“The minute the baby came out, I became the ball and chain.”
A mum-of-five has been praised for her refreshingly honest post about how her relationship with her husband – and life, in general – has changed after having a baby.
Outspoken blogger and author, Constance Hall, shared a photo of herself breastfeeding her youngest child, Raja, where she claimed that mums with newborns are like “insect repellent to husbands.”
She began the post by explaining how she had gotten many messages about how ‘hands on’ her husband, Denim Cooke, was; and how her fans see them as ‘couple goals’.
However, she added: “The truth is that having a baby has pushed my relationship to the absolute edge.”
The mum of five – who clarified that she wasn’t “man bashing or airing dirty laundry” – went on to say that she was having trouble handling the “unjust, unfair living arrangements that so commonly follow the birth of a baby.”
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Her post continued:
“The minute the baby came out, I became the ball and chain.
“Coming somewhere with me became a chore, holding the baby, a favour, we went from being inseparable our saying was ‘where you go I go’ to Christmas holidays with 2 trips apart already.
“I am lonely. I wake up with my baby at 6am and I’m in bed exhausted by 8pm. That’s the thing about babies, they take away all of your alone time and somehow leave you feeling incredibly lonely.
“I am resentful. After doing so many loads of washing the other morning while his highness slept in for the 340th time this year I flooded the bathroom, mopped for half an hour, put the baby down, made myself some eggs, walked past the wet patch and slipped, smashing my plate and knees. And I was not expecting to not be able to get up.
“I just lay there, covered in washing machine water. Furiously crying. So f*cking angry with where motherhood/wifehood has taken me.
“And I’m fucking exhausted, so many night feeds, remembering to buy school stuff for next year, to bath all my kids, wash all the clothes, dishes, supermarket, take them out to tire them out, answer 5 thousand questions a day with a smile and keep this house looking relatively clean because someone walked into it the other day and laughed and said ‘don’t clean up for us.
“But the truth is I f*cking had, for hours.
“Is this what equality looks like? You have a baby and you become insect repellent to husbands?”
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Constance ends the post by pointing out that imbalance in workloads that many women face in their relationships once a baby comes along.
She continued:
“But in the spirit of honesty, having a baby is one thing, sharing that baby is a completely different story.
“Where there is love there is a way and there is no shortage of love in my marriage. We will grow and we will be ok.
“Because as my recently divorced male friend told me, ‘you think having a baby and wife is depressing.. until they leave you. And then you learn the meaning of depressing.'”
The post has been liked more than 80,000 times, with tens of thousands of comments from mums who have found themselves in similar scenarios.
One person said:
“My husband wore our youngest in the ergo carrier the other day and the whole f*cking time people smiled and made comments about how beautiful it was, how lucky I am, how great he is… I wear the baby every mf day, no one smiles or tells my husband how lucky he is!”
Another added:
“I used to get ‘oh that’s so great that your partner is babysitting so you can go out with your friends’. Ummm, excuse me? It’s HIS kid too. It ain’t babysitting, it’s parenting !”
