Danny ChaiI’ve only gone through it once myself, but if I were to offer advice for husbands of pregnant / birthing / nursing women, it would be the following:
- Do exactly what she tells you to do.
- Don’t offer advice.
- Do exactly what she tells you to do.
- Don’t try to fix her problems.
- Do exactly what she tells you to do.
You might think there are exceptions to these rules, like when she says something that seems patently absurd, possibly even dangerous. Like if she suggests that, to ease her nursing, it would really help if you shaved baby’s head and pasted the hair to baby’s buttocks. In this case, you might think you’d be justified in stepping in and offering your opinion to the contrary.
You’d be wrong. The reasons why are complicated, but basically, when there’s a difference of opinion, the tie-break goes to the person who’s sick all the time / uncomfortable / feeling heartburn / passing large objects through small orifices / feeding an organism attached to her body at all hours over the person who’s doing none of these. You lose your rights to have an opinion until you can share in these things, which you can’t, and you just have to trust that you married someone who is generally reasonable, and if she isn’t, it’s your own fault for saying “I do”. Just do what she says. As a wise person once said, happy wife, happy life.
I’m not saying this because I’ve mastered this. Quite the contrary, I need to write this to remind myself because for the life of me, it’s the hardest thing in the world to not offer advice / fix things. I’ve gotten better, but it’s still really difficult. If you’ve ever read a marriage book or had counseling or whatever, you know that a common issue is that men always want to solve women’s problems when women just want them to empathize, and this is another one of those things. What the books don’t explain is why that is.
My guess is it’s because men like to pretend, even believe, that life is more orderly than it really is. For example, men in general have a strong desire to organize the world into categories. Scientists break down the world into neatly defined classifications. Men in general like to make lists all the time. All in an attempt to make a disorderly world orderly. We also prefer the certainty and orderliness of games to real life chaos. Who is a better man? Let’s play a game of football / poker / Boggle and settle it. We like the rules of competition to be clear and consistent. Even though real life is nothing like that.
Because of this, men like to believe in immediate cause and effect, that everything that happens has an immediate, addressable cause, even when that’s not the case. Like when superstitious sports fans wear the same article of clothing every game. They like to believe their actions have an immediate effect on the outcome. Everything that happens, we like to believe it has an addressable cause. The alternative is a random, chaotic, frightening world.
When we see our wives suffering from pregnancy/nursing stuff, it’s especially frustrating because it most goes against our need to see an immediate, logical, addressable cause of the suffering. The root cause is just the pregnancy. But why did she specifically throw up this time? Could have been a smell. Could have been something she ate. Or didn’t eat. So we try eating certain foods. Except the same foods that were delicious one day are repulsive the next; it even changes from bite to bite. In short, there’s just no solution to it, there is no clear way to fix it, something that works is a fleetingly temporary solution. And that’s maddening.
I’m using the 1st person plural, but I really just mean me. When Jieun throws up and there’s nothing she could have done about it, it’s frustrating. I’d like to think that if she had eaten something else, or not eaten something, or rested, or *something*, then it could have been avoided. But usually, it just is what it is and there’s no solution to it.
Anyway, reminder to self: don’t offer advice. Just do what she says. Without exception or argument.