WOOH! Being a tiny baby parent is a non-stop emotional roller-coaster.
Last weekend my partner’s back went out and he was pretty useless. By Monday morning the no sleep since Friday, with constant baby-care while simultaneously working led to tearful result. Luckily, his back continued to improve, and by midway through the week he was working really hard to get me enough sleep to function at work. Also luckily, I have an amazing family that has been stepping up to help!
Finally getting enough sleep led me to stage 2 emotional fallout – Holy Fuck I’m going to get fired if I don’t start doing my job like…a LOT more (plus more tears! Maybe I’m not quite as not-tired as it seems). I mean, I’m doing it. But there is not a single thing I am not behind on and nothing feels organized or in control. So now during my little sleep times I am having work nightmares. Which is not actually THAT helpful to our overall life. And this is something we just have to figure out. This is what we are doing, this is how we chose to do it. Some day, I’m going to adopt a baby, and I’m going to take my freaking maternity leave, and it’s going to be the most beautiful few weeks of my life (probably I’ll be really stressed, and feel not entitled to that time, and we will take a trip and somehow fight the whole time. Building up future experiences never turns out well!) But until then, I have to find SOME WAY to make this work. Mostly, to make ME work!
It’s really hard not to feel stressed about our gender-reversal household and not to think that things would work better if we were going the other way. I seem to find it easier to fulfill baby’s needs over long stretches of time and have trouble letting baby-care be provided by substitute caregivers in order to focus on work – while my partner seems more in need of breaks from baby-care and more stressed to not be able to get his personal work-projects done. But I’m the breadwinner and he is the full-time caregiver and it really seems like we somehow fucked up this plan! But presumably, if we reversed we would probably still be exhausted, stressed, and mildly resentful of each other that way too. Maybe I need to ask 500 same-gender parents about their emotional status during this time to resolve this internal debate – I’m sure they’ll love that! OK, instead, new plan: stop taking on his jobs of problem-solving as well as my own – a super-hard thing to do, because I am a problem solver.
On the other hand, I managed to make muffins the other day! 
WHILE wearing a baby! And a good thing, because I’m pretty sure they were the only thing I ate for a few days. Hard to say, life’s a little blurry right now.
On the other other hand…I am surprisingly into the whole being a baby-mama thing. There has been a long-term concern that once bab(y)(ies) arrived I might not really be that into it, because I’m not really into babies generally. I remember a pregnant friend looking down and saying “I sure hope I like this thing” – a sentiment I super-get. But my baby is totes excellent! It’s a lot like a slightly less cute slightly less independent puppy! I love puppies! It has a big round face, is gaining weight and getting bigger, and makes cute sounds, and is a warm cuddly puddle of snorfle and snug. It’s pretty great and it’s pretty great that it is pretty great!!
And the big pre-placement concerns about the emotional disconnect of “I can’t believe how hard I am working to take care of a baby and it’s not MINE” is surprisingly non-existent. This baby IS mine unless and until it’s not.