By the time Ava was two months old, I was doing everything.
Everything.
I got up every time she cried at night. Three times. Four times. Sometimes five. I changed every diaper. I fed her. Burped her. Bathed her. Rocked her. Sang to her. Walked her up and down the hallway for hours when she had gas and couldn’t stop screaming.
I cleaned the entire house. I did all the laundry. Ours and hers. Babies make an unbelievable amount of laundry. Spit-up on everything. Blowouts that went all the way up their backs.
I cooked dinner every night. I did the grocery shopping with Ava strapped to my chest in a carrier. I paid the bills. I scheduled her pediatrician appointments and took her to them alone. I took her for walks around the neighborhood twice a day, because the doctor said fresh air was good for both of us.
And I didn’t have any time for myself.
None. Not one minute.
I stopped going to spin class. I stopped reading. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d brushed my hair properly. I wore the same three pairs of leggings in rotation. I ate cold toast for lunch and called it a meal.
Sometimes I’d catch my reflection in the hallway mirror and not recognize the woman looking back. Pale. Hollow-eyed. Hair in a greasy knot on top of her head. Spit-up on her shoulder.
I’d think, Where did I go?
At first, I thought Glen just hadn’t gotten used to being a father yet. Some men take time. I’d read about it in the books. The bond between father and baby sometimes takes longer to form. Especially when the mother is breastfeeding. They feel left out. Useless. They don’t know where they fit.
I told myself he needed time.
So I tried to help him. I’d hand him Ava when she was happy and calm, so he’d have good experiences with her. I’d show him how to swaddle her. How to hold the bottle at the right angle. How to bounce her on his knee.
He’d do it for a minute or two. Then he’d hand her back.
“Here. You do it. You’re better at it.”
“You’ll get better if you practice.”
“I’m not good with babies, Hannah. I never have been.”
“You were going to teach her to ride a bike. Remember? To throw a football?”
“When she’s older,” he said. “When she can actually do things. Right now she just eats and cries and poops. That’s your department.”
Your department.
Like I was a branch of a company. Like he was the CEO and I was the diaper division.
The bath thing happened in May.
I’d been fantasizing about a bath for weeks. A real one. Hot water. Bubbles. Twenty minutes, maybe thirty, of lying in the tub with my eyes closed and nobody touching me and nobody needing me. I’d bought a little bottle of lavender bath oil the month before I gave birth, and it was still sitting unopened on the edge of the tub.
One evening, Glen came home from work at six. Ava had been fussy all day. She’d napped for twenty minutes, total. I hadn’t eaten lunch. My shoulders were so tight I could barely turn my head.
I met him at the door with her in my arms.
“Hey,” I said. “Can you please stay with Ava for just an hour? I need to take a bath. I need it really badly.”
Glen looked at me. He looked at the baby. He loosened his tie.
He shrugged.
“How about I watch her for five minutes while you take a quick shower? That’s enough. Why do you need a bath?”
I stared at him.
“Five minutes?”
“Yeah. Showers are faster anyway. More efficient.” He kicked off his shoes. “Baths are kind of a waste of water, if you think about it.”
“Glen. I haven’t had more than five minutes to myself in two months.”
“And I haven’t had a day off in two weeks,” he said. “I’ve been in meetings all day. I’m exhausted. I just want to sit down.”
“You can sit down. With her. On the couch. She’ll probably fall asleep on you.”
“She never falls asleep on me. She only falls asleep on you.”
“Because you never let her try!”
He sighed. The big, heavy sigh he’d started doing lately. The one that meant I was being difficult.
“Fine. Ten minutes. Take a shower. I’ll hold her.”
I took a shower. I stood under the water for exactly ten minutes and cried the entire time. When I got out, Ava was screaming in her bouncer on the living room floor, and Glen was on the couch with his phone, scrolling.
“She started fussing,” he said. “I put her down so she could self-soothe.”
She was seven weeks old. Seven-week-old babies don’t self-soothe.
I picked her up. I didn’t say anything.
That lavender bath oil is still sitting unopened on the edge of the tub.
You get the idea.
It went on like that for weeks. Every request I made was too much. Every time I asked for help, he had a reason why he couldn’t. He was tired. He had work. He’d had a long day. He didn’t know how. She liked me better.
And slowly, I stopped asking.
It’s strange how that happens. You don’t decide to stop. You just get tired of hearing no. You get tired of the sighs. You get tired of feeling like a nag. So you just do it yourself. All of it. Because it’s easier than fighting.
My friends noticed before I did.
“You okay, Hannah?” Jess asked on FaceTime one afternoon. I was holding the phone with one hand and bouncing Ava with the other. “You look—”
“Terrible?”
“I was going to say tired.”
“I’m fine. It’s just a newborn. Everybody’s tired.”
“Is Glen helping?”
I didn’t answer fast enough.
Jess’s face changed. “Hannah.”
“He’s adjusting,” I said. “He works a lot. He’s tired too.”
“So are you.”
“I know.”
Monique was even blunter. She has three kids. She’s been through it.
“Babe,” she said. “My ex-husband was like this. I work, I’m tired, you’re better at it. You know where that ends? With you doing everything for eighteen years and him getting credit for showing up at the soccer games.”
“Glen’s not like that.”
“Then why are you crying?”
I hadn’t realized I was.
Glen’s mother lived fifteen minutes away.
Ellen was sixty-four years old. She’d been an emergency room nurse for thirty-five years before she retired. She was small and wiry, with short gray hair and reading glasses she wore on a beaded chain around her neck. She did crossword puzzles in pen. She drove a pickup truck. She’d buried her husband six years earlier and grieved him quietly, fiercely, the way she did everything.
I liked Ellen. I’d always liked her. But I was a little afraid of her too. She had a way of looking at you like she could see straight through your skin to whatever was broken underneath. Thirty-five years in the ER will do that to a person.
She came to the hospital the day Ava was born. She held her for a long time without saying anything. Then she handed her back to me and squeezed my hand.
“You call me,” she said. “Anytime. Day or night. I mean it. I’ve been up all night more times than you’ve had birthdays. I don’t need sleep.”
I thanked her. But I never called.
I don’t know why. Pride, maybe. Or maybe I didn’t want her to know how badly her son was failing. Maybe I was protecting him. Maybe I was protecting myself.
But she came by sometimes anyway. Every couple of weeks. With a casserole. Or a bag of groceries. Or just to hold Ava for an hour while I folded laundry.
She’d watch Glen. I noticed her watching him. When he handed Ava back to me after two minutes. When he turned up the TV. When he said, “You’re better at it.”
She never said anything. But I saw her lips press together into a thin, tight line.
Then, at the end of May, Jess texted me.
Coffee Saturday? Copper Kettle, 2pm? Monique’s coming. We miss you SO much. It’s been 3 months. Please say yes. We’ll buy.
I read it six times.
You know that feeling? When your friends invite you out for coffee, and you just dream of getting out of the house? Of sitting somewhere in peace, at a table with no spit-up on it, and chatting with your girlfriends about anything except diapers for even an hour or two?
I wanted it so badly I could taste it. Vanilla latte. Their almond croissants. Jess’s terrible jokes. Monique’s stories about her middle son’s science fair disasters.
Saturday was Glen’s day off.
I asked him on Thursday night.
“Jess and Monique want to get coffee on Saturday. Two o’clock. Just for a couple of hours. Can you stay with Ava?”
He was watching basketball. He didn’t look away from the screen.
“Yeah, sure. Whatever.”
I almost cried with relief.
“Really?”
“I said sure.”
I texted Jess back immediately. YES. I’ll be there. Can’t wait.
For two days, I was almost happy. I washed my hair. I found a pair of jeans that fit, sort of. I painted my toenails while Ava napped, the first time since before she was born. I picked out a blouse. A real blouse, with buttons, not a nursing tank top.
On Saturday morning, I fed Ava at one-fifteen. I changed her diaper. I put her down for her nap at one-forty. She went right to sleep. A miracle.
I put on my blouse and my good jeans. I put on mascara. I looked at myself in the mirror and almost recognized the woman looking back.
At one-fifty, I grabbed my purse and went to the kitchen table to get my car keys.
They weren’t there.
Laura Bennett writes about complicated family dynamics, difficult conversations, and the quiet moments that change everything. Her stories focus on real-life tensions — inheritance disputes, strained marriages, loyalty tests — and the strength people find when they finally speak up. She believes the smallest decisions often carry the biggest consequences.