The month that writes the rules
Nobody sits down in the first week and says: you take nights, I'll take mornings. You handle the paediatrician, I'll handle the formula. The division of parenting labour doesn't get decided. It gets discovered, after the fact, once the pattern has already set.The baby arrives and the world compresses to a single room, a single cry, a single question of who gets up. You get up. Maybe because you're breastfeeding. Maybe because you woke faster. Maybe because your husband looked at you and you looked at him and something passed between you that neither of you could name, an old agreement, inherited from your mothers and their mothers, that this part belongs to you.By the end of the first month, the division is done. Not decided. Done.
