Practical & Conscientious Parenting
Thoughts
Maternity Leave
16 years
Ashley is officially on Maternity leave! She finished up the school year last Friday, and she’s taking the fall off, so she won’t have to be back until January. I’m really excited about the extra time we’ll have together and the extra help around the house. Since I’m a work-at-home-father-to-be (I’ve been working from home now for about nine months doing web development, and I love it. I absolutely love it.), we’re both going to be home to do some serious nesting. Not to mention we’re going to have the best babymoon ever! Even this week, though, I’ve realized that having Ashley around the house all day is going to bring its challenges.
While Ashley was in school, I usually worked for about five hours or so during the day, took a little break when she got home to hang out and cook dinner, and then worked again at night while she was studying. We were used to hanging out when she was at home. One of the downfalls of being self-employed is that I don’t offer myself any sort of paternity leave (I know, I know… I really should get with the times). I’m thinking I need to iron out a little more structured schedule, or it will be way to tempting to sit around and watch movies all day.
A Stunning Realization
16 years
I’m not a big fan of gender roles. I like to use my sewing machine just as much as my table saw. I like both Reservoir Dogs and Roman Holiday. In our pre-pregnancy lives, Ashley and I try to share the responsibilities, and for the most part we work pretty well together. I’m horrible at keeping a schedule, so Ashley pays the bills. I’m good in the kitchen, so I do a lot of our cooking. Nothing has tried to push us back into traditional gender roles quite like pregnancy has.
It’s been hard to find ways that I can equally contribute, since I haven’t had trouble keeping food down, I haven’t been super tired, and I haven’t had to grow another human being inside myself. I try to compensate by doing most of the shopping, cooking and dishes. I’ve been to most of the prenatal appointments, and I keep our blog updated with pictures for our families. But recently, I was reminded just how different our roles are during pregnancy, and just how incredible mothers are.
On a recent trip to visit our families in Oregon, Ashley started getting worried because she hadn’t felt the baby move in a couple of days (spoiler: everything turns out just fine). Generally, our little bug has been pretty active (although we didn’t start feeling baby kicks until about four months into the pregnancy because of an anterior placenta). It was late at night, and we weren’t sure if our insurance would cover an out of state emergency room visit. Funny things happen all the time during pregnancy, but we thought just to be safe we should go in. We did, and after being hooked up to a fetal monitor for about 20 minutes, the doctor said everything was just fine.
On the way home, I was relieved, but I was never really that worried. Me being the current bread-winner and having a fundamental dislike of visiting doctors, I figured this was just going to be another needless trip to the hospital. But then came my stunning realization: somehow Ashley is expected, with no previous experience, to know what’s going on with our baby. Between all the gut turning somersaults and still moments, new mothers are expected to know when things aren’t okay. And bad things can happen if they don’t recognize signs that they’ve never even felt before. Wow.
So this is just to say, to Ashley, Anne, my mom and all moms: Wow. Way to go.