He actually sighed, a long, put-upon exhalation, and glanced around the house with an expression of weary grievance, and then he told me that he was exhausted from coming home every day to crying babies, and dirty bottles, and a wife who always looked stressed and tired.

I remember standing there, a drowsy infant on each shoulder, absorbing that sentence, and feeling something in me go very still.

Because in that sigh, and in those words, was a whole worldview I had somehow failed to notice taking root in my marriage: that the exhaustion of our home was something being done to Julian, an unpleasantness he came home to, rather than a shared labor he was part of; that my stressed and tired appearance was a failure of mine, an aesthetic disappointment, rather than the visible cost of work he was benefiting from and not doing.

He was not tired from the babies.