The needs of no one

I am sitting in a bar in Amsterdam. I am having a beer that I did not order and I am reflecting about what I learned this week. I spent five days in a gender training. In one of the sessions we learned about productive and reproductive roles.

What does that actually means?

Basically, the value that society place on tasks and the time we invest in them. So. If you go to work, you get paid. But if you spent one hour giving breakfast to your baby, you don’t. If you spent time mingling with coworkers after 5, you are networking. It is an investment. If you are caring for your child and you mingle with other parents -mostly moms- at the playground, you are chitchatting. If you take an hour off to watch the game, it is leisure and you earned it. You work hard. If you are watching your favorite soup opera, you are wasting time.

You got it ?

So as I do this kind of work, I feel like I get it. I value the time my partner spends pumping. I try to be as supportive as I can. I know that her day is filled with a tight agenda of careful crafted moments: meals, naps, play time, snacks, her work, commute, baby hand overs and driving. I know that she does not sleep well because our little rascal still wakes up at 3 am to nurse while I sleep.

I get i.

But I don’t. I don’t quite get it. There is a fundamental piece of all of this that I have not gotten yet. I call the this, the need of no one.

So, I work full time and when I am at home, I fully join the primary rituals of meals, bath, story time and sleep. While my partner tackles 1:1 with the baby, I tackle the dishes, the food and the aftermath of whatever the day brought. I also sleep bad. We spent the days picking up toys, changing poopy diapers and figuring out chores based on naps.

I feel very proud of it. But this week, I realized that I have been missing a fundamental piece of it: the needs of no one.

No matter how much I do. How many dishes I wash. How many meals I cook or errands I run. How fully engaged and invested I am in play time, read time or clean up time. The need of my time is never, ever depending on a daily basis of someone else. At least not every day. And when it is, as it is now that I am traveling, I am getting paid for it.

This is not the case for my partner. Her days are filled with detailed requests for her time and attention and thousand of decisions. As our baby still nurses, it means that her body is still not hers. When she is not with the baby, her activities are working around him and when she is with him, she is thinking about the next three steps. I don’t have to negotiate my time or my body at this level.

Sometimes, when I am at work, I forget I have a son. I don’t think my partner forgets that for a single second because their demands and needs are so intertwined with her life that is not possible.

So I don’t quite get it though I can see glimpses of it. I feel as I am watching the sun raising from the horizon. I can see it but I cannot feel yet its warm on my skin.