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Family dynamics

02nd Apr 2017

‘Respect your wives as mothers…’ one dad responds to critics of co-sleeping

Gillian Fitzpatrick

As we all know – there are LOTS of opinions on co-sleeping. Some swear by it; others think it’s a really bad idea.

But whatever side of the fence you fall – the same undercurrent crops up: what does your husband think?

The implication being that, if you’ve replaced your partner with your children in the marital bed, he’s not going to be too happy.

And it was a conversation much like that that prompted one dad to stand up for his gender.

“My wife is a best friend kind of woman,” David Brinkley says in a recent Facebook post that has now garnered 500K reactions. “Recently she was talking to a friend and they were talking about this thing called ‘co-sleeping’ and I heard the other person ask ‘doesn’t your husband hate that? My husband would never let me do that’.

“This blew my mind and has bothered me for days. So I just decided to come out as a man and set a few things straight. I do NOT hate any part of what makes my wife the mother that she is.

“I would NEVER degrade or disregard anything that she feels like doing for my children. Do I have to squeeze into a small corner of the bed sometimes? Yeah? But my God how beautiful does she look holding my children? Making them feel loved and safe? The thing is that our wives only experience these little seasons in motherhood for a short time.

“They carry our babies they birth them they nurture them and maybe while they are little they let them crawl into our beds and snuggle but eventually our babies get bigger they grow up they get ‘too cool’ for snuggles so why would we as men want to steal a single second of this time from them?

“Being mothers is part of their identity and what’s a year or three out of decades of life spent together? I just want to say that I am proud of the decisions my wife makes as a mom and I support every single one of them.

“I would never want to rob her of this time she has or these seasons that are in reality too short to not enjoy. Please respect your wives as mothers.”

Hear, hear! Now we just need to go off and get a tissue as there is something in our eye…