Friday afternoons are tough but hoping someone might have some insight. I have a dear friend who is struggling with her husband and specifically since having a baby, who is now 6 months old. For context, there are 5 in the friend group who are incredibly tight, though only 4 on the current text chain somewhat by accident. Friend was last to be married and last to have their first-born (we’re all 38/39 with 3 to 7 year olds). She had about 5 months between wedding and getting pregnant, so not a lot of time to be married pre-kids, fwiw.
Best as I can summarize, her husband is either incredibly anxious about parenting solo, he’s bean-counting/keeping score, a closet d i ck that none of us realized before now, or some combination of all the above. She continues to cancel on us and says it’s because her DH is upset at her and she’s just trying to keep the peace/in survival mode. We’ve been out to lunch on a Saturday and he’ll call incessantly, saying the baby won’t eat only to find out he tried only for a few minutes to get her to take a bottle, but he demands she come home (she was only gone for 45 mins at that point). In another instance, she was basically ordered home because she wouldn’t stop crying / go down for her nap. He took a month of paternity leave when she went back to work and asked her for a list of things to do every morning because he couldn’t figure out what to do with a newborn while on 4 weeks of leave. Last weekend Friend did a last minute 24-hour night away to visit a friend who is tragically about to start an intense chemo regimen in a nearby city, and for that reason Friend has to cancel tomorrow’s long-standing “girls afternoon” (12-5) because he’s giving her flack about being out “again” (we really and truly rarely go out… can’t come up with the last time we were all together TBH). Last weekend Friend dropped baby and DH off at DH’s family’s house for the night, which DH was fine with, but after the fact you would have thought she abandoned them and was partying her behind off for a week. He also continues to go out with evidently little concern for leaving all of the So Very Challenging parenting on our Friend. It’s only a problem when he’s left with the baby.
This is getting increasingly hard to watch. Other friends in the friend group are really neutral, measured in their language. I’m usually the one who has the harsher take on any situation. The 5th friend who is accidentally not on the chain is more like me. I’m going to talk to her and get her take on how best to support Friend because the neutral “it’ll get better!” “it’s only a season” “infants are so hard, amiright?” empty statements seem unproductive. Our friend is looking for real help – she keeps asking “is this normal? is it supposed to be this hard? like this is the hardest it gets with a kid right?”…. eeehhhhhh…
Last Thursday around 5:30pm she sent me a picture of her holding baby, still trying to wrap up her WFH day, while also hooked up to a pump and he was in the distances just watching TV because he needed to “decompress.” She says that’s the second or third time the same thing happened that week. I just want to shake him.
What would you do? When do you shift from empathizing that it’s hard adding a kid to a relationship (it really and truly is!) to your DH needs to get his act together and step up?? This friend is incredible and I just want to do whatever I can to support her. We don’t dislike her husband, or I didn’t until all of this mess. I think he’s a nice, good guy in general but omg, this is snowballing quickly.
Kat
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