Why husbands are not wives

(even when you wish they were)

Dear Global Jigsaw,

Today, as a seasoned parent, I have learnt the truth behind the hoary cliché: be careful what you wish for; it may come true, the hard way.

This first dawned on me when my firstborn was a fussy infant who had invaded my brain and body, leaving me almost unrecognisable to myself. I was tired and bewildered. And much of my ire was focused on my husband, whom I felt was not involved enough in the gritty quotidian of infant-rearing. I remember thinking that husbands were “useless,” and what mothers of young babies really needed was a “wife”.

With the benefit of long hindsight, I can put myself in my spouse’s shoes with some sympathy. In fact, he’d taken a month off from work when our firstborn debuted, to find himself mostly superfluous in a home filled with a screaming baby for soundtrack to the action sequence of a wild-haired wife hurling accusations about the unfairness of everything.

My baby had lived and formed inside my body for months. I had a sense of ownership over him that was physical and fierce. As a result, even as I railed at my other half for not doing enough, I didn’t give him the freedom to actually do much. I constantly corrected the way he held the baby or the comforting techniques he attempted to use. I did this because I knew that, for example, my son preferred being carried upright, to the sideways cradle my husband tended to adopt.

Julio minding Ishaan while multitasking with his laptop. November 2008

My constant interfering could only have been dispiriting for the spouse. Eventually, he turned to the one activity that gave him a simultaneous sense of control and involvement: research. And as all baby-related roads lead to the mother’s breasts, so my beloved soon fancied himself as an expert on my breasts and what I should be doing with them. I was struggling to produce enough milk, but was determined not to give my son formula. The result was a lot of stress, and this was a problem that my husband decided to “solve”.

Lacking milky mammaries himself, he began to stay up nights reading the blogs of assorted lactation consultants, scribbling neat notes for me to peruse. He sent out orders on Amazon for fennel seed supplements, a known herbal lactation aid. He suggested I try getting a prescription for domperidrone, a medication usually used to ease symptoms of nausea and vomiting, but also shown to increase milk production in some women.

But when my husband recommended that I set the alarm clock so as to wake every two hours through the night in order to attach my chest to a pump for a 20-minute milking session, thereby “stimulating” my supply, I’d heard just about enough.

At one level, I realised he was only trying to help a situation — low milk supply — that I myself was agonising about. But I hated what I perceived as his interference in what was a deeply private matter. The reality was that I wanted him involved, but on my own terms.

His evangelising about breastfeeding was not the kind of support I’d craved. What I’d wanted was affirmation that I was a good mother despite problems with my milk supply. But my spouse’s efforts to “help” had merely felt like finger-pointing. Suffice to say, I had not taken kindly to the little post-its with lactation tips that I’d found on my bedside table in the mornings. That, in fact, I took some satisfaction in shredding these to bits and tossing them in the general direction of the dustbin, while yelling at my beleaguered beloved to *leave* *me* *alone*.

Of course, only a few hours earlier I had been yelling at him to be more concerned. Sending mixed messages is commonplace. Given how emotional, contradictory, disorienting and just huge, motherhood is, mixed feelings and their garbled communication are par for the course.

In hindsight, what I’d really wanted was for my husband to feel as unmoored by parenthood as I did. I’d wanted him to experience the inability of having a pure, baby-uncontaminated, thought. To not to be able to enjoy music without worrying about our son’s bowel movements. To not be able to read a newspaper without planning what to put in the diaper bag for baby’s next outing.

I’d wanted him to feel like I did, annexed by the baby, rather than just do things like research or giving our son a bath. I am able to put up my hand now and admit that it was unfair of me to have expected my spouse to be miserable, just because I was. For other moms of infants out there — fear not. In the long run, and if you have chosen your spouse wisely, as I have, your husband will have plenty of opportunities to find parenting wretched! And, even more importantly, both of you will be left gobsmacked by the absolute, spanking privilege of growing a human and have her love you.

xxx

That’s it from The Global Jigsaw for this week. Its tough to think of a candidate for a more “global” topic than motherhood and parenting. How did having a baby alter your life in the early days? Did you want a wife instead of a husband? And did the husbands out there want an altogether different kind of wife? He! He! Let us know in the comments. And so upgrade to paid subscriber if possible.