She’s Resentful I Work While She Stays Home With Our Baby, and I Get It. Sort Of.
This morning I stood by the front door dabbing coffee off my work shirt with a crumpled paper towel, and she was leaning against the nursery door holding our 8-month-old, who’d just spit up all down her favorite gray hoodie—the one with the hole in the elbow she got before we got pregnant, when we went to that janky outdoor music festival. She didn’t say anything at first, just looked at me, and I knew what that look was. The one that says you get to leave. I zipped up my bag, kissed her on the cheek, kissed the baby’s fuzzy warm head, and walked out to the car, and the whole drive to the office I couldn’t stop thinking about that look.
We chose this, remember? We sat down at the kitchen table with a calculator back when I got the promotion last year, added up her salary after daycare, commuting gas, work clothes, all the little hidden costs of working outside the home, and it came out to almost nothing. Like, she’d basically be working full time just to pay someone else to watch our kid. So we agreed she’d stay home for a couple years, until he’s old enough for preschool. It made sense on paper. It still makes sense on paper. But paper doesn’t tell you how it feels when one of you gets to leave the house every day and talk to other adults and drink hot coffee and pee alone, and the other one doesn’t.
A couple weeks ago we got in a stupid fight after dinner, over me leaving my dirty socks on the bathroom floor, which is definitely my bad, but it blew up fast into the real thing we’ve been tiptoeing around for months, and she said it: “You get to shut the office door and have a whole day that’s just yours. I don’t even get to poop by myself.” And I stood there holding a plate I was scraping into the sink, and I couldn’t even argue. I’d never thought about that before, not really. I go to the bathroom at work five times a day just to stretch my legs and escape a boring meeting, and it’s just me. She locks the door and the baby bangs on it from the other side, crying, like the world’s ending if she’s out of his sight for two minutes. That’s not a small, petty complaint. That’s the kind of thing that builds up, slow, until it’s heavy as a brick in your chest.
Last month I had to go to a work conference two hours away, stayed overnight in a hotel by myself. I won’t lie to you, I slept 10 straight hours. No baby monitor beeping every time he stirs, no little foot kicking me in the ribs at 3 a.m. I got room service pancakes and ate them while I watched a whole episode of a show that wasn’t baby sensory videos. I felt so guilty I didn’t tell her how good it felt. I just said the conference was boring and the bed was too hard. I knew if I told her the truth, it would just cut deeper. She hasn’t slept through the night in 8 months. She hasn’t eaten a whole hot meal without pausing to pick up a falling baby or wipe up a spill in 8 months, most days.
I used to come home and say “Man, I’m so tired from work today,” like that was some kind of competition. That was so stupid. I work 40 hours a week, most days. She works 12, 14, whatever, on call 24/7. There’s no competition. I get a weekend most weeks, she doesn’t get a weekend unless I give it to her. I used to think I was helping by taking out the trash and mowing the lawn once a week, like that checks the “I pull my weight” box. But that’s 20 minutes of work once a week. She’s on the clock the whole time.
The other night I got home and she was sitting on the living room floor, laundry spilled all over the carpet around her, baby was chewing on the TV remote covered in crumbs, and she hadn’t showered since the day before. I asked what she wanted for dinner, I offered to order whatever she was craving, and she just started crying. Quiet crying, not the screaming fight kind, and that was worse. She said she just wanted 20 minutes to take a shower without listening through the door for him to start crying. So I grabbed the baby and his jacket and walked him around the block for 30 minutes. It was 40 degrees out and I forgot my own coat, so my ears were freezing by the time I came back, but he fell asleep in the stroller, and I just walked in circles around the neighborhood. I thought about how we used to go out for dinner on Fridays, just us, and we’d talk about our dumb work drama and make fun of bad TV, and now we’re both just so tired most nights we fall asleep on the couch before the baby even goes down.
We talked after that shower, after he went to bed. She said she loves him more than anything in the world, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t resent me for getting to still have my job, my identity that isn’t just “mom.” She said she feels like she gave up her whole life just to make this work for our family. And I get that. I do. I told her I resent it a little too, that I missed his first roll over while I was in an all-day meeting, he said “dada” for the first time while I was stuck in traffic coming home. I’m just the guy who brings home the money and plays with him for an hour before bed. It doesn’t feel fair to any of us.
Some nights we go to bed and we don’t talk, because we’re both too tired and too mad to hash it out again. Some nights we figure it out: I give her an hour to go get coffee with her friend, I take the baby to the park, and it’s okay for a whole day. I don’t have a big solution. I don’t have some neat little lesson to wrap this up with. We’re just two people who made the best choice we could with the info we had, and it’s still hard, and she’s still resentful sometimes, and I’m still tired and guilty sometimes. I just try to not argue when she’s mad. I just try to take the baby as soon as I walk in the door, and let her have whatever time she needs, even if it’s just sitting on the porch scrolling her phone drinking a cold soda. That’s all I got right now. It’s not perfect. Nothing about this is.
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