I read this article once that said that the blood pressure of infants and mothers were linked for several months after birth. Some scientists somewhere did a study testing the blood pressure of both mother and baby in several different environments and when the mothers blood pressure went up - so did the baby's. Even when they were in separate rooms. I'm not sure if any of that's even true but it feels true.
I would be home all day with my daughter and the 9 hours that my husband was gone for work felt like 3 days. By late afternoon I had reached the end of my rope, she was tired and cranky, I was tired and cranky. I was also still in my pajamas and I smelled like spit up, the house was a mess and the more frustrated I got, the more she cried and the more she cried - you guessed it - the more frustrated I got. Then, like a knight in shining armor, hubby would walk through the door and I would dump everything in his surprised hands, muttering/crying that I needed a shower, to brush my teeth and 15 minutes away from her before I shook her.
After 15 glorious minutes in the shower I would emerge with shiny teeth, clean hair and the beginnings of a much better attitude......and then I would hear the silence in the house. So I would tip toe down the hallway to the living room and find Daddy asleep on the couch (still in his work clothes) and my now sweet, silent 3 month old passed out on his chest. I have about 100 pictures of the same scene but on different occasions. Later it would be with my son asleep on his chest and our 3 year old daughter asleep in the bend of his arm. I've even got one with our "never-takes-a-nap" nephew asleep at the other end of the couch!
At first I was a little sad (and a little bitter) - why couldn't I do this? Why is it whenever my husband holds a small child they fall asleep but I'm the Mother and I don't have this gift? I've got a theory on this - it's a combination of two things: the first is that mens hearts beat slower so it has a calming affect and the second is the blood pressure affect. Daddy's don't have this link because they didn't grow this little bundle of joy inside them. We were really linked for 9 months and that link never fully goes away. So she (or he) feels your frustration and they don't understand it, it's worse than a chain reaction because you're feeding off of each other and it's just gets worse and worse until somebody passes out or gets shaken.
This is when I started giving us both a break. I would be so frustrated, so exhausted, so DONE that I just had nothing left to give so I would lay her down in her pack-n-play and I would sit at the end of the hall and I would take deep breaths and sing to myself. Singing calms me down and it drowned out the sound of her crying. It would be a wondrous thing if I could say that my singing helped her calm down but that's just not true. She was pissed and I had to work to calm her back down but, thankfully, now I was more relaxed and it was much easier.
And when Dad is home - hand that baby off! She's half his too and you need to communicate that you need a partner not an audience. Maybe he just doesn't know how to help you. How he begins being a father is how he'll go on being a father, right? Give him a little nudge in the right direction because we all know that he won't stop and ask for directions himself!
I have to admit that I have a secret weapon though - I have an amazing husband who does way more than his share of pretty much everything. He does more dishes than I do, he sweeps and vacuums more, when he was home he changed pretty much every diaper, he has never said, "what's for dinner?" or "I don't have any clean socks" because he can do those things too. He's pretty awesome and I'm pretty lucky. I can't take credit for him though - he came this way. One of the few "as-is" deals I've ever lucked out on!
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