Hand it to Dad
Your weekly reset, in 5 min or less.
The reason these weekly resets will likely head out to your inbox at anytime of the week is for a few specific reasons:
Do moms actually have weekends? For me, it seems the Friday night is what Sunday nights used to be before children: evenings where I am anxiously gearing up for the onset of a couple days without solid routine structured with childcare or work schedules. In conclusion: what is the beginning of our week?
I am human. At least, that’s what they tell me and humans are mistake-makers.
Ideally, these weekly resets will provide a dose of encouragement but I’m pretty sure that is always needed.
This first week is for free subscribers as well! Scroll to keep reading.
Hand it to Dad (if you can?)
I’ve found this strange phenomenon that occurs when it comes to fathers, where men and women alike ask if a father can handle their children for a whole day without support.
It’s curious to me that in 2022 the flexibility for families to decide who or how parents can share responsibilities in the home has become more balanced…and yet this still pops up!
“Can Dad handle it?”
We’re all learning this parenting thing together so let them find out!
We need to have better confidence in men to raise their kids. Otherwise, how will children see them as a secure space as often as they do mothers? We can’t give dads the chance to lead their family if we’re constantly holding the reins.
This holds true for spiritual encouragement as well: men are biblically called to lead their families but how can they do so if we cannot be helpers to them as partners?
This pattern regarding well-equipped fathers caring for their own children happens to coincide with a social media post I encountered this week. The writer proposed that mothers are more frantic than their own moms were and that they had more pressure to get things right.
“We know the burden of the work, life, and baby balance.
We’re expected to shower, smile, eat, stay fit, build an empire, maintain a clean home, maintain romance, maintain friendships, maintain our eyebrows (don’t even get me started on my bikini line), raise a tiny army, run an envy-worthy Instagram page, and stay totally sane through it all.”
-From a post on Instagram by @annielawton_
YES. We do know the burdens and pressure for balance all while having people look into the day by day highlights of our lives on social media. But I would have to disagree with a key point of this share.
Our mothers knew the burdens of chasing “work/life balance” but they didn’t talk about it.
The beauty and curse we have today is the conversation is always growing, but let us remember to speak up and with the intention of breaking generational trauma. We cannot simply cry the truth, that motherhood is hard, without being the ones who also lead the change. My mother wasn’t sharing because she was doing what she was raised to do: get the work done and keep it to yourself. Healthy for her? No. Was she doing the best she could with the tools she was given? Absolutely and I honor her for that now as a mother myself.
Circling back to the fathers.
How can we see more dads taking the center role as caregiver for when it works best for the family and not just as a last resort? I hate to break it to you mothers, because we are already tired, but we have to be the ones to let them build confidence by trial and error.
We lean on each other for support and we can start to include them on the conversation by including them with the time that is needed for them to grow as parents. Without the chance to flounder, how can we not feel like the household depends on us guiding ship?
There is a difference between being the encourager of the home and being the whip. Let’s restart this week with a mindset of healing and openness.