A big moment in my marriage was when after about 2.5 years of increasingly resentfully getting up 6 mornings a week at whatever ungodly hour the baby woke up at (husband got up with him on Sundays, I think), I realized IT DIDN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY. and told my husband we would now be alternating days until the end of time.
I may not have been diplomatic about it. (I was probably in tears and angry, honestly.) I remember he gave me quite a look. But he said okay, and the next day he got up when the toddler did, and so it has been ever since.
But it took me over two years to even think of it. That’s how ingrained it is, even if you’re a flag-waving feminist raised by left wing liberals. And a year or so after *that*, when, at work, my very tired husband mentioned to a coworker who was also a mother that it had been his morning to get up with the baby, she got REALLY MAD. Because she’d never thought if it, and her husband/partner had never thought of it, and her kids were now much too old for anybody to need to get up with them.
This shit is *embedded*.
