Child care should be a 50/50 endeavor, but one woman is seriously worried about giving her male partner his fair share. She recently wrote in to the Mumsnet forum and shared that her partner has been a little careless with their 9-month-old daughter and even went as far as to leave the infant alone while he ran out to get ice cream. “Am I the one being precious/hormonal or what?” she asked.
As the Original Poster explained, her partner usually takes their daughter in the mornings so she can get some extra sleep.
Recently one morning, she wasn’t feeling that tired, so she got up and went into the living room to see where everyone was.
“No one was in the living room and [I] had assumed they went for a walk or went to the shops or something,” she wrote. “When [Dear Partner] gets back and pushes the pushchair in the living room, I see both of [Dear Daughter]’s coats on the table.“
The OP asked him which coat he’d put on their daughter.
“He just looked at me like he'd been caught out and didn't say anything,” she recalled. As her partner took their daughter out of the stroller, she saw that she’d gone out in only a sleep suit.
“Bearing in mind he has a nice warm coat on himself AND a hat,” she wrote. “Yet DD has been taken outside with just a vest and a sleepsuit?”
When her partner gave her their daughter, she was freezing.
But the problem is, he’s done stuff like this before.
“Last month I went to my mom's house and stayed over for one night just to have a break as I was exhausted. When I came back something told me to ask DP if he'd left DD alone at any point,” she remembered.
Perhaps it was a past experience when she called her partner on the phone and he told her that he was going to leave their baby alone in the house while he went to take the trash out.
Or maybe her mama bear instincts just kicked in.
“I asked him if he'd left her alone and he said he went across the road to Sainsbury's when she was asleep in the night,” she recalled. “I said 'why the hell did you leave her? We didn't need formula, nappy or wipes so what was so important that you needed to get??' He told me he went to get Ben and Jerry's ice cream,” she wrote.
The whole thing has left the OP confused. Usually parents are overprotective with their babies, but her partner is not taking parenting seriously.
“Taking her outside without a coat on in the middle of Winter, leaving her by herself to go and get ice cream. It just sounds like some sort of prank,” she continued.
Now the two are expecting their second child, and the OP is worried that her partner will never get it together.
“He always used to be extra careful with DD and now it's as if he thinks she's 15 years old and doesn't need to be properly cared for or something,” she added. “Arghhh help me Mumsnet.”
Other commenters understood the mom's frustration.
"Oh my god I am lost for words. I would be furious," wrote one person. "Leaving her on her own!!! I can't even comprehend? What if she woke and started crying/chocking/ANYTHING??? Bizarre behavior."
"I honestly don’t know why you are pregnant again by someone so useless," another person wrote.
"I'd have lost my s— about the coat thing, I'm not gonna lie," admitted someone else. "It's not good advice but it's honest. Being freezing cold and unable to do anything about it is a really horrible feeling. Switch the heating off and hide all his coats and see how he likes it!"
Other people thought there was some wiggle room.
"What sort of outside temperature are we talking about — it's really quite mild here today. And how long were they out for?" wondered one person. "I wouldn't be concerned about leaving them to take the bin out, but leaving the house to go shopping is not on at all."
"Nothing wrong with nipping down to the bin," someone else agreed. "Going shopping, definitely not."
"I used to go out and garden — quite a big garden — while babies were asleep indoors. How far away is the shop? How long was he gone?" a third person wondered.
The mom later wrote that she was just baffled by her partner's behavior.
"It's like, 'why are you so dumb??' 'when did you even become this dumb??'
Especially when I'm explaining things to him and I can see he GENUINELY did not think he was doing anything wrong," she wrote.
"I find it worse than people who are purposely doing the wrong thing because at least then there's a chance at getting through to them. It's like talking to a brick wall sometimes and I don't know what he'll do next. It's just pathetic," she added.
It didn't seem like this problem was going to be solved any time soon.
"All I want is for him to use common sense," she added, "at least when it comes to our kids for f—'s sake."
