Welcome to the final part — let’s call it the post-event Q&A — of a small series of essays about queer baby-making. In part 1, I wrote about our (long) process of deciding to add a new baby to our family and the choice to have Ash, who is nonbinary, be the gestational parent. In
I missed this one earlier somehow. So many reflections on my own life, as usual. My previous F/F marriage didn't include children in large part because I had come to realize that I wouldn't like the way my ex would parent. I would want equitable labor but a. it wouldn't happen and b. what did happen, I wouldn't like. My husband and I have plenty of different ideas about baby and childcare and I know he disagrees with my choices a lot, but for the most part, we come to understandings... or ignore. We approach childcare coming from very different cultural backgrounds. And housework. And an unusual component is that we have exactly the same job and make pretty much exactly the same salary in the same number of hours. Perhaps that takes one opportunity for disagreement out of the equation... we can't have any discussion about whose job is harder or takes more time or contributes more.
I was reading this in a bit of awe and jealousy, wondering "how do they make this all work? why couldn't I make this work like other people do?" until I got to the part about childcare. Okay! Now I feel less inadequate. :) We are all just doing our best.
I have two kids, and the first was exclusively breastfed. My second... almost was. He was an insatiable consumer of breastmilk, always eating EVERYTHING I pumped during the day, until I weaned him at 20 months. It was not sustainable. But no other alternative seemed good. I didn't recognize postpartum depression at the time, but what I thought was, this is the only thing I seem to be able to do right, I don't want anyone to take it away from me. If my husband or the babysitter can feed him just as well as I can, there would be no reason for me to be here.
My little one was 7 months when covid hit and 9 ,months when we all got covid. I was out from work for a month, maybe more? I couldn't bring myself to pump during that time (plus, when would I have done it? How? Pumping requires the mother to have enough milk to pump, so, not when baby has recently nursed, and then you have to have enough milk to nurse from the breast when the baby is hungry--so you have to have like a 4-hour window minimum. There were no four hour windows.) So I had to go back to work without leaving breastmilk behind. We bought one can of formula. We never bought another one, after that first day I was again "living paycheck to paycheck" on pumped breastmilk as I thought of it, but OH the relief I felt if I was "only" able to pump 16 ounces during a shift. There would always be formula if he was still hungry.
Babyhood is behind us, the little one is four. But this week there was basically a SWAT-operation level of planning for me to go to a freaking PTA meeting for one hour. Will things ever change.
As a nonbinary parent called ‘Mom’ (who was raised female), I really appreciated reading this Q&A. I wasn’t able to breastfeed my first child due to medical reasons, and the guilt I felt was overwhelming. We had to formula feed, and I felt like a complete failure. Oddly enough after I had my second kid, I chose to formula feed because it helped distribute the load between me and my husband. I just felt really seen by your commentary on feeding a baby, and I appreciate your thoughtful words on parenting, how to distribute the work between two people, and how gender plays such a role in what we take on. Thank you. 💜
Thank you Molly! So much to unpack and think about. I appreciate your thoughts and perspective.
After posing that question, I have now gone back to work. I’m a teacher and gone from the house. My husband, who is currently unemployed, is caring for our daughter. I’m optimistic that with his current role as primary caregiver, more equity may be achieved. Of course, I am still breastfeeding, which, yes I do think, tips the scale.
“Something I love about my second marriage — and about bringing more life experience to this partnership — is that I am never asked to be only one thing. In this iteration of marriage, I am regularly encouraged to be and reminded that I am a mother and a spouse, yes, but also a writer, a teacher, a friend, an increasingly extroverted introvert, a person who likes to nap, a person who is learning about gardening, a person who did water aerobics for the first time on Sunday and fucking loved it, a person who is into complimenting strangers, I mean who even knows who I will be next.”
Getting to have so many selves who we continually get to know and introduce to ourselves and our partner(s) is meaningful to full dignity and is no longer a perk reserved for cis herero men. For too long — and still today in many places — women have only ever been valued for one thing: reproduction. Only when every person with female reproductive organs gets to live out as many diverse interests as do men will we have gender equality.
Molly, first of all, thank you again for this beautiful series and for answering my (and so many others'!) questions with transparency and grace!
I just wanted to say thank you for capturing the value of formula-feeding. After a couple weeks of trying and failing to lactate while they were in the NICU, my twins were exclusively formula-fed. It was fearfully expensive, the bottle-washing was relentless, but **any capable adult could feed them**. My husband and I shared that task equally, and it allowed me to be rested, be sane, and heal physically in a way that I rarely see afforded to other new moms. And, it DID set us up for more equitable parenting. All of that has SO MUCH value. I wish I had known that then, and I wish it were more culturally acceptable to trumpet that from the rooftops now. Thank you so much for starting the conversation here.
Molly, have loved this series and your insights - thank you for all of it. I too am still dealing with the mess feeding my baby left me with and she’s 9! But really, I also wanted to say water aerobics is the freaking best. My friend and I go every Sunday while the pool is open and just recently declared it the best part of summer - bold, but we stand by it!
Hi Molly, I always enjoy your writing on parenting. I found the first year of parenting extremely challenging. I breastfed but we also supplemented w formula, honestly my son probably got 50/50. Even though I had a wife, I felt so much of the work fell to me. You're telling me you want me to nurse, pump, AND wash all the pump and bottle parts??? I felt like no one tells you how hard parenting is. There were many additional factors, but ultimately my wife and I separated in 2020.
I'm not sure what my ultimate point is, just that I so appreciate you talking about your experiences frankly.
Growing up witnessing my mother take on so much of the invisible, thankless and unpaid labor of raising my siblings and I and 'keeping the home' while my father worked, I was not interested in having my own children and being forced into the same structure. While I am still childless, and unmarried, I have opened up to the possibility of having a child solely due to the fact that my male partner currently does the lion's share of logistical work in our relationships (house and yard work, grocery shopping, trip planning, large financial purchases, transportation, etc.) and also has the higher paying job.
I have no idea if this dynamic will indeed translate to a fair division of child care, should we choose to have a child, but I have more confidence than I have with any other male partner.
Oftentimes it appears to family and friends that my partner handles the majority of the logistics in our household and life, while I sit back and enjoy the ride, and while that may be true now, I trust that so much more will inevitably fall on me as the birthing parent and believe that the scales will even out. I have set firm boundaries in my relationship around what I am willing to give of myself, boundaries that I realize will be stretched (and broken) should I choose to become a mother.
Part of me does wonder if my interpretation of him doing more labor in our relationship is again this societal gender dynamic at play, and this feeling that I am doing too little and he is doing too much is actually just what a fair division feels like, as Molly's friend pointed out!
Also, this might sound strange, but I believe I hold what I feel is the spiritual integrity of our relationship together, the soul of us as a couple, and this maintenance requires constant care and witnessing. While this work is less tangible, and certainly not visible, it feels incredibly necessary and I sense that were we to grow as a family, so would the weight of this responsibility.
Molly, I have so much to say, and am so grateful for the clarity and realness and embrace of complexity and contradiction in your posts. It is beautiful storytelling and makes the world feel less alone. There are many points of familiarity.
I wanted to ask if you might be willing to write more about how you moved through the wake of divorce into new partnership and the coparenting era, how what you mentioned in an earlier post (about having full time with Ames but part time with June, and the pain and inconceivability of that) has unfolded, and the hating of divorce but recognizing the better parenting opportunities and positive developments of its aftermath—any of that. I would love to read what you write and I think it could be healing too.
Regarding feeding, when my second child was born I realized the thing I most hated about breastfeeding was pumping. Especially at work where I pumped in a bathroom, even moreso the nights when my child didn't wake up for a feed and I found myself exhausted and pumping when I could be sleeping. I decided that pumping would not be a regular part of my life again and so the baby had formula when I wasn't there and sometimes even if I was. And it was incredibly liberating and I tell people about it whenever it is even vaguely related to the topic at hand. Great post, thank you for sharing.
I find these conversations really interesting. My wife and I (we're both she/her and both somewhat genderqueer/genderfluid) have been together since we were both 23, and we're now in our early 40s. Our kid just turned 7. We've gone through a lot of configurations with our household situation in that time, though in our case I think gender has played into it less than physical and mental factors have. I've always been lucky enough to have a very healthy, pain-free body. My wife has had frequent headaches and chronic pain and fatigue (no specific diagnosis) for most of her life, plus a lot of emotional aftereffects of a traumatic childhood. I was raised by two older parents who were able to retire when I turned 3, which set impossibly high standards for the amount of time I subconsciously felt should be made available to our kid. I've had to be more realistic in that respect, because I do have to work, and as of four months ago, my wife has started working as well. I was the one of the two of us who desperately wanted to become a parent.
My wife was more ambivalent, and took a long time to decide whether parenthood was something she wanted, given that when we hit our 30s she felt like she had finally gotten on a good path emotionally and had begun to heal some of the trauma that had affected her self-conception and well-being for so much of her life. For mostly logistical reasons, she wound up being the one to carry our kid (even though I had always wanted to), and so I threw myself into every aspect of parenthood that I possibly could, saving up for nine years (and eventually spending 75% of our total household assets) to self-fund parental leave for much of our kid's first year (even though she had quit her job and was also home full-time with him), doing tons of research on donor conception, childbirth, child rearing, non-gestational parenting, et cetera... And for her part, for much of the first few years of our kid's life, even though she was the genetic, gestational, breastfeeding, and stay at home parent, she was beset by imposter syndrome, at times feeling that she wasn't a "real parent", which I think had more to do with her past than with our actual situation at that time, given that I was out of the home working and she was doing the vast majority of childcare.
Now that our kid is 7, things are much less overwhelming for both of us, and I think we've both settled into a good relationship both with the kid himself and with our own relationship towards household management. At times (especially when the kid was very young) I've done most of the cooking. These days she mostly does, since she works at home and I tend to be out of the house working during food prep times. I tend to take the kid out all day Saturday and Sunday so that she can have time alone, since I get time alone between jobs when I'm out at work (I'm a freelancer with a somewhat erratic schedule, while she works a fairly flexible at-home 9 to 5). I've always done the majority of the apartment cleaning, but she has a lower threshold for mess and dirt than I do, so she usually feels free to let me know when she thinks a room should be cleaned, and then I'll do it. Recently she's gotten somewhat better control of her chronic pain, and she's been able to do more around the home without hurting herself. I think it's been a bit of a struggle for both of us to adapt our relationship's previous dynamic to the new state of affairs, but I think it's been good for both of us. For a while I know she felt like her identity had been consumed by stay at home parenting, even though I did my best to take the kid off her hands pretty much any time I wasn't out working, and that caused me to feel like I had nothing in my own life outside of work and child care, while at the same time being resentful that she got so much more time with the kid than I did. Now that our kid is in school and is much more self-sufficient, he requires less hands-on attention from day to day, and we both feel like that pressure has eased. We were both worried that my wife going back to work for the first time in 6 years would destabilize the hard-won balance we'd built, but I think we've both been pleasantly surprised at how well it's worked, and how it's given her back a bit of variety and purpose in a life that had been centered around child care for so many years. It's also helped me feel able to say no to certain gigs in favor of spending time with the kid, which has made me way happier and less stressed about money than I had been before.
It's hard to say how different any of this would have been if we had been a heterosexual couple or if there hadn't been the disparity in pain and energy levels or if our employment situation had been more balanced. I have to say I'm proud of us for getting to where we are, though. It hasn't been easy, but to my mind it's definitely been worth the struggle.
I love getting these insights into your daily life, Molly! Thank you for sharing! Also I would love to come over and snuggle Ames--or, better yet, just ship him to LA! PLEASE!!!
I exclusively breastfed my three kids. I worked from home/had a flexible teaching schedule and breastfeeding came easily to me. I'm not sure what might've happened if that hadn't been the case, though I'm certain there would have been a lot of teeth gnashing and unnecessary guilt and stress over it. I love that you had two totally different experiences, which gives you such keen insight. And I love that mothers who use formula are recasting that choice, revealing its benefits. I am interested in mothers feeling empowered, and talking about the choices that empowered them.
I have a different viewpoint on nursing precisely *because* my hetero male partner is so involved in the domestic tasks and parenting. (Sadly, he's sort of a unicorn, I'm learning, based on what most other straight women say about their husbands! It does not have to be this way, though! His dad was like he is, and my kids will, I hope, continue this pattern of equitable partnerships with their own spouses. May we all work to shake off these gendered labor imbalances...!)
Because my husband has always been committed to doing his share of household tasks, I felt like nursing was like a TICKET OUT OF DRUDGERY! I'd so much rather sit in a chair cuddling my child and nursing them (again, it came easily to me, so that's important to note) than wash dishes, or mop the floor, or figure out the childcare schedule, or go to the market, or give an older kid a bath, etc. I love that nursing took time and that it wasn't productive--beyond feeding the child. It was like a release from efficiency.
Of course, it did mean I couldn't leave my kid for too long in the early days, and I also had to do the nighttime feedings. But I also could always sleep in, and it meant the non-nursing stuff fell to my husband, which made him a stronger parent--in those early days, he always changed the diapers, for instance. And I have never in my life cut my children's fingernails. Not once! Since my husband couldn't nurse the kids, that was a Daddy-only job that he saw to.
I think for couples that aren't as equitable, formula may be a way to even things out. If the birthing parent wants to nurse, then considering how that is basically ALL they should do for a while. It can really balance the scales.
Anyway, just my experience! I loved reading about yours! xoxo
The quote from your dad-friend seems spot-on to me. I take on more of our household chores, which I don't enjoy, but what I really don't enjoy is that is that I know my husband thinks we have an equal load.
That being said, we do equally share the parenting load. This is great when it comes to the time and emotional investment of raising children, but it can be challenging in that we rarely relinquish control to the other. We butt heads about how to handle discipline so much that we've decided we need to discuss how to handle even the most minor issues - i.e., our second-grader consistently pours herself way too much cereal; what's the appropriate response?
Part of this equality might be because we have the exact same job - same pay rate, same flexibility, same expectations. Even when our kids were babies and were exclusively breastfed, we were equally involved in all things except feeding them. I didn't choose to exclusively breastfeed because of any preconceived notions about formula; I was just too overwhelmed as a new mom to take on anything else. I knew how to breastfeed so I was going to keep doing that. But I do wish I'd had the flexibility that formula-feeding would have given us.
Your words- and those of Sara and Amanda- make me feel like I can’t breathe. Which is ironic because I am in a place in my life where I finally CAN breathe. In reading this-I finally feel seen and heard! I have been a mom since age 17 and 24. I was a single mom for 5 years as I finished high school and put myself through college. These kids have been my life. In hindsight- I felt so many of the feelings and thoughts you describe, I just didn’t have words for them and too much guilt to talk about them. I was always SO touched out when the second one came along- I breastfed her for a year and felt trapped all the damn time. We are a month or so into the “empty nest” years and for the first time in adulthood- I feel like my life is my own! My husband is a good dude, he is actually in recovery for alcoholism and has grown so much. His recovery has included acknowledging and changing his shortcomings. We talk about the mental load and invisible labor now. He helps cook and clean. (I should mention that I was a stay at home mom for 16 months after baby #2 and almost lost my goddamn mind and since then have worked full time). As great as it is now, I really lament that he didn’t step it up during those hard years of being in the damn weeds of parenting. I don’t want this to be my daughters’ experience too so we talk out loud about these things. I hope they eventually have partnerships where the load is more equal from the start and they feel less…panicked. Thank you for all of this.
Side note: I finally made it to Delancey last month while on vacation and it was STUNNING. Best part of our trip.
Thank you again- for all your hard work in all areas of your life. You make a difference.
I missed this one earlier somehow. So many reflections on my own life, as usual. My previous F/F marriage didn't include children in large part because I had come to realize that I wouldn't like the way my ex would parent. I would want equitable labor but a. it wouldn't happen and b. what did happen, I wouldn't like. My husband and I have plenty of different ideas about baby and childcare and I know he disagrees with my choices a lot, but for the most part, we come to understandings... or ignore. We approach childcare coming from very different cultural backgrounds. And housework. And an unusual component is that we have exactly the same job and make pretty much exactly the same salary in the same number of hours. Perhaps that takes one opportunity for disagreement out of the equation... we can't have any discussion about whose job is harder or takes more time or contributes more.
I was reading this in a bit of awe and jealousy, wondering "how do they make this all work? why couldn't I make this work like other people do?" until I got to the part about childcare. Okay! Now I feel less inadequate. :) We are all just doing our best.
I have two kids, and the first was exclusively breastfed. My second... almost was. He was an insatiable consumer of breastmilk, always eating EVERYTHING I pumped during the day, until I weaned him at 20 months. It was not sustainable. But no other alternative seemed good. I didn't recognize postpartum depression at the time, but what I thought was, this is the only thing I seem to be able to do right, I don't want anyone to take it away from me. If my husband or the babysitter can feed him just as well as I can, there would be no reason for me to be here.
My little one was 7 months when covid hit and 9 ,months when we all got covid. I was out from work for a month, maybe more? I couldn't bring myself to pump during that time (plus, when would I have done it? How? Pumping requires the mother to have enough milk to pump, so, not when baby has recently nursed, and then you have to have enough milk to nurse from the breast when the baby is hungry--so you have to have like a 4-hour window minimum. There were no four hour windows.) So I had to go back to work without leaving breastmilk behind. We bought one can of formula. We never bought another one, after that first day I was again "living paycheck to paycheck" on pumped breastmilk as I thought of it, but OH the relief I felt if I was "only" able to pump 16 ounces during a shift. There would always be formula if he was still hungry.
Babyhood is behind us, the little one is four. But this week there was basically a SWAT-operation level of planning for me to go to a freaking PTA meeting for one hour. Will things ever change.
As a nonbinary parent called ‘Mom’ (who was raised female), I really appreciated reading this Q&A. I wasn’t able to breastfeed my first child due to medical reasons, and the guilt I felt was overwhelming. We had to formula feed, and I felt like a complete failure. Oddly enough after I had my second kid, I chose to formula feed because it helped distribute the load between me and my husband. I just felt really seen by your commentary on feeding a baby, and I appreciate your thoughtful words on parenting, how to distribute the work between two people, and how gender plays such a role in what we take on. Thank you. 💜
Thank you Molly! So much to unpack and think about. I appreciate your thoughts and perspective.
After posing that question, I have now gone back to work. I’m a teacher and gone from the house. My husband, who is currently unemployed, is caring for our daughter. I’m optimistic that with his current role as primary caregiver, more equity may be achieved. Of course, I am still breastfeeding, which, yes I do think, tips the scale.
“a person who did water aerobics for the first time on Sunday and fucking loved it” 👏 🐠
My favorite part of this post is this:
“Something I love about my second marriage — and about bringing more life experience to this partnership — is that I am never asked to be only one thing. In this iteration of marriage, I am regularly encouraged to be and reminded that I am a mother and a spouse, yes, but also a writer, a teacher, a friend, an increasingly extroverted introvert, a person who likes to nap, a person who is learning about gardening, a person who did water aerobics for the first time on Sunday and fucking loved it, a person who is into complimenting strangers, I mean who even knows who I will be next.”
All this reminds me of a piece I read a while back on the importance of accepting change in relationships: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/style/modern-love-to-stay-married-embrace-change.html.
Getting to have so many selves who we continually get to know and introduce to ourselves and our partner(s) is meaningful to full dignity and is no longer a perk reserved for cis herero men. For too long — and still today in many places — women have only ever been valued for one thing: reproduction. Only when every person with female reproductive organs gets to live out as many diverse interests as do men will we have gender equality.
Thank you for another great post Molly.
Thank you for sharing your experience with such honestly and clarity, Molly. I aways benefit from reading your words.
Molly, first of all, thank you again for this beautiful series and for answering my (and so many others'!) questions with transparency and grace!
I just wanted to say thank you for capturing the value of formula-feeding. After a couple weeks of trying and failing to lactate while they were in the NICU, my twins were exclusively formula-fed. It was fearfully expensive, the bottle-washing was relentless, but **any capable adult could feed them**. My husband and I shared that task equally, and it allowed me to be rested, be sane, and heal physically in a way that I rarely see afforded to other new moms. And, it DID set us up for more equitable parenting. All of that has SO MUCH value. I wish I had known that then, and I wish it were more culturally acceptable to trumpet that from the rooftops now. Thank you so much for starting the conversation here.
Molly, have loved this series and your insights - thank you for all of it. I too am still dealing with the mess feeding my baby left me with and she’s 9! But really, I also wanted to say water aerobics is the freaking best. My friend and I go every Sunday while the pool is open and just recently declared it the best part of summer - bold, but we stand by it!
Hi Molly, I always enjoy your writing on parenting. I found the first year of parenting extremely challenging. I breastfed but we also supplemented w formula, honestly my son probably got 50/50. Even though I had a wife, I felt so much of the work fell to me. You're telling me you want me to nurse, pump, AND wash all the pump and bottle parts??? I felt like no one tells you how hard parenting is. There were many additional factors, but ultimately my wife and I separated in 2020.
I'm not sure what my ultimate point is, just that I so appreciate you talking about your experiences frankly.
Growing up witnessing my mother take on so much of the invisible, thankless and unpaid labor of raising my siblings and I and 'keeping the home' while my father worked, I was not interested in having my own children and being forced into the same structure. While I am still childless, and unmarried, I have opened up to the possibility of having a child solely due to the fact that my male partner currently does the lion's share of logistical work in our relationships (house and yard work, grocery shopping, trip planning, large financial purchases, transportation, etc.) and also has the higher paying job.
I have no idea if this dynamic will indeed translate to a fair division of child care, should we choose to have a child, but I have more confidence than I have with any other male partner.
Oftentimes it appears to family and friends that my partner handles the majority of the logistics in our household and life, while I sit back and enjoy the ride, and while that may be true now, I trust that so much more will inevitably fall on me as the birthing parent and believe that the scales will even out. I have set firm boundaries in my relationship around what I am willing to give of myself, boundaries that I realize will be stretched (and broken) should I choose to become a mother.
Part of me does wonder if my interpretation of him doing more labor in our relationship is again this societal gender dynamic at play, and this feeling that I am doing too little and he is doing too much is actually just what a fair division feels like, as Molly's friend pointed out!
Also, this might sound strange, but I believe I hold what I feel is the spiritual integrity of our relationship together, the soul of us as a couple, and this maintenance requires constant care and witnessing. While this work is less tangible, and certainly not visible, it feels incredibly necessary and I sense that were we to grow as a family, so would the weight of this responsibility.
Molly, I have so much to say, and am so grateful for the clarity and realness and embrace of complexity and contradiction in your posts. It is beautiful storytelling and makes the world feel less alone. There are many points of familiarity.
I wanted to ask if you might be willing to write more about how you moved through the wake of divorce into new partnership and the coparenting era, how what you mentioned in an earlier post (about having full time with Ames but part time with June, and the pain and inconceivability of that) has unfolded, and the hating of divorce but recognizing the better parenting opportunities and positive developments of its aftermath—any of that. I would love to read what you write and I think it could be healing too.
Regarding feeding, when my second child was born I realized the thing I most hated about breastfeeding was pumping. Especially at work where I pumped in a bathroom, even moreso the nights when my child didn't wake up for a feed and I found myself exhausted and pumping when I could be sleeping. I decided that pumping would not be a regular part of my life again and so the baby had formula when I wasn't there and sometimes even if I was. And it was incredibly liberating and I tell people about it whenever it is even vaguely related to the topic at hand. Great post, thank you for sharing.
I find these conversations really interesting. My wife and I (we're both she/her and both somewhat genderqueer/genderfluid) have been together since we were both 23, and we're now in our early 40s. Our kid just turned 7. We've gone through a lot of configurations with our household situation in that time, though in our case I think gender has played into it less than physical and mental factors have. I've always been lucky enough to have a very healthy, pain-free body. My wife has had frequent headaches and chronic pain and fatigue (no specific diagnosis) for most of her life, plus a lot of emotional aftereffects of a traumatic childhood. I was raised by two older parents who were able to retire when I turned 3, which set impossibly high standards for the amount of time I subconsciously felt should be made available to our kid. I've had to be more realistic in that respect, because I do have to work, and as of four months ago, my wife has started working as well. I was the one of the two of us who desperately wanted to become a parent.
My wife was more ambivalent, and took a long time to decide whether parenthood was something she wanted, given that when we hit our 30s she felt like she had finally gotten on a good path emotionally and had begun to heal some of the trauma that had affected her self-conception and well-being for so much of her life. For mostly logistical reasons, she wound up being the one to carry our kid (even though I had always wanted to), and so I threw myself into every aspect of parenthood that I possibly could, saving up for nine years (and eventually spending 75% of our total household assets) to self-fund parental leave for much of our kid's first year (even though she had quit her job and was also home full-time with him), doing tons of research on donor conception, childbirth, child rearing, non-gestational parenting, et cetera... And for her part, for much of the first few years of our kid's life, even though she was the genetic, gestational, breastfeeding, and stay at home parent, she was beset by imposter syndrome, at times feeling that she wasn't a "real parent", which I think had more to do with her past than with our actual situation at that time, given that I was out of the home working and she was doing the vast majority of childcare.
Now that our kid is 7, things are much less overwhelming for both of us, and I think we've both settled into a good relationship both with the kid himself and with our own relationship towards household management. At times (especially when the kid was very young) I've done most of the cooking. These days she mostly does, since she works at home and I tend to be out of the house working during food prep times. I tend to take the kid out all day Saturday and Sunday so that she can have time alone, since I get time alone between jobs when I'm out at work (I'm a freelancer with a somewhat erratic schedule, while she works a fairly flexible at-home 9 to 5). I've always done the majority of the apartment cleaning, but she has a lower threshold for mess and dirt than I do, so she usually feels free to let me know when she thinks a room should be cleaned, and then I'll do it. Recently she's gotten somewhat better control of her chronic pain, and she's been able to do more around the home without hurting herself. I think it's been a bit of a struggle for both of us to adapt our relationship's previous dynamic to the new state of affairs, but I think it's been good for both of us. For a while I know she felt like her identity had been consumed by stay at home parenting, even though I did my best to take the kid off her hands pretty much any time I wasn't out working, and that caused me to feel like I had nothing in my own life outside of work and child care, while at the same time being resentful that she got so much more time with the kid than I did. Now that our kid is in school and is much more self-sufficient, he requires less hands-on attention from day to day, and we both feel like that pressure has eased. We were both worried that my wife going back to work for the first time in 6 years would destabilize the hard-won balance we'd built, but I think we've both been pleasantly surprised at how well it's worked, and how it's given her back a bit of variety and purpose in a life that had been centered around child care for so many years. It's also helped me feel able to say no to certain gigs in favor of spending time with the kid, which has made me way happier and less stressed about money than I had been before.
It's hard to say how different any of this would have been if we had been a heterosexual couple or if there hadn't been the disparity in pain and energy levels or if our employment situation had been more balanced. I have to say I'm proud of us for getting to where we are, though. It hasn't been easy, but to my mind it's definitely been worth the struggle.
I love getting these insights into your daily life, Molly! Thank you for sharing! Also I would love to come over and snuggle Ames--or, better yet, just ship him to LA! PLEASE!!!
I exclusively breastfed my three kids. I worked from home/had a flexible teaching schedule and breastfeeding came easily to me. I'm not sure what might've happened if that hadn't been the case, though I'm certain there would have been a lot of teeth gnashing and unnecessary guilt and stress over it. I love that you had two totally different experiences, which gives you such keen insight. And I love that mothers who use formula are recasting that choice, revealing its benefits. I am interested in mothers feeling empowered, and talking about the choices that empowered them.
I have a different viewpoint on nursing precisely *because* my hetero male partner is so involved in the domestic tasks and parenting. (Sadly, he's sort of a unicorn, I'm learning, based on what most other straight women say about their husbands! It does not have to be this way, though! His dad was like he is, and my kids will, I hope, continue this pattern of equitable partnerships with their own spouses. May we all work to shake off these gendered labor imbalances...!)
Because my husband has always been committed to doing his share of household tasks, I felt like nursing was like a TICKET OUT OF DRUDGERY! I'd so much rather sit in a chair cuddling my child and nursing them (again, it came easily to me, so that's important to note) than wash dishes, or mop the floor, or figure out the childcare schedule, or go to the market, or give an older kid a bath, etc. I love that nursing took time and that it wasn't productive--beyond feeding the child. It was like a release from efficiency.
Of course, it did mean I couldn't leave my kid for too long in the early days, and I also had to do the nighttime feedings. But I also could always sleep in, and it meant the non-nursing stuff fell to my husband, which made him a stronger parent--in those early days, he always changed the diapers, for instance. And I have never in my life cut my children's fingernails. Not once! Since my husband couldn't nurse the kids, that was a Daddy-only job that he saw to.
I think for couples that aren't as equitable, formula may be a way to even things out. If the birthing parent wants to nurse, then considering how that is basically ALL they should do for a while. It can really balance the scales.
Anyway, just my experience! I loved reading about yours! xoxo
The quote from your dad-friend seems spot-on to me. I take on more of our household chores, which I don't enjoy, but what I really don't enjoy is that is that I know my husband thinks we have an equal load.
That being said, we do equally share the parenting load. This is great when it comes to the time and emotional investment of raising children, but it can be challenging in that we rarely relinquish control to the other. We butt heads about how to handle discipline so much that we've decided we need to discuss how to handle even the most minor issues - i.e., our second-grader consistently pours herself way too much cereal; what's the appropriate response?
Part of this equality might be because we have the exact same job - same pay rate, same flexibility, same expectations. Even when our kids were babies and were exclusively breastfed, we were equally involved in all things except feeding them. I didn't choose to exclusively breastfeed because of any preconceived notions about formula; I was just too overwhelmed as a new mom to take on anything else. I knew how to breastfeed so I was going to keep doing that. But I do wish I'd had the flexibility that formula-feeding would have given us.
Your words- and those of Sara and Amanda- make me feel like I can’t breathe. Which is ironic because I am in a place in my life where I finally CAN breathe. In reading this-I finally feel seen and heard! I have been a mom since age 17 and 24. I was a single mom for 5 years as I finished high school and put myself through college. These kids have been my life. In hindsight- I felt so many of the feelings and thoughts you describe, I just didn’t have words for them and too much guilt to talk about them. I was always SO touched out when the second one came along- I breastfed her for a year and felt trapped all the damn time. We are a month or so into the “empty nest” years and for the first time in adulthood- I feel like my life is my own! My husband is a good dude, he is actually in recovery for alcoholism and has grown so much. His recovery has included acknowledging and changing his shortcomings. We talk about the mental load and invisible labor now. He helps cook and clean. (I should mention that I was a stay at home mom for 16 months after baby #2 and almost lost my goddamn mind and since then have worked full time). As great as it is now, I really lament that he didn’t step it up during those hard years of being in the damn weeds of parenting. I don’t want this to be my daughters’ experience too so we talk out loud about these things. I hope they eventually have partnerships where the load is more equal from the start and they feel less…panicked. Thank you for all of this.
Side note: I finally made it to Delancey last month while on vacation and it was STUNNING. Best part of our trip.
Thank you again- for all your hard work in all areas of your life. You make a difference.