This is step one on the journey to “my husband doesn’t help me with our kid,” “I feel like a single mother of two”, “I’m exhausted because he rarely does anything with our kid, and it’s all on me.”
Time and again, women engineer these sad architectures of paternal exclusion for the dubious payoff of feeding their ego in the first couple of months of the child’s life. The result is always the same and so is their absolute shock that it happened.
Huh.
But the way you are besotted with your baby is different from the way you’re besotted with your beloved, you know. Why is this a hard concept?
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A father bonds with the baby later and in a different way than the mother. Of course, he didn’t carry her inside his body for 40 weeks. He wouldn’t have the same bond, the same already existing and profound relationship that she has with the mother. It will take time to develop such a relationship. But it might not develop at all if the mother continues to rub this difference in his face the whole time. One comment won’t do it but repeated assertions of how much stronger her bond with the baby is and how much better she understands the baby will produce exactly the results I’m talking about.
Understandable. But also… I’m not sure it’s realistic to expect that kind of emotional subtlety and relationship-management shrewdness from a woman who is still in the midst of a freaking tsunami of postpartum hormonal chaos. Somebody needs to take that fellow aside and explain some things to him– namely, that his woman is suffering from temporary physiological insanity designed to make sure his offspring survives infancy, and he shouldn’t take it personally.
Also, that it’s bloody well time to get married, and if he doesn’t care enough about his woman or his kid to take some permanent legal responsibility for them, he can hardly blame her for being more attached to the kid than to him.
–being ‘engaged’ at the time the first child is born does. not. count. He just let her go through nine months of being horribly emotionally and physically vulnerable, and heading into the even-worse-in-every-way postpartum stretch, without any real relationship security. If they just want to have a pretty wedding they could have gone down to the courthouse as soon as they found out, had a civil ceremony, and then done the formal vows with family and friends at a later date. She’s effectively just his babymama.
That means odds are good her relationship with him will be five years or less from this point whether they finally tie the knot or not. Unless she really, really screws things up, her relationship with that kid is gonna be at least the next 18 years.
Even if her actions were completely rational, she’d be making the mathematically correct decision here, by investing her emotional attachment in the kid, over the selfish manchild she’s ‘engaged’ to.
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“investing her emotional attachment in the kid, over the selfish manchild she’s ‘engaged’ to”
My take is that part of her hormonal chaos is manifesting as extreme dislike for her fiance.
Look up ‘women hate their husbands after childbirth’….
It might be temporary and she’ll come to her senses (if he’s worth it) or it may have been building for a while.
But giving someone who’s emotionally vulnerable a “are you fucking serious” look… not the only option she had, maybe not the absolute worst but…. close to it.
And look carefully at the wording in the last paragraph. She “love(s) and cherish(es)” her daughter and has “never experienced this kind of love for another human being” … what’s missing?
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Where is the dislike? He is the one being unreasonable and having problems processing biological reality, namely that carrying the child also results in feelings that he, as someone who was not pregnant, cannot relate to, and needs to accept.
She didn’t say a single bad thing to him. She described what she is feeling.
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Oh, yeah, he’ll accept soon enough. He’ll withdraw, not take any initiative with the child, defer to the Real Specialist on this child that’s the mom, and slowly morph into the role of a big brother to the kid at best or a distant dude who barely communicates at worst. Then she’ll pout but hey, that’s the price of feeling superior for a bit.
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“a woman who is still in the midst of a freaking tsunami of postpartum hormonal chaos”
As our hostess mentioned…. one of the weird side-effects of modernity is pretending that male and female physiology are identical (which is why gender-linked consumer goods are so necessary).
I doubt if either of the two has the mental hardware to understand things like hormonal chaos…..
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I expect not. Going through that all for the first time myself: postpartum was a very rough time! My blood sugar was going from 180 in the evening to 35 by morning, I was anemic from blood loss, my son was so relentlessly colicky that I didn’t get more than 45 minutes of sleep at a stretch for weeks, and when we were awake, the baby was nearly always miserable and needed to be rocked or nursed. Constantly. I was hallucinating from lack of sleep, and we were in a foreign country so we had no relatives around to help.
Did my husband feel neglected at that time? You bet! He told me about it later. Did I ego-manage him? No effing way. I could barely remember to eat or wipe my own arse. He’s grownup enough that he didn’t make a big deal out of it, managed his own feelings, and once we were past the 3-months-of-hell colic stage, we got past it, and re-focused with a bit of we-survived-that-warzone-together post-traumatic cameraderie into the bargain.
That could have been really, really dicey if we didn’t have the security and commitment of being both married and religious: i.e. the status of our relationship is permanent, and does not depend on constantly managing everybody’s feelz at the present moment. Having a baby is just a temporary crisis you have to get through. Things get better on the other side.
Which is all to say… sure, maybe she could’ve handled it better. But I’m not judging her for it because I certainly couldn’t have handled it better. Even my husband would tell you that I’m just not a very nice person while pregnant, and frankly kind of insane postpartum, no matter how hard I try to manage it (it’s not like I just give myself permission to be a crazy person). I understand this, and I didn’t blame my husband for my internal bad feelings. He’s clearly doing his best, and it’s equally clear that he’s in it for the long haul. So we both have the very solid assurance (through three kids now, so we know the pattern!), that even though this is a really tough ~year, it’s not always gonna be like this, and we’re still gonna be married when we get to the other side and we can be actual functioning humans again.
This gal at least has a few things going for her: she doesn’t mention colic, she does mention having her mom around to help, and she doesn’t sound half-dead. So perhaps expectations should be higher, I dunno. Still. I can’t imagine going through all that and also piling on top of that the insecurity of: if I don’t keep him happy all the time, he’ll leave me and the baby. That by itself is bound to result in some serious resentment.
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If she’s not lying about anything, she expressed what most new mothers feel after giving birth, and the baby’s father wasn’t mature enough to process it properly. She made one comment, and he was the one who brought it up repeatedly.
I’m baffled as to how you manage to make her out to be in the wrong.
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“baffled as to how you manage to make her out to be in the wrong”
Not that she was in the wrong, exactly, more that he didn’t deserve the hostility people were expressing toward him.
Call it contrarianism…. when I see everybody saying A I wonder “What’s B’s deal?”
I think feeling hurt was completely legitimate on his part (and eventually so did she).
It’s not “wrong” or “right.” Everybody is free to behave as they wish in relationships. I’m only pointing out how the very typical female complaints of “I feel like I’m a single mother of 3 where my husband is one of the 3” are gestated.
I happen to know what an extraordinary gift it is for a girl to have a close and profound relationship with her father. I also happen to know how to let my child and her father develop such a relationship. I’m sharing this knowledge. If people don’t want to take it, it’s perfectly fine with me.
In every mothering FB group, “my husband doesn’t do anything around the house or with the kids” is literally every third complaint. It’s mega easily solvable. But if people enjoy hitting their heads against that wall, I’m happy for them.
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It’s easier to avoid this problem in religious marriages because the wife will not try to impose her authority so much.
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“wife… authority”
Ha!
Ok, maybe you’re right, but for us that had nothing whatever to do with religion. By necessity, my parents’ household was intensely matriarchal. I spent the first ~six months of married life figuring out how to navigate a husband-wife relationship without casually bossing him around, because I didn’t even realize that was my default setting. There was some friction!
But I could see that my parents’ relationship was *not* one I wanted to use as a model, that my husband didn’t want to be treated that way (he told me so!), and *I adapted*. We both suck at mindreading and all that empathy and emotional intelligence girly shite, we know it, and so when something bothers us, we say it: “This thing really bothers me. That thing you just did, it made me feel bad. Please don’t say it like that.” And then we try to find some other way to do things. It’s not always smooth sailing, but in general we can fall back on: we like each other and we want to stay married, so we work on that stuff. It’s worth it.
I mean, crikey, you could hardly find two people more suited to each other than we are, but nobody’s perfect. No reward without putting in the work, but the work is worth it!
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The killing of language, and of family, renders these conversations rare:
“I did not realize I could love anything this way until I held our baby in my arms”
“Yes, me too. It’s amazing”
“A whole new adventure for us”.
The emotional tsunami is real. Pretending otherwise is a mistake. Excluding either sex because they are Having Unapproved Emotions is killer. Stealing the words we use to tell each other our stories is cruel.
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“women engineer these sad architectures of paternal exclusion”
There’s an update where they talked to each other (and other people) and realized that nothing they were feeling or doing was in any way novel or terrible so there’s hope.
But it is a sad symptom of hyper-individualization that they had so few real-life resources to turn to….
Cliff, I think people are often more open about their feelings online with strangers. I’m not disputing that she didn’t have people nearby to ask for advice, but even if she did, she may have wanted to ask this question online.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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