100 Words Per Mile: A Difference Between Me and My Wife

Parenting requires that we butt heads in a way we never had before.

January 5, 2022
10.00 miles
1:25:23

I sucked it up and ran a lot today. We also started looking at different daycares.

I may have mentioned once or twice in here, but my wife and I don’t fight. We sometimes bicker in a playful way, but we’ve never really gone at it. If she’s upset with me, it’s been for good reason, so I do the work to mend it. If I’m annoyed or bothered by something, she’s pretty emotionally tuned in that we iron out the wrinkles right then and there. I owe a lot of this to therapy, if only because it gave me a lot of the vocabulary I was missing when it came to my own processes. Even though I only met with a therapist a handful of times, that bit of insight and mindfulness has been invaluable to my marriage.

Perhaps that’s why this daycare conundrum wasn’t worse, but it was definitely our first bit of a battle as parents.

My wife has started feeling uneasy and apprehensive about sending our daughter to daycare—which is all reasonable and natural, of course. So, she’s recently brought up the idea of looking around at other daycares, just to be sure. We’re only a few weeks away, so I was a little frustrated that she wanted to make the change now. There likely isn’t any availability anywhere, and if we’re being honest, I’m just tired. The idea of calling/emailing around, making appointments, and visiting daycares all over again sounds completely exhausting.

The way my wife has phrased it, she wants our daughter to meet the teachers and see how the teachers interact with her. She’s looking for a feeling, some kind of reassurance, which makes sense but the cynic in me doesn’t believe that feeling exists. I feel like this is simply a hurdle we have to face together, and that eventually we’ll get used to it.

This all stems from a philosophical difference between me and my wife. It’s something I love about her, because really, it makes me a better person to be around it.