Becoming parents can be stressful. It’s a precious time, but it is also a time filed with exhaustion, tears, frustration, anxiety, and rushing around like a mad woman trying to get that one pot in the sink clean that you’ve been trying all day unsuccessfully to wash before the baby cries, and someone dumps dirty dishes and food into it before you can rinse it and set it on the counter to dry!
Consequently, sometimes (unfortunately more often than not in my case) it’s easy to immediately shoot down your spouse’s ideas about how to do certain things with the baby or lose your temper when he does something to disrupt the content state of the child you have worked so hard for so long to calm down.
The time of day I have most struggled with this recently is in the evening after my daughter has fallen asleep for the night.
Our baby currently sleeps, nighttime and naptime, in my arms, so when I need to use the restroom in the evening, she cries when I lay her down. My sweet husband always rushes into the nursery to hold her and calm her down until I get back.
The first few times he did this, he would bring her into another room with a light on and I would return from the restroom mortified that he was actually HELPING her wake up so that I would have to spend longer to get her back to sleep.
“Don’t bring her into the light!” I would hiss. He would apologize and bring her back to her room, but would say the light calmed her down. The problem with that was … I didn’t want her to stop crying, I wanted her to stay half asleep so that I didn’t have to bounce her back to sleep for an hour.
I’m her mother; of course I hate to see her distressed. But she and I will both have a much more restful night overall if she stays disoriented in the dark rather than fully waking up in the light.
So after those first several times of finding my husband doing whatever he could to comfort his baby girl while I was in the restroom, I began to get all worked up every time I heard him go to her as I hurried from the nursery to relieve myself.
I would mentally rehearse the tirade I planned to unleash on him if I were to find him compromising my daughter’s sleepy state. Yes, mama bears are as protective of their child’s (and consequently their own) sleep as they are of their physical safety.
I have not found him bringing her into the light in a while since I’ve explained to him why it is important for her to remain in the dark at night, but for some reason I still didn’t trust him and always planned a lecture while using the restroom, just in case.
And then this evening happened. This evening my husband told me something that changed my whole perspective on the situation.
He said, “You know what my favorite time with her is? The times that I hold her while you use the bathroom at night, when she’s crying and then she calms down when I hold her.”
My heart melted as I thought back over comments he’s made previously about those moments with his daughter that I now realize are so special to him.
Until tonight, I still got a little irritated about him coming in to hold her during my bathroom breaks, even though he keeps her in the dark now, because I always worry she’s going to wake up too much by him talking to her to calm her down.
But I’m so thankful for the reminder that sometimes daddies need to have a say. It’s easy for me to get caught up in a frustrating, frantic moment and try to brush him off as I’m caring for her, but what a sad thing it would be to deprive my daughter of her Daddy’s sweet and loving care.
Sometimes, it’s okay to let Daddy do it his way.
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