I recently attended a parenting group session hosted by Naomi Stalden. You know, the one who writes those thought-provoking books based on her conversations with new mothers at weekly support groups that she has been running for the past twenty years.

My overall impression of Naomi was that she is really interested in hearing about mothers’ feelings. Even after all these years of running these groups, you could tell that this shit really and truly fascinates her. Pretty amazing considering she must have heard the same stuff over and over again. I mean, I’ve only been doing the mum thing for seventeen months and in that 1.5 hour long session alone I can’t count the number of times that I had to check that I didn’t audibly yawn at some of the topics of conversation.

A lot of these mothers had very young babies. Their first babies. And I’m not there right now. Not anymore. I don’t want to talk about feeding routines, or about how your mum disagrees with your attachment parenting philosophy, whether you should try BLW, or if you should go with your original plan to put your child in a nursery or cough up the extra money and hire a nanny like most of your friends. (The session was held in a very affluent part of London, I should have been prepared for this sort of dilemma that would make me feel completely alienated).

Then there was the woman who said that being a mother has changed her relationships with her friends that have children, made her closer, realising that she had been selfish and unaccommodating without recognising her friends’ needs as parents. My spirits sank with that comment and it set me off once more to thinking about being on the flip side of that coin. Naomi then asked to hear from anyone who might have been the first or only one of their friends to have children, which led to one of my only contributions to the conversation.

I had mixed feelings about my afternoon. My emotions ranged from boredom, alienation, and plain ol’ sadness all in the space of an hour and a half. I had gone to the group with the hopes of being put in touch with parents of breastfeeding, night-waking toddlers. (I think I will have better luck at the regular group, as this one was opened up to a wider audience that happened to be mainly mums with teeny babies). However, there were a couple of moments that really piqued my interest. Namely, a discussion about the emotional transition that takes place when having a second child, and some comments about the dynamics of a parenting partnership. I noted down the following comments concerning how some of the mothers’ felt about the father’s involvement in caring for their child:

‘When I go out and leave the baby with his dad, I always get the feeling that he feels he is just holding the fort until I get back. I delegate, and he does what I say, he doesn’t do things with/for our son off his own initiative.’

‘When packing to go away, it’s me that will remember certain things, like his favourite sippy cup, or a particular book he likes that week. I wouldn’t expect my husband to know these things.’

‘There is a big difference between support and permitting something to happen. I want my husband to support my wish to not sleep-train, meaning we take it in turns to go into the baby at night, rather than him sitting back and letting me get on with it.’

I can really identify with all of these comments. I have been there. But I had to smile as I listened, as it made me realise that we are not there anymore. In fact, we couldn’t be further from these situations right now. Maybe it’s because Arlo is at the latter end of the baby stage, and the shift in his emotional needs and the less he needs to be physically attached to me (feeding) has made more room for Sam to step in. I’m sure that comes into it to some degree. Whatever the reasons, it is a really good place to be.

Sam is totally involved with all things Arlo. He knows his routines and whatever particular quirk he has that week. He knows the tricks to get him to eat, how to deal with his tantrums, the things that are likely to set him off and the things that will calm him down.  If he sees that Arlo is tired, he will pick him up and take him off to bed without any need for discussion with me. He goes into Arlo every other time during the night. He supports my way of parenting Arlo at night-time, not without occasional disagreement, but he still gets up and does it. These days Sam’s intuition can even take over mine, there have been a few occasions where Sam has been the first to know what to do.

He knows all of Arlo’s favourite toys, food, everything. I would happily let him pack Arlo’s overnight bag, and I frequently leave Arlo with Sam for a full day, confident that he will put 100% into parenting Arlo, in the same way that he does when I am present. I’ve been going out a lot recently, with absolutely no worries that I will be at all missed at home. I am really enjoying this recent sense of freedom and certainly making the most of it while I can. I am so pleased that we have seen through those thoughts being experienced by the mothers I met with last week, that we seem to have come through the other side.

In order to prevent this post from coming across as me bragging about how great my other half his and how perfectly we’ve adjusted to becoming a family, I would like to state that our relationship is most definitely not without its arguments. We have had some very fierce night-time rows, there has been resentment on my part over quality of sleep and the weight of responsibility I once felt as a breastfeeding mother. Things have been broken, doors have been slammed, tears have been shed. Instead of taking our frustrations out on Arlo during the middle of the night, guess who we take it out on?

One aspect of the chronic exhaustion that comes with a child who wakes frequently in the night is an increased need to try really, really hard to keep your cool with your partner and work through it as a team. And when that doesn’t happen, you can always work it out with long-winded text message conversations in the light of day when your head is clear and things don’t seem as bad as they were at 4am.

Sam is completely wonderful at looking after Arlo. But this doesn’t make him a martyr, or mean that he has super-special parenting powers. The feminist in me would like to clarify that I think this is just the way it should be. The fact that he can care for Arlo extremely well is hardly groundbreaking. Sam’s word on the matter (he reads a draft of any post about him before I publish, as per our agreement) is that he would feel patronised if I thought he couldn’t care for Arlo as competently as me, especially if my reason was to do with gender.

The special bit is not that Sam is a great carer, but that he is a brilliant dad, and he has developed a very close relationship with his son. That’s the bit that makes me proud.