Months ago, I read a post by one of my favorite bloggers. She talked of how she and her Husband got into an inane argument in the middle of the night over who would take care of their screaming baby. Neither one really wanted to take care of the task at hand and yet neither wanted the other to be the one to do it.
I didn't get it at the time. Why would you fight over that? Why not just let the other one deal with it? Why not take the lazy way out?
Fast forward to now. To last night. I get it now.
Bella has gone back to sleeping in shorter stretches the past few days, which means I've gotten up a few times each night. She isn't the best napper during the day so I haven't had much of a chance to catch up on sleep. I'm a little, shall we say, crabby. Yesterday evening, we returned from a walk and found it was already 7 pm. (How in the hell does that keep happening?) I still had to do the shred, we still had to eat, Bella needed her bath & bedtime routine, and there was a movie we needed to watch as it was overdue. Le sigh. We decided to divide and conquer. I would shred while Husband gave her a bath and then I could feed her and we'd put her to bed. After she was down we'd do dinner & a movie.
Halfway through the Shred, I can hear Bella screaming her head off upstairs and it's making it so hard for me to exercise. I stopped the DVD with 10 minutes left and went upstairs to feed her, sweaty state and all (mmm...salty breastmilk). Husband was doing fine, aside from her shrieking, but I felt like the screaming needed to stop right then (and what quicker solution than the boob?). We got into a mild, bickery argument about who would get to soothe her. He thought I should go back and finish exercising; I thought she should be soothed by feeding her that minute. We both wanted to be the one to take care of her. Neither of us really wanted to do it at that moment, but neither of us trusted that the other would be the best person for the job. So we went back and forth for a couple minutes about what to do. In the end, I fed her and then passed her back to Husband who insisted I finish up the last 10 minutes of the Shred as he knows I would have been frustrated with myself for not doing it to completion.
Parenthood is so weird. What other situation makes you want to be the one in charge of the (quite literally) shitty tasks when there is someone else willing to do it? No, please, let ME be the one to hold the screaming baby. I want to. I swear!
Husband and I talked about it later and he said that he could see that I was at my breaking point and he knew he needed to step in and take care of her at that time. I can see that point in him, too, and will do the same for him. It's that ebb and flow to our relationship that keeps me sane.
But I could still use some more sleep.
It's the weirdest thing, isn't it? You said it perfectly: Neither one trusted the other one's solution as the best thing at the time. Perfect.
ReplyDeleteHere's hoping you get more sleep soon!
Just wait until the day you can say, "mmm... sandy breastmilk"! We had been playing in the sandbox and aparently some went in my bra. Brady starts to nurse, looks up at me and says, "other side! Too sandy"! Hope baby bella is sleeping better :)
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