Step 1. Don’t. Nobody wants to train their husbands and nobody wants to be trained. What we want are real partnerships. We want to be on the same team trying to make magic in this crazy world. Raise a couple kids, have some good times, and take great vacations.
2020 sucked. There are no words. But it gave my husband and I what we needed to get where we wanted to be. It forced us to evaluate what is really important to us. When COVID hit and the world shut down, my husband was a bartender and I was working from home. Calvin’s school closed and I was 5 months into a high risk pregnancy. The only way to get the pieces to fit was for Chris to stay home. It was great at first. We focused on silver linings. We finally had time to work on some house projects and we had a lot more ‘us’ time.
When things started to get better and it slowly but surely felt safe to go out to eat and travel and whatnot again, we re-evaluated. We had a 3.5yo with the summer off from preschool and a nearly 1yo that won’t start ‘preschool’ until January. My husband wanted to go back to work. He considered a couple of jobs, but nothing made sense. We decided he would stay home for the foreseeable future. This was difficult for us. The world is not designed for stay at home dads. I felt at odds with myself, guilty that as the mom I don’t stay home with my children. I honestly don’t think I could. Shout out to all of the stay at home parents. Y’all are amazing, even if you don’t feel that way. You are changing the world, one soul at a time.
Making the pieces ‘fit’ required lots of communication. We were still learning how to communicate. It has been uncomfortable at times, but we don’t grow within our comfort zones. Over time we have developed a mutual understanding of each others’ needs and how we express those needs. And it works.
Many working moms can likely attest, there is a point when you return from maternity leave and you feel like you are just failing at everything. You don’t know how to be a good mom. You don’t know how to be a good employee now that you are a mom. You don’t know how to be a good wife, friend, daughter, etc. You can’t give anything 110% anymore. It really sucks. When that feeling came after I returned from Conor, I thought about how to make our pieces ‘fit.’ If I focus on my career, Chris can focus on becoming the dad he didn’t have the opportunity to be after Calvin. We can both have rewarding roles that meet our personal needs and our families needs.
Today, I went to fill out a form that Calvin’s school had sent a third reminder for. At 9pm on a friday night. I went to the website and it said ‘no new forms’ and I hunted the form down in our profile to learn that it had our updated emails already. I told my husband and he said, ‘oh yeah, I did that a couple of days ago.’ Huh? What? ‘yeah, you told me to do more actual parenting, so I got you.’
Ladies (and gentlemen) I have arrived. I have a full fledged partner.
MumGene 