Tag Team Parenting
By KarenBannister • Jul 6th, 2009 • Category: The Momoir BlogAs light streams through the cracks in my bedroom blinds, I hear the sound of my husband’s feet touching the floor, the slow rustle of his body unraveling from the sheets. It is 7am and I am slowly coming to, wrestling the drug of sleep from my head as I acknowledge the four walls around me, the comfort and warmth of the light grey comforter on top of me and the softness beneath my head.
I hear my son’s cry, muffled by the walls of his room. I note the movement of my husband towards the door and the pieces fall in place - the welcome touch of familiarity, the comfort of our weekend routine. I mumble, “I’ll get him.” But my husband shakes his head and tells me to go back to sleep. I roll over, indulging in another lazy morning, resurfacing two hours later only to pad down the stairs and find my son, fully dressed, fully cleaned, fully fed.
This morning is no anomaly; in general, it is my husband who rises with our son, who feeds him breakfast and gets him ready for the day. It is also my husband who bathes him at night, feeds him his bottle and kisses his nose in slumber. We fell into this routine during my battle with Postpartum Depression - when I found it difficult to rise from bed and when my irrational fear of drowning and my anxiety over sleep kept me from being involved in bedtime. Now, we simply carry on with this pattern and I fill in the gap of the rest of the day. While I acknowledge, in my confident moments, our arrangement as a pretty good division of labour, I am also often plagued by a sense of guilt over everything that my husband does for our son.
Even as I write this I feel a pang of shame - as a mother I feel the burden of super woman, that horrid archetype of maternal success who exists to place unrealistic expectations on my shoulders. When I confess my guilt and shame to my husband, he always seems puzzled. He does not see this as I do. To him, he is just taking care of his son. And so our division of labour continues, and only in my eyes does it occassionally fall short of perfection.
This afternoon, my husband and I visited with his family. Outside on the deck of my in-law’s home, I watched my son play. I guarded the unsafe drop to the grass with my body. And when I felt tired and wished to sit and enjoy a glass of wine with my sister-in-law, a rare opportunity to catch up, I motioned to my husband. Twirling my finger around in the air, I mouthed “change-up.” My husband grinned, jumped from his chair and tagged my hand with a slap. Tag team, like marriage should be, like parenthood has to be.
While I still wonder if my own contribution falls short of 50/50, I know that my husband and I make a pretty good team. Where I fall down, he rises up and I only hope I do the same for him. Well, I guess I must because we are doing this parenting thing and pretty successfully. At least, I think my son thinks so.
Writing Start: Tag Team Parenting
KarenBannister is a fundraiser by profession and writer by passion. She lives in Niagara Falls, Ontario with her husband, son and boisterous labrador retriever.
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Karen, I think you should be proud of this arrangement, that gives you time to tend to your own needs and desires, while it gives your husband wonderful bonding time with his son. My husband and I have a similar arrangement. It feels healthy that we both get time to work, time to play and time with our daughter.
I think we sell dads short when we buy into the stereotype of the bumbling father who can’t dress the kids in matching clothes and so on.
You and your readers might enjoy Amy & Marc Vachon’s blog: http://www.equallysharedparenting.com.
Tag Team
Somewhere between dropping my wedding dress off at the drycleaners and extracting myself from the cocoon of my warm bed to nurse Hamish, I lost a piece of myself. I stopped listening to Ani DiFranco and my dreams of taking down the system were exchanged for conversations about sleep and aspirations to find time for myself. I became wife and mother. Like stepping into a pair of yoga pants, I fell into the comfort of my roles. I took motherhood seriously and appointed myself chief caretaker queen without stopping to assess how this would all play out. Now, two children under four later, I sit uncomfortably on my thrown and I feel the hot orange wave of resentment as I drag my knackered spirit out of bed to get up with the kids by myself for the 250th day in a row since Hamish’s birth. I’ve talked to friends who report that whoever hears the kids first gets up with them or that they simply take turns. I muse over what kind of miracle needs to take place in order for me to be able to sleep in. I sit silently and wonder where it all went wrong and how I ended up being the one who is constantly giving to everyone else around her at the expense of her own sanity. When did I become this person who can’t negotiate her own needs? When did I become the kind of wife that lapses into the role of mother to her husband? I can’t count the number of times I have said, “shh, Daddy’s still sleeping.” Somewhere between loads of laundry and wiping noses, I embarked on a journey to take care of everyone else’s needs leaving my own almost unfulfilled. Should I be surprised that nobody has magically appeared to take care of them for me? What is probably the most baffling part of all this is that I’m not married to some kind of uncaring lout who is unconcerned with my happiness and well being. Far from it. I’m married to someone who loves me deeply, someone who is happier when I am happy. And yet, somehow we have been delivered to a place that serves neither one of us. When we play the game of kid swap on weekends, we come together beautifully as a parenting couple. But recently when I listened to Ani DiFranco, I had my own mini Aha moment. She sang “and you will take the heavy stuff. And you will drive the car. And I’ll look out the window and make jokes about the way things are.” If I have misplaced small parts of myself then it is up to me to find them. If I want a tag team approach to parenting 100% of the time then I need to take the wheel and stop making jokes about the way things are.