Mating in captivity

You get pernickety, I get pedantic, says Sophie White, during a battle with Himself about who is the better parent — neither, as this column attests

Himself and I had been having a particularly fractious time in terms of the whole ‘continuing to like each other’ thing that every marriage requires.

I think at the root of the problem is that pervading sense of feeling hard-done-by, which, surely, most co-parents of small children experience. A lot of things in a marriage can start to feel very transactional when there are tiny people to take care of. The relationship becomes a relay race of passing small humans back and forth, while navigating an obstacle course of external demands, such as careers, and the need to occasionally flee the house to locate the nearest bowl of wine.

Himself keeps an unofficial tally of all my extra-familial activities on a special, very embittered little leader board in his head. If he starts to feel like my time spent ‘out’ is beginning to outweigh his jaunts ‘out’, he can get very ratty indeed.

Sadly for me, he doesn’t express these resentments in timely and reasonable fashion. Instead, he hugs them close, fertilising them with passive-aggressive mutterings and presumably watering them with his own bitter tears, until what began as a minor irritant over my attending an early evening book launch has spiralled into a divorce-worthy grudge.

Having neglected to divine his thoughts through soothsaying, I’m happily ambling along, unwittingly adding fuel to the fire by making plans with friends, and unaware of the simmering resentment oozing from his pores.

“If he starts to feel like my time spent ‘out’ is beginning to outweigh his jaunts ‘out’ he can get very ratty indeed”

When the eruption takes place, it is not pretty. He refers to his ledger of grievances to list my total number of non-spawn-related excursions versus his outings, and I start to feel mutinous.

I, too, can play at nitpicking. I point out the obvious flaw in his methodology: he is using a like-for-like system, meaning that his Sunday nine-hour round of golf is apparently equal to my four-hour bookclub on Friday nights.

For starters, that is a difference of five hours, and also, and this I feel is even more pertinent, his absence for golf is during what I have dubbed ‘waking hours’, meaning our children are fully conscious and in need of maximum supervision while he’s golfing, but are peacefully slumbering on Friday night when I go out. I probably should’ve started this column with a few lines about how much I love and cherish my children.

Anyway, my rather pedantic argument now means that Himself is threatening to establish a points system, whereby each parent ‘earns’ hours by babysitting during ‘waking hours’. Obviously I had to shut him up, so I made this gorgeous tagine to distract him from his Excel doc.

Also: Parenthood is heaven.™