’t realize we now live in a tired house. That now that we have a baby, tired is just the default.
It’s hard not to feel the same way about everything. Oh, you’re finding the baby’s crying stressful? Well I’ve been home with the baby all day. Oh, you want a few minutes to yourself? The baby is literally with me when I pee.
But dad’s life has also been turned upside down. He really is tired. He really is sleeping worse. He’s being assaulted by a slew of new anxieties every day. He’s mourning the loss of the Saturday afternoons he used to spend watching college football, the Friday nights when mom and dad could have a few beers and watch a movie without having to wake up early and supervise a creature increasingly determined to injure himself.
I’ve never been a dad, and so I cannot, obviously, understand how dads feel. But I do believe new parenthood is almost always objectively harder for the mother, and I’m suspecting that might actually be one of the most difficult parts of being a new dad – that life got way harder, but nobody wants to hear about it because it’s even harder for someone else. It may seem like they aren’t allowed to express that they’re having a hard time. It may seem like nobody cares.
This is all just to say that this wonderful journey of raising our precious little hell demons is allowed to be hard for everyone. My hard time is not inherently trivialized by my husband’s. We both need support from the other, and to feel like it’s okay to express how we’re feeling. A dad in his Seattle winter can live alongside a mom in her Minnesota winter and it can be very hard for both of them. This is something I need to try to remember.
Denise Resting 