My husband and I just had a baby about a
month ago. There seems to be a healthy kind of empowerment that comes to a
woman for giving birth. It has been said by a mother describing it after giving
birth: “You feel like you can do anything.” Then there’s the unhealthy kind of
empowerment where a mother will nag the father or go to extremes in telling him
what to do, almost being the head of the house. The “anything” described by the
woman above should be good things, godly things…like the empowerment to love the
child, and love the husband more than ever.
Something that keeps the unhealthy
empowerment from building is the mother’s ability to overlook or ignore what
could build pride, such as all the work she did in labor. When you do something
good, it is better to see it as something overlooked, rather than to keep
thinking about how wonderful it was what you did. If you can overlook it, it
calms down your pride and is quite freeing from the unhealthy type of
empowerment.
A mother after giving birth who can still
think of others beyond herself is a valuable lady. It is quite unselfish of her
to think of her husband, who didn’t do the birth labor and who didn’t have the
amazing experience from pregnancy to birth in a day or however long the labor
is. It is easy to overlook all others when pride could sneak in after a great
accomplishment. But something that could help you in your relationship with
your husband in such a situation is to imagine switching the roles for a minute
but in a different situation that can be used to understand. You have a normal
week. You do the things you normally do on each day. Your husband has a normal
week, too. He has been busy…but one of those days, he has a chance to go to the
gym after work or spend time on your family’s exercise machine for a good hour.
He is so proud of his worked up muscles and wants you to say something about
it. How it is for a husband after the wife goes through labor is the normal
week as far as she went through the labor, but he didn’t. You can put yourself
in your husband’s shoes about your labor experiences. Do not expect him to
almost “put you on a pedestal” for your amazing work… and you can keep from
expecting it by realizing it’s easy to overlook. Realize that the pride and
what could lead to negative empowerment could be overlooked if you just think
about others.
