And then, gradually, the nights became mine too, because I was already up feeding, so what was the point of us both being awake.

And then the weekends began to erode, because by the weekend I had the routine down and it was easier if I just handled it, and Julian was tired from his week.

Each handoff of responsibility was defensible on its own.

Together, they added up to a total transfer of the entire enterprise onto me, accomplished so gradually that neither of us noticed it happening.

And here is the part I have had to sit with: I taught him this.

Not deliberately, but by my silence, by my competence, by my grim determination to prove that I could handle it, I taught my husband, day by day, that there was no floor to what I would absorb, that no amount of exhaustion would make me demand his help, that he could keep handing me pieces of the load and I would keep taking them, forever, without protest.

My endurance, which I had thought of as a virtue, had functioned as a lesson plan, and the lesson it taught was: she will carry anything, so you need carry nothing.

By the time Julian shrugged and told me to act like a mother, he was not being uniquely cruel.

He was simply stating the conclusion of a curriculum I had spent six months, without meaning to, teaching him.

The tragedy was not that he had learned the lesson.

It was that I had been the one teaching it.

Chapter 2 — Just Wash the Bottles

One evening, while I was trying to get both girls to sleep at the same time, an act of coordination that required roughly the concentration of landing an aircraft, I asked Julian a small thing.

I asked him if he could wash the baby bottles.