Your Wife, At Home, During the First Twelve Weeks

Once upon a time (i.e., the day before your kid was born and each day before that (i.e., a million years ago)), you and your wife lived similar lives. You likely were both working, a bustle of activity at home in the morning, commuting to and from work, packing lunches or choosing where to eat out for lunch, both having to shop for work clothes, both dealing with office or work politics, maybe both using email at work and being connected to the internet. Hitting a happy hour or the gym after work. You had a wealth of common experience to share with your wife. Common understandings. In many ways, you were the vision of the 1960’s women’s movement. You were equals in the eyes of society and equals in your relationship, and you liked it that way.

Every man whose wife chooses to stay home with the kids will have a time when he calls his wife and explains that he is coming home from work. “See you in 10 minutes honey.” And he will get in his car and drive home, but before he gets into his driveway, he’ll see an oddity in front of his house. It is his wife, holding his child. And he’ll wonder what she’s doing. She isn’t gardening. She isn’t talking to anyone. She isn’t going for a walk. She isn’t getting the mail.

What she is doing is this: she is just standing there, doing nothing, waiting for him to get home. This is the same independent woman who (in what feels like another completely different lifetime) used to insist on paying for her own beers and who can drive a stick shift better than him. This is the same capable, independent woman that he fell in love with, and, here, in this place, she’s so desperate and frazzled that she’s hanging out on the curb so she will notice his arrival home from work 20 seconds earlier than she otherwise would. And she will not look good.

After you go back to work after a week or two, like most men, your wife will likely stay home for the first 12 weeks at least; maybe even longer these days. And your wife might end up staying home for good. Either way, while she’s home, this is her life: she doesn't talk to practically any adult all day long (except for the number of calls to you at work, which will double at least). She shops at the drug store during business hours when there’s nobody else there. She goes for meandering walks before lunch with no destination and no time limit and passes playgrounds where kids are having recess (when is the last time you saw a playground with kids on it at recess during a schoolday?). She now has access to a TV during the day, when TV is really, really bad, like way worse than Friday night even. And she might start watching some of those really bad shows … admittedly, there isn’t much to do with a baby on your teat, or while holding a bottle for it… if you stayed home, you’d feed with a bottle in one hand and flip to Sportscenter with the remote with the other. But her shows are called Oprah and Dr. Phil. And because your wife doesn’t have people to talk to, if you were a fly on the wall, you might see her actually speaking to Oprah and Dr. Phil,, even though you are reasonably sure (but maybe not completely sure) that she realizes that they are not really in her living room. And now, your wife, with whom you used to have minor differences because you liked to have lunch at Arby’s once a week, while she preferred Au Bon Pain, is now officially living on a different planet from you. She lives on the planet full of people that actually talk to the screen when Oprah is on. She will start to obsess about things like where the pacifier is. She will cry because another baby’s mom slighted her by asking if your baby is smiling yet, when he isn’t. She will cry because, at times, she fucking hates being a mother. She will have all kinds of reactions that seem foreign to you. You might ultimately understand them, after multiple explanations, but you’ll never really be completely on the same page anymore.

I would like to tell you what to do about this, how to address this, but there’s just nothing to say. If your wife stays home, you and your wife are going to be living different lives now.

And you probably are going to be living different kinds of lives even if she doesn’t stay home.