My baby doesn’t get a lot of milk directly from my breasts, but it certainly doesn’t mean that she does not love them. Every time she sees them, it’s as though her eyes get bigger and she starts wiggling her arms and legs more enthusiastically. Well, Chris, perhaps not even realizing it himself, managed to create a fake boob for our daughter.

The bassinet she has been sleeping in has bars on the outside of it, and when she moves vigorously in the bassinet, sometimes she bangs her head against the skinny bars. Chris got a little concerned, thinking she might get brain damage from banging her head too much against them. So he wrapped these thick, huge layers of bubble wrap around each of the bars where her head is during sleep. One of those wrap jobs is so thick that the bubble wrap protrudes into the bassinet and against the bassinet wall from the outside, which looks like a huge, round fluffy breast. So at night and early in the morning, when we’ve watched our baby lean over to that side of the bassinet, she tries to go at the side, mouthing and constantly licking and sucking at the “boob.” It’s the cutest and most hilarious thing to watch. And even when she is not in the bassinet going at the fake boob, you can see all her darkened saliva marks staining the area where the fake boob is.

“I’m so lucky that I have Joe,” my friend said over a Zoom chat the other day. When she was recovering from her c-section birth last August, she could barely stand up on her own for the first three weeks, and when she was able to stand on her own, she couldn’t really bend over, which meant she couldn’t change any of their baby’s diapers. Her husband did the lion’s share of taking care of the baby and the house as she recovered from the c-section, and she said she felt really bad about it. “We’re lucky to have partners who really believe in equal parenting in this day and age,” she said to me. “Our moms did NOT have even a fraction of this when they had us!”

She’s right. The current generation of parents are more egalitarian than the generations before us. But unfortunately, I see many, many posts in the mom and pumping/breastfeeding groups I’m in where there are plenty of dads that literally do nothing to help raise their children. They think it’s fully the mother’s responsibility to do everything child-related, and even say things like, “You need to control your child!” or “All you do all day is sit on your ass and pump.” That last one really stung when I read it. As someone who has attempted to exclusively pump since my child’s fourth week of life, I can say with firsthand experience that pumping not only fucks with your mind (“wait, I’m pumping milk to feed my child, but I can’t feed her directly from my boob, so I don’t get that direct bonding experience with her? WHY?!”), but it also just takes so, so much time and energy. Breastfeeding mothers do not attach themselves to an electric nipple sucking device for fun or as a hobby; we do this because we need and want to feed our babies the only thing they are able to eat aside from formula. We are producing food and nourishment for our babies to SURVIVE. And in a current time when formula has not only been recalled but is in scarcity, saying something that is not only tone deaf and ignorant, but it’s just plain stupid.

I’ve never had to explain to Chris why I wanted to breastfeed, whether that was directly from the boob or pumping. I’ve never had to listen to a dumb retort from his mouth when I tell him, “I have to pump.” I’ve never had to explain the benefits of breast milk to him or why pumping was a decision I wanted to push forward with to feed our child, even when I was angry or grumpy about it. He just got it and respected my wishes. He does pretty much all the baby’s bottle feeds other than the ones the nanny does now, and he actually enjoys it. If anything, I think he benefits from my exclusive pumping: it means he gets bonding time with our baby, who associates him with food (instead of me :-P). Whenever he walks into the room, her eyes immediately go to him. To her, Daddy = food. I know he loves this. Am I sad that she doesn’t associate me directly with food? Yes, but I’ve gotten over it now. She may be unaware of it now, but my body is providing the majority of her nourishment, and I’m happy knowing that. To think that other partners would not be supportive and would be flat out ignorant to the benefits of pumping and breast milk, not to mention completely be oblivious to the time and mental energy required to pump, just hurts my heart. And to think that other partners would not want the relationship Chris has with our daughter just seems sad to me. Why even bother to procreate unless you want to have a relationship with your child and contribute to their health, safety, and well being? It’s really unfortunate that not only so many women choose partners who are like this, but also continue to put up with this terrible behavior and treatment… in the year 2022.

I grew up having the utmost respect for working moms, as in, moms who not only take care of the house and kids but also have a paid job outside the home. My mom instilled in me from a really young age that I needed to stand on my own two feet and not depend on a man for money, that it didn’t matter how much money my future husband would make because if he left me, or God forbid, died, I’d be left with nothing or little and would need to rebuild whatever career I would have left. And there’s actually data to prove this: women who leave the workforce to care for their children and return a few years later re-enter at a lower position, lower salary, and have to work *that* much harder to get back to where they left off, if they are even lucky enough to get back there. I also heard a lot of negative comments from other kids or moms against “working moms” — working moms supposedly don’t care or aren’t as invested in their children as stay-at-home moms; working moms only think about their own careers and not raising their children. There are certainly flipped arguments here that you could use against stay-at-home moms, but either way, I heard more disparaging comments about working moms growing up. And what is not even in any of these debates is… what about “working dads” or the rare stay-at-home dad? Why don’t dads ever pit themselves against each other in these regards? Moms of all types have to argue with each other and prove who is the best. It’s so tiring.

But it goes without saying that in this generation, it’s a privilege to even *think* about being a stay-at-home parent. For most of us who live in major metropolitan areas with a high cost of living, it’s pretty much untenable to NOT have both parents working. Childcare is expensive regardless of whether it’s a daycare center or a nanny. Unless you have nearby grandparents or a very loving and selfless relative nearby who wants to help for free, there’s no getting around high childcare expenses. And being a mom now, I have thought a lot more about what life would be like from a stay-at-home mom’s standpoint, and I’ve actually learned to really admire them. For those moms who had a budding or happy career or job, they chose the selfless path to play the primary role in child-rearing and gave up their careers for their children. They felt they could be the best caregiver there was for their child, and so they pushed money and “status” aside to do that. They wanted to be there for their children’s “firsts” and be there for all the moments their babies needed encouragement and love immediately. They made that decision believing it was the best choice for their child and family, and so they became a different type of “working mom” — the working mom who works full time and gets paid zero dollars to help their child grow and flourish.

Our world we live in has little to no respect for caregivers, whether they are for the very young or the very old. We devalue childcare and elderly care. But why do we do this when our babies will eventually become the people running the world in the next couple decades, or when the elderly have given their all to society when they were in their prime?