Why We Work

TH read the post. The post about him and how I feel like his parenting has taken a dive with little man.

He came up to me while I was changing a diaper and told me that he'd read it. I wasn't all that surprised. He knows about this blog and he reads it from time to time. I'd never write something here that I would keep private from him, and in reality he and I have had talk after talk about the things I wrote about.

He said he was glad he'd read it. That it was a wakeup call that that night with little man, when he was crying and we didn't know why, would have just dropped off his radar, but that reading my take on it, my reaction to him, my thoughts, made him realize that maybe it shouldn't. Made him realize that it may have been a bigger deal than he was making of it, at least to me.

He said he agreed that a large part of the "change" in his parenting he thinks can be attributed to my own confidence this time around. It's not that he's worse, it's that before I really leaned on him to help me get through, and now that I'm so much steadier on my feet as a parent, I'm seeing faults in him that I didn't notice before. Relativity and all that.

And then we left it at that. I'm not sure we really reached a resolution other than "I read it and I'm glad I read it," but so many of our conversations don't really have resolutions these days. Either the issues are too big to solve in the three minutes we get to discuss them, or we're cut short by the needs and demands of our kids, or we choose to spend our time playing with and enjoying our children rather than hashing out uncomfortable topics with each other. Regardless, we left it at that.

And the next morning, my baby woke up with a nasty, barking cough. Thoughts of "whooping cough" spread through my mommy mind like wildfire. I had just been out of work for an entire week over Thanksgiving, and it was Monday morning, and I was panicking.

And TH said that he'd stay home. No guilt trip. No heavy sighs or looks of panic. Just calm, "I got this, honey, go to work." And I could feel the stress melt off me (at least, as much as it can when my 6-month-old sounds like a coughing, barking seal). He made an appointment with the pediatrician and I met them there and my baby had croup. We were warned that the night would be rough.

And it was. My daughter has never been sick like that before. She's always been a sleep machine, even when dealing with a random cold, which is really all she's ever had, so we've never done the "up all night" thing with her. I think I got maybe 3.5 hours of sleep that night, and TH got even less. Because he sent me to bed from 11-2 and tended to little man's crying misery. And when I got up I had to force him to go to bed to get rest. He hovered around us, asking what he could do to help. At 5 I finally crawled back into bed, and when little man woke about 30 minutes later, crying and coughing, TH was the one to get up and hold him while I slept another precious 30 minutes until my alarm went off.

It was the worst night we've ever had as parents. Being up all night with a sick, crying baby, sitting in steamy bathrooms, taking him into the cold night air, rubbing vicks, shushing him, holding him upright so that he can sleep, and then repeating it again for hours and hours hit us like a ton of bricks. And right through it all, I felt like I had a partner again, someone on whom I could lean and depend. Someone who was helping to make it easier rather than just adding to my stress.

My husband read the blog and stepped up his game. And that's why we work. We work because for the last 16 years, he's made me believe that I never have to settle. We work because, though he's far from perfect, he busts his ass to get as close as he possibly can. We work because I'll never give up on that fact, and because I have always recognized, from the moment I met him in high school, how rare and valuable that really is.

I'm a lucky woman.