long story coming up. Beware.

Ok I’m going to preface this story by saying I generally have a very supportive husband. He was lucky to get 4 weeks off of work right when baby was born. We all had such a great time learning how to be parents and bonding with baby. But then he went back to work a few weeks ago and things have not been great since. I think he’s just back in this mindset that he was in before we had kids. I recognize that he works for 8 hours but to be honest he has a really cushy salaried job in technology management at a big company and his boss is his friend so he gets a lot of wiggle room, etc. I’m just saying this so you all know he’s not spending 8 hours a day doing manual labor or something really exhausting. It’s just an office job and they don’t grind him to the bone.

Ok so baby is 6.5 weeks old and she’s been doing some longer stints of sleep recently. Like 4-6 hours sometimes. It varies a lot. But my husband and I have a deal that if he does the first feeding I will do the second one plus of course get her when she wakes up. Last night wasn’t a good night. It took her a long time to go down. We started trying around 8 but she really wasn’t asleep until around 9:45. We both took turns soothing during this time to put her down. Team effort. Once she went down I pumped to give myself some more time to sleep if she sleeps long (I’m prone to overproduction/clogged ducts) and I immediately went to bed around 10:00 or 10:15. At 2:00 she woke up for her first feeding. I gave my husband the milk I had pumped before bed and then I pumped again and cleaned all of the equipment. All ins lol I was up for about 30 minutes. Then I went to bed. We turn off the baby monitor when someone is with her so the other can sleep and then turn it back on when we come back to bed.

At 5:30 she’s crying again. Mostly straining to poop. But it was long enough where I decided to feed her too to hopefully give me more time in the morning before she woke up. I came back to bed around 6:15. At 7:00 she’s crying again which isn’t really like her. But I knew she didn’t need anything so I just kind of half asleep popped a pacifier in her mouth. Then went back to bed. Every few minutes I’d get up and pop it back in. And it would soothe her until she spit it out again. My husband at one point rolls over and says “are you just putting a pacifier in her mouth?” And I said yes I was just in there less than an hour ago and she doesn’t need anything. In between the pacifier trips I’m kind of snoozing. Then my husband miraculously decides to get his ass out of bed and help! Great! Now I can get some sleep before he has to go to work. At this point it’s like 7:30. He leaves for work at 8:45-9. So I hear him up and getting dressed. And I kind of fall asleep and wake up to the baby crying again. I go to see her and notice his car is gone. I call him and ask him where he is. It’s 7:45 st this point. He says he’s on his way to work. I said why. He said because he was already awake so he might as well. I said and you don’t think you could be useful here where there’s a crying baby? He said he didn’t think I was holding up my end of the bargain because he was “up all night”. I get up every time he’s up to pump at the very least. And he was not up all night. I was awake far more than he was. Keep in mind he has a salaried job so it’s not like he’s getting overtime. He’s a manager and his employees don’t get there until 9. He literally left either to spite me or to get away from a crying baby. Either one really pisses me off.

Also I’ll note that the night before he had to get up early to go on a day trip a couple hours away for work so I gave him the night off of feedings and I did everything.

I know his job is important and I’m not back st work yet so I can’t quite understand what it’s like to juggle both parenting and work. But I truly feel pretty abandoned. I feel like in his head he is better at doing his job than being a parent. It’s very predictable and he’s a very logical man. Babies aren’t predictable and he gets frustrated when she won’t go to sleep when he wants or when she’s seemingly crying for no reason. I mean I get frustrated too.

Jokes on him though because right after he left baby went back to sleep so now I’m going to try to get a wink or two in before she wakes up again.

Please be kind in your comments. I know I’m lucky in a lot of ways. I just needed to rant.