While pregnancies are often accompanied by what’s called a pregnancy glow, they also tend to be accompanied by things far less positive, like swollen feet or morning sickness, just to name a couple.
This woman, pregnant with her second child, was no exception. She, too, experienced morning sickness, which would seemingly ruin mornings not only for her, but for her husband, too. That’s because by asking him to look after their toddler for a minute when she was sick, the woman would disturb his free time, which eventually even made her wonder if she was a jerk for doing so.
Morning sickness is something many moms-to-be have to go through
Image credits: gpointstudio / Envato Elements (not the actual photo)
This woman, pregnant with her second child, wondered if she was a jerk for disturbing her husband when she was sick
Image credits: LightFieldStudios / Envato Elements (not the actual photo)
Image credits: Zobug6_
Image credits: senivpetro / Freepik (not the actual photo)
Parenting should be a team effort
When both parents are present in the kid’s life, parenting should be a team effort. That doesn’t mean that people should follow a set of rules on how to perfectly divide parenting responsibilities; because there isn’t one. That means that the well-being of the little one shouldn’t fall entirely on one parent alone.
Seeking to make sure that they tackle parenting as a united front, moms and dads come up with all sorts of arrangements. The OP and her husband, for instance, have agreed that the dad is the one to look after the baby during the night, while the mom takes over after 6AM to let him sleep. Other couples might agree on different people taking up different tasks, for example, or doing everything together. As long as both parents are involved and content with the arrangement, there’s seemingly no wrong way to do it.
It’s also okay not to share everything 50/50. Maybe one parent prefers to tend to the children, while the other one cooks dinner for the family or cleans around the house, which, even if not equally as directly, is also making sure that the kids are taken care of. Again, as long as everyone’s happy, each family is free to do what works best for them.
According to a Pew Research Center study on how working parents share the load of raising kids and running a household, few families do everything 50/50. Data suggests that the large share of the day-to-day parenting responsibilities falls on the shoulders of mothers, which might need readjusting if they become pregnant again.
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Seven-in-ten pregnant women reportedly suffer from pregnancy sickness
As with any arrangement, parenting strategies, too, can be affected by unexpected situations or significant life events. Needless to say, pregnancy is definitely significant enough to require making certain changes in routine family life. In the OP’s case, it was pregnancy-evoked morning sickness that affected the typical way of sharing parenting responsibilities.
According to a Cambridge-led study, seven-in-ten moms-to-be experience pregnancy sickness. If you’re wondering what exactly causes it, the study revealed that it’s a hormone produced by the fetus – a protein known as GDF15. But it’s not only how much of said hormone is produced that makes the woman nauseous, but also how exposed to it she was before becoming pregnant. That is why some women deal with a more severe case of morning sickness than others.
The OP shared with the community that the pregnancy made her quite sick. She also revealed that her husband didn’t take the pregnancy too seriously at first, both times she was pregnant. That and other details encouraged the majority of netizens to side with the mom-to-be. They took to the comments to assure her that she wasn’t a jerk for asking for her husband’s help when she would get sick.
Netizens assured the woman that she wasn’t being a jerk
Some people, however, believed that she was a jerk, but not for the reason she thought
