Saturday, July 11, 2009

Your mom

My hubby E is my absolute hero. He loves and takes care of me and the little man. He worries about how to best handle all of the things around the house, deal with things at work, and making sure our little family is happy and healthy. He is all around the best husband I could ever hope for and my best friend.

What he is not good at, however, is being tired.

Both of us are exhausted. A new baby, despite enriching your life beyond what you could ever imagine, makes you tired. There's just really no way around it. Because I know that E just doesn't do tired, I've been trying to handle all the late night baby dealings. With me starting back to work this week, E started to notice a marked difference in my ability to do things. Because of this, he volunteered to take the midnight (ish) feeding and let me do the four am shift. It was all working great, because each of us got to have at least six hours of uninterrupted sleep.

Until last night. I heared the monitor at about twelve thirty and tapped E on the shoulder. I say to him, "Bud, the baby is crying. He's hungry." To this E says, "So go feed him!" Taken aback, as this is not how he typically talks to me, I say, "But it's midnight, you were going to feed him now." To this he says, and I am not kidding...

"Your mom!"

Even in my half-asleep state my eyebrows rose. What? My mom? Was he kidding?

I take one more stab at getting him up, but it becomes very clear that he's not moving. So I am thoroughly upset. I mean, MAD. We don't argue often, so the fact that we were doing it in the middle of the night and that I was the only one who seemed irritated was really getting to me. Feeling full of the dramatic, I turn off the baby monitor, stand up and say with a flourish "Fine, I'll just sleep in the living room and do EVERYTHING! You just sleep!" and storm (as best as you can after being woken from a deep sleep) out of the room. (I realize this is ridiculous and unreasonable. However, in the dark of the night in a half asleep state it was hard to be reasonable.)

And good to my word, I spent the rest of the evening on the couch, but given I was so exhausted anyway I just zonked out. I think I could have fallen asleep on the tile in our entryway at that point. It didn't really matter where I was, so much that I was just horizontal.

At about six fifteen I was feeding N when heard E and Zoee emerge from the bedroom. I was primed. I mean, I was still a little steamed up about the whole thing. My mom? What? And why didn't E come and get me and insist that I not sleep on the couch? (Yes, I realize that this was passive-agressive thinking, but give me a break. We're exhausted.)

E comes in and says, "Feeding the baby?" Then he looks all happy and cheerful and asks me how long I had been up. I was like, "What do you mean?" And he was like, well, your alarm went off at five and you weren't there. Suddenly it occurs to me that E may have slept through the whole thing. Was that even possible? I tell him, "I was sleeping on the couch... Remember?" He looks at me quizzically and then says simply, "No. Why would you be doing that?"

Right. Turns out I had an arguement and stormed out on a man who was still fully asleep. He didn't remember anything from the night before. The whole "Your Mom" thing? Yeah, that's kind of hilarious now. E spent the entire morning trying to make up to me for a fight we had that he doesn't even remember. He feels terrible. He's done baby duty all morning and has insisted that he and N run some errands this afternoon while I take a nap. In the light of day the whole thing is pretty funny.

Your mom indeed.

4 comments:

Mrs. Robinson said...

This is hilarious....now that it's over at least. When I first started reading it, I thought he was saying you had to feed because "you are mom". Anyways, too funny. Glad it ended fairly passively.

ahefner said...

Right - your mom versus you're mom... I'm glad that we can see how funny it is in the light of day too!

The Blevins' said...

Okay that is hilarious!! I totally sleep through things like this and tell Ben crazy things in the middle of the night, so I feel E's pain. I often don't remember what I have said. Glad he made it up to you.

Meve & Co. said...

Matt often does not remember getting up to change diapers, etc...and, i have found myself asleep in Paul's room with my head on his little hippo chair--not so comfy when you wake up, but any sleep is better than none!