It's amazing how trivial all our married life arguments seemed as soon as we had a newborn. At the time, like most married folks, we really thought we were limiting our battles to the important stuff. Like, before we got a pet gate to secure the dogs in the back of the Jeep, Tiki used to nose her way into the front seat, where there was nowhere for her 60-pound body to go but 78% on my lap and 22% in Ryan's face. Ryan did nothing to discourage her as he drove along and her happy little tail whacked me repeatedly in the face.
You can't pet her when she does this!
I know...
You have to yell at her!
It doesn't work.
You have to do it anyway, and you have to push her into the back!
You know I can't do that! She was abused! THEY LOCKED HER IN A BATHROOM.
It's DANGEROUS. You even said this is why you rear-ended that Volvo when we first started dating.
That was a minor accident! I'm a safe driver, I COULD DRIVE RACE CARS.
We're still paying higher insurance because of it!! AND YOU GOT A BURRITO FOR LUNCH WITHOUT ME ON TUESDAY!
Those were the days. Because even though I've read a lot of good stuff about communication and productive argument and all that, it never seems to work when we're a collective mix of stressed and sensitive.
Finley's a relatively easy enough baby. But he's not one of those miracle super low maintenance babies. And what that means is that while we've never had any complaints in the sleep department, I don't have much time to contribute to chores. While I think that staying on top of laundry should earn me some kind of medal, Ryan gets frustrated with how much that leaves for him to do on particularly long or hard workdays.
There's no avoiding that pickle for us right now. But there are pickles we can avoid. And so these are some important battles I've learned to avoid:
1. Stop touching my breast milk!
I vented to my friend Shauna about this. Apparently Ryan isn't the only husband who likes to play a role in milk management. Her husband loves to freeze milk and prep bottles. But Bryan must not be as forgetful as Ryan is, because she has yet to send me an iMessage with 7 purple angry face emoticons at the end of it.
I come home from work each day with four full bottles that attach to my pump funnels. But, because they can be used post-milk-storage, we use mason jars for storing milk in the freezer. (On a scale of Emily Post to, say, Honey Boo Boo's mom, how inappropriate would it be to use said mason jars for our homemade Christmas gifts next year?)
Ryan tries to help me by transferring the milk and packing my pump bag. Well, I pumped into a canteen the other day. That day, he forgot to pack the bottles, which was not as catastrophic as the day he forgot to pack the little yellow pieces that facilitate suction.
But when I just said that Ryan likes "to help me", that was basically almost entirely false. He doesn't like to leave it until the morning for one of us to do for some reason that I don't care much about. I'm fine doing it in the morning, but I just don't want to do it at night. But he does. He does that instead of cleaning up the crumbs he manages to strew over every surface in the kitchen, instead of picking up the socks and clothing layers he sheds as he walks around the house, instead of returning empty seltzer cans and tea cups (he's a fancy carpenter) to the kitchen. Those things he leaves for me to do in the morning.
If I sound ungrateful, it's only because I had to walk from Downtown Crossing to the waterfront to borrow Shauna's pump while leaking through my shirt, and accidentally made eye contact with three young men from the Ukraine (or who knows where, there are a lot of accents I'm unfamiliar with), who demanded that I take their picture (four times) at the Boston Massacre Memorial, which is a circle of old bricks on the sidewalk, which, no, you could not see in the picture. At all.
Anyway, I could try to convince Ryan to take care of his sh*t, and let me take care of mine, or I could just make a checklist for myself to run through in the morning. Guess which is easier.
2. You're not the thing I like most about you!
Wha? I know. I'll explain.
One of the best things about Ryan is that there is, literally, no one I'd rather have by my side in an emergency or disaster. Well, maybe I'd want an expert in handling whatever specific emergency or disaster were to occur; but, for the general unknown, my husband is the best.
He trained as an EMT and graduated from the fire academy when he lived in south Florida, which is, if you'll recall, where people eat people's faces. He's been 20 miles out in 16 foot seas, and has even had to dive into the ocean in the middle of the night with a knife in his mouth to cut something or other from the anchor line so the boat wouldn't sink.
But, when I say that my baby's ear is slightly pinker than normal, he is in no way qualified to tell me not to worry, even if Finley had just been laying on that side of his head for 3 hours.
You see what I'm getting at. Sometimes I'm wrong. I have to remember that I don't always recognize that in a timely fashion.
3. Stop being such a little b*tch!
I think this is the dumbest of all the fights we almost have. I think most people know that nothing good can come from comparing pain. And yet, I find it so hard to resist doing.
Ryan had kidney stones a couple years ago. Four of them. His doctor told him he had zero kidney stones. Kidney stones hurt, apparently, and Ryan kept complaining about the pain. I insisted for one month straight that he get the name of his friend's urologist. I wish I could say that the reason was because I felt so bad that he was in pain. That was probably true for the first week or so. But then it was like, you aren't even trying to fix this, and now I just want you to stop b*tching. Fast forward some amount of time I don't quite recall, Ryan undergoes a couple stone-blasting procedures and has been fine since. Also, Ryan has a new doctor.
Fast forward a little further, to my third trimester. One morning, Ryan says, "There's nothing I can do to beat you if you give birth without drugs. You'll wear the tough pants in the family." This was the first and last time he's acknowledged my pain tolerance in comparison to his. Did I actually think he was going to give me a medal? I guess not. But would a piece of foil on a chain of paperclips really be too much to ask for?
But, no matter how hard I wish, there is no way that we can actually compare one another's pain tolerance levels and declare a winner.
What I can tell you is that when Ryan gets a stuffy nose, I get a status update every hour until it's gone. "I think I'm coming down with something." "I'm definitely coming down with something." "I wonder if this is a cold or allergies." "I think I have allergies." "I think I have a cold." "I wonder if I have the flu." "Don't let me breathe on you, I think I have the flu." And so on.
Me, on the other hand. They have this thing called the 5-1-1 rule to tell you at what point during labor you should go to the hospital. (Or, in our case, to the birth center.) I met the requirements at about 8am, but my midwife sent me home because it didn't hurt bad enough. Four hours later, I was pretty darn sure it hurt bad enough, and I told Ryan it was time to go back. He calmly replied, I don't know, I don't think it's bad enough yet. What I wanted to say was, I know it seems that way, but that's because I'm not a b*tch like you. What I did say was, It's bad enough. What the midwife said was, It's bad enough. Finley arrived five hours later.
So, I often want to say, Stop being such a b*tch! But, I have to remind myself that unless I want another sense of the word to describe me, I just have to let him be one.
So, those are the lessons I've learned.
1. Go with the easy option.
2. Know that you might be wrong.
3. Don't be a b*tch.
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