I’m 3 months postpartum and I love my baby with a ferocity that terrifies me, but I hate the fact that my husband gets to “choose” when to be a parent while for me it’s a 24/7 biological mandate.

Three months ago, my body did something extraordinary, and I have not slept more than four consecutive hours since.

That’s not a complaint. It’s context.

My baby is here, and she is perfect, and I love her in a way that genuinely frightens me—with a ferocity I didn’t know I was capable of, a physical pull so strong it feels less like an emotion and more like a law of nature.

She cries, and something in my chest responds before my brain has processed the sound.

I would do anything for her. I already am.

That’s also context.

Because the thing nobody tells you, or maybe everyone tells you, and you just can’t understand it until you’re in it, is that the love and the exhaustion and the loneliness are not separate experiences.

They’re the same experience. All of it happening at once, in the same body, with nowhere to put any of it.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I started noticing something about my husband that I don’t know what to do with.

He loves her too. I’m sure of it.

I can see it when he holds her, the way he looks at her face like he’s trying to memorize it. He’s not absent. He’s not a bad father.

He just gets to choose when to be one. And I don’t.

What the first three months actually cost

My body went through something and is still going through something and will be going through something for a while yet, and there is no equivalent for him.

He watched it happen, which I imagine was its own kind of thing. But watching is not the same as hosting. He did not grow a person. He did not push her out. His body did not immediately begin producing food for her, round the clock, on demand, regardless of whether he was awake or asleep or in the middle of something else.

Mine did.

And now, three months in, I am still the primary source of her nutrition, which means I am still the one who wakes up when she wakes up, which means I am the one calculating hours of sleep in forty-minute increments at 3 am, which means I am the one who cannot—not in any meaningful way—separate my body from this baby’s needs.

He went back to work at two weeks. His life, from the outside, looks approximately like it did before.

Mine is unrecognizable.

I don’t think he fully understands this. I’m not sure he’s capable of understanding it without living it. And I’m too tired to explain it, which is its own kind of trap.

The parenting imbalance

This is the thing I keep turning over.

On a Saturday morning, my husband can decide to sleep in. He does this sometimes. And I don’t begrudge him the sleep—he works hard, he needs rest, I understand all of that. But the decision is available to him in a way it is not available to me. He can hear her cry and lie still for a moment and assess whether someone else will get up. He can close his eyes and take thirty more seconds before he moves.

I cannot do that. Not because someone is stopping me—but because my body is already responding before I’ve made a decision. My milk lets down. My heart rate spikes. Something ancient and biological says go, and I go.

He parents by choice. I parent by nature. Both of us love her. Only one of us has a biological override.

I’ve tried to explain this, and it comes out sounding like I’m accusing him of something, which I’m not. He’s not doing anything wrong by sleeping. I’m not doing anything heroic by waking up. It’s just how it works. But the asymmetry is real, and it is enormous, and I don’t know how to make him see it without him hearing it as an attack.

So mostly I don’t say it. I just carry it, at 3 am, alone, in the dark, while he sleeps the sleep of someone who does not have a biological mandate.

The guilt about the resentment

I resent him sometimes. I need to say that plainly because it’s true.

Not always. Not even most of the time. But in the specific moments—when he takes a long shower, when he goes to the gym, when he sits down to eat while I’m still standing, holding her, eating one-handed over the counter—there is a feeling that I don’t want to have and can’t quite get rid of.

And then I feel guilty about the resentment, because he’s trying, and he loves her, and none of this is his fault exactly, and isn’t this just what early parenthood is, and shouldn’t I be grateful, and on and on until the guilt is exhausting in its own right.

This is the loop I live in.

The thing about the guilt is that it’s doing his work for him. Every time I talk myself out of the resentment, I’m also talking myself out of saying the thing that needs to be said—which is that this is not sustainable, and I need more, and the distribution of labor in our house has quietly become something I never agreed to.

But I’m so tired. And the conversation feels so hard. And she’s so little, and this time is so short, and shouldn’t I just be enjoying it?

Yes. I should. I am. Both things are true.

What love looks like when you’re this depleted

People ask how I’m doing, and I say good, tired, you know how it is, and they nod and move on. Nobody really wants the honest answer, which is that I am simultaneously the happiest and the most depleted I have ever been in my life, and I don’t know how to explain that without sounding like I’m complaining about something I chose.

I did choose this. I want to be clear about that. I wanted her. I want her. The love is real.

But wanting something and being prepared for the cost of it are different things. And the cost, for me, has a shape that it doesn’t have for him. Not because he’s doing anything wrong. Because I’m the one whose body made her, feeds her, responds to her at a level he can’t access.

That’s not his fault. It’s also not nothing.

I watch him with her sometimes—genuinely good moments, him making her laugh, the two of them in their own little world—and I feel a wave of something that is love and grief at the same time. Love for both of them. Grief for the version of this I thought it would be. The one where we were equally in it together.

We’re in it together. Just not equally.

What I actually need him to understand

I don’t need him to be me. I don’t need him to lactate or to feel the biological pull I feel or to experience this the way I experience it.

I need him to understand that his version of parenthood has an off switch and mine doesn’t.

I need him to see that the gap between our experiences is not a character flaw in either of us—it’s a structural reality that requires active compensation, not just good intentions. I need him to stop waiting to be asked and start noticing.

I need him to wake up sometimes before I do.

Not every night. Not perfectly. Just sometimes. Just enough that I know he sees it. That he understands what I’m carrying and has decided, on his own, to pick up more of it.

I love him. I love her. I love this life we’re building, even when it’s hard.

I just need him to understand that, for me, right now, there is no choosing.

There is only showing up.

And I need him to choose to show up with me—not because I asked, not because I reminded him, but because he looked around and saw what this costs and decided that mattered.

That’s all I want.

It doesn’t feel like too much to ask.

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy.