Ducky Mommy

One night, just before we went to sleep, my husband put his head on me.

He was teasing me, so he didn’t exactly put it down gently. He just dropped his head on me and stayed there.

“That’s heavy,” I said.

“That’s love,” he replied.

Cute. But also, my neck was hurting.

I laughed, but his answer stayed with me. Because it made me think about how strange it is that some things we do for the people we love can be exhausting without ever feeling like a burden, while something as small as making dinner can sometimes feel surprisingly heavy.

I know this feeling quite well.

When I came from Bangkok to France, taking care of the children naturally became more my responsibility. Finding a job wasn’t easy, I needed time to adapt to a new country, and my French needed some work. My husband and I understood the situation, and we both knew that taking care of the children was important.

There were plenty of tiring days. There were days when life felt difficult and I would have happily handed the whole thing over to someone else for a few hours. But I didn’t feel that I was carrying something that belonged to me alone. We had made sense of the situation together, so even when it was hard, it felt right.

Housework was another story.

I don’t like cleaning. I can do it, but I have to make myself do it. And somewhere along the way, I had quietly created another job for myself: being the wife who has the house under control and dinner ready when her husband comes home.

When I say it now, it sounds a little ridiculous. Apparently, somewhere in my head, being a good wife came with a daily meal plan.

A frozen pizza didn’t quite fit the picture.

The funny part is, my husband never actually asked for any of this. He never said he expected me to have dinner ready every night. He never told me the house had to be clean when he came home. I had simply decided that this was what I was supposed to do as a wife, and then somehow turned my own idea into an expectation I had to live up to.

Maybe that’s why it felt so heavy.

We often talk about the weight of other people’s expectations, but sometimes the expectation isn’t coming from them at all. Sometimes we love someone so much that we start guessing what would make us a good partner in their eyes, and then we spend years trying to be that person without ever checking whether they actually wanted us to be.

These days, my husband cleans the floor every week. Sometimes, while he vacuums, I sit on the sofa and play on my phone with that tiny bit of guilt tapping me on the shoulder.

I’m learning not to answer it.