The Weight of Waiting
There are moments in life when a simple task becomes a symbol of everything that’s wrong with a relationship. For me, that moment came in the form of an unassembled crib box sitting in our spare bedroom, growing heavier with significance each day it remained untouched. At nine months pregnant, with my due date approaching like an unstoppable freight train, I found myself staring at that box and wondering when my husband had stopped being my partner and started being just another person I lived with.
My name is Eloise, and at thirty-two, I thought I had marriage figured out. Tom and I had been together for six years, married for three, and until recently, I would have described our relationship as solid, loving, and built on mutual respect. We had navigated career changes, family deaths, financial stress, and the usual collection of challenges that test every couple’s commitment to each other.
But pregnancy had revealed cracks in our partnership that I hadn’t noticed before, or perhaps had chosen to ignore. What started as small disappointments – forgotten doctor’s appointments, dismissed concerns about baby preparations, a general attitude that pregnancy was something happening to me rather than something we were experiencing together – had gradually accumulated into a pattern of disengagement that left me feeling profoundly alone during what should have been the most shared experience of our marriage.
The crib had become the focal point of my frustration because it represented everything I needed from Tom that he seemed unwilling or unable to provide: reliability, initiative, and the basic acknowledgment that we were about to become parents together.
The Anatomy of Endless Delays
The crib box had arrived six weeks earlier, a beautiful white convertible model that would grow with our child from infancy through toddlerhood. I had spent hours researching cribs, reading safety reviews, and comparing prices before making what I thought was a careful, thoughtful decision. When it arrived, I felt a surge of excitement and accomplishment – one more item checked off the endless list of preparations that seemed to multiply faster than I could complete them.
“Tom,” I had said that evening, as we looked at the large box that now dominated our spare bedroom. “Would you mind assembling this sometime this week? I want to make sure everything fits properly and that we have time to return it if there are any problems.”
He had glanced up from his phone with the distracted expression that had become increasingly familiar over the past few months. “Sure, babe. I’ll get to it this weekend.”
But that weekend came and went without any movement toward the nursery. When I asked about it on Sunday evening, Tom looked genuinely surprised, as if the conversation had never happened.
“Oh, right, the crib. I totally forgot. I’ll do it next weekend for sure.”
The following week brought the same pattern. I would mention the crib, Tom would promise to handle it “soon,” and then days would pass without any action. His excuses became increasingly elaborate and frustrating: he was too tired after work, he wanted to wait until he had a full day to dedicate to it, he was waiting for his friend Mike to come over and help, he needed to buy better tools first.
Each delay felt like a small betrayal, not because assembling a crib was inherently difficult or time-consuming, but because his promises had become meaningless. I began to realize that “I’ll do it tomorrow” had become Tom’s default response to any request that required effort or initiative, and tomorrow never seemed to arrive.
As my due date approached and the crib remained unassembled, my anxiety about the nursery became secondary to a much deeper concern about the kind of father and partner Tom was going to be. If he couldn’t manage to put together a piece of furniture when I was nine months pregnant and specifically asking for help, how would he handle the much more complex and demanding responsibilities of parenthood?
The Physical and Emotional Burden
By the time I reached my ninth month of pregnancy, every movement had become a careful negotiation with my body. My belly was enormous, my back ached constantly, and simple tasks like putting on shoes or getting out of bed required strategic planning and considerable effort. The idea of assembling furniture while nine months pregnant wasn’t just daunting – it felt almost impossible.
But as I stood in the nursery one Saturday morning, looking at the still-unopened crib box while Tom slept in until noon, I realized that impossible didn’t mean I had a choice. The baby was coming whether the nursery was ready or not, and waiting for Tom to follow through on his promises was clearly not a viable strategy.
I dragged the heavy box across the carpeted floor, the weight of it pulling at muscles that were already strained from carrying our child. Each movement sent sharp pains through my lower back, and I had to stop frequently to catch my breath and try to find a comfortable position.
Opening the box revealed an intimidating collection of wooden pieces, metal hardware, and instruction sheets that seemed designed by someone who had never actually assembled furniture themselves. The diagrams were unclear, the written instructions were in three languages but none of them seemed to be the English I was familiar with, and the sheer number of screws, bolts, and mysterious metal pieces was overwhelming.
Tom emerged from the bedroom around noon, wandering into the kitchen for coffee while I sat on the nursery floor surrounded by crib components, trying to make sense of the assembly instructions. He glanced into the room as he passed, coffee mug in hand, and paused in the doorway.
“You’re doing that now?” he asked, as if my decision to finally tackle the project was somehow unexpected or unreasonable.
“Someone has to,” I replied, not looking up from the instruction sheet that might as well have been written in hieroglyphics.
“You didn’t have to do it yourself,” he said, but his tone carried no offer of assistance and no acknowledgment that his six weeks of delays had led directly to this moment. “I would have gotten to it eventually.”
Eventually. The word hung in the air between us like a challenge. Eventually, when? After the baby arrived? After I had gone into labor and we realized we had nowhere safe for our newborn to sleep? Eventually had become Tom’s answer to everything, and I was tired of living in the indefinite future of his good intentions.
The Struggle of Solo Assembly
What followed was three of the most frustrating and physically demanding hours of my pregnancy. Every aspect of the assembly process was complicated by my size and limited mobility. I couldn’t get down on the floor to align pieces properly, couldn’t reach across the partially assembled frame to tighten screws, and couldn’t maintain the awkward positions required to follow the increasingly complex instructions.
My back screamed in protest as I bent and twisted, trying to hold pieces in place while simultaneously operating the screwdriver. Sweat dripped down my face despite the cool temperature in the room, and I found myself taking frequent breaks to sit on the floor and try to ease the pressure on my spine.
The most maddening part wasn’t the physical discomfort, though that was considerable. It was the sound of Tom in the living room, scrolling through his phone, watching television, living his normal Saturday routine while I struggled alone with a task that would have been simple for two people to complete together.
At one point, when I was trying to attach the crib mattress support and needed someone to hold one end while I secured the other, I called out to him for help.
“Tom, can you come hold this for just a minute?”
“I’m in the middle of something,” he called back. “Can you wait a few minutes?”
I held the piece in place for ten minutes, my arms shaking from the effort, before he finally appeared in the doorway. By then, I had managed to wrestle it into position myself, though not without considerable pain and frustration.
“Never mind,” I said, my voice tight with anger I was trying not to express. “I figured it out.”
“See? I knew you could handle it,” he said, as if my ability to manage without him was somehow a positive thing rather than a failure of partnership.
The Moment of Clarity
When I finally tightened the last screw and stood back to look at the completed crib, I should have felt pride and accomplishment. The crib was beautiful, sturdy, and exactly what our baby would need. I had managed to assemble it correctly despite the confusing instructions and my physical limitations.
But instead of satisfaction, I felt a profound sense of sadness and isolation. This should have been a moment we shared, a milestone in preparing for our child’s arrival that brought us closer together as expectant parents. Instead, it had become another example of me handling responsibilities alone while Tom remained comfortably disengaged from the practical realities of our changing life.
I was drenched in sweat, my back was throbbing, and my hands were shaking from the physical and emotional strain of the morning. But the physical discomfort was nothing compared to the realization that I couldn’t rely on my husband for support when I needed it most.
As I stood there looking at the crib I had built alone, while nine months pregnant, while my husband relaxed in the next room, I understood that this wasn’t really about furniture assembly. This was about partnership, reliability, and the kind of person Tom was choosing to be as we approached the most challenging and important phase of our relationship.
The crib was assembled, but something fundamental in our marriage felt broken.
The Pattern Recognition
That evening, as I lay in bed with my aching back and racing thoughts, I began to trace the pattern that had led to this moment. The unassembled crib wasn’t an isolated incident – it was the latest in a series of disappointments that had been accumulating throughout my pregnancy.
There was the baby shower planning that I had handled entirely myself while Tom expressed vague opinions about guest lists and menu options. The pediatrician interviews that I had scheduled and attended alone because Tom was “too busy” with work. The childbirth classes that he attended reluctantly and spent scrolling through his phone during breaks.
Each individual incident had seemed minor enough to overlook or excuse. Tom worked long hours, after all, and pregnancy hormones made me more emotional than usual. Maybe I was being unreasonable to expect so much involvement from him. Maybe this was just how marriages worked when babies were coming.
But lying there in the dark, feeling our baby move inside me while Tom slept peacefully beside me, I realized that I wasn’t being unreasonable. I was being abandoned, slowly and subtly, by the person who was supposed to be my partner in the most important adventure of our lives.
The problem wasn’t that Tom was malicious or deliberately hurtful. The problem was that he had somehow convinced himself that pregnancy and baby preparation were primarily my responsibility, with his involvement being optional and dependent on his convenience and availability.
This realization was both clarifying and terrifying. If Tom thought that pregnancy was mostly my job, what would he think about actually raising our child? Would I be doing diaper changes alone while he slept? Would I be handling night feedings by myself while he claimed he needed his rest for work? Would every aspect of parenting become another item on my endless to-do list while Tom remained a supportive but largely uninvolved observer?
The Plan for Accountability
The next morning, I woke up with a sense of purpose that had been missing from my life for weeks. I was tired of feeling disappointed and frustrated by Tom’s lack of engagement. I was tired of making excuses for his behavior and adjusting my expectations downward to match his minimal effort.
If Tom couldn’t understand the weight of responsibility I was carrying through explanation and conversation, maybe he needed to experience it firsthand.
I had been planning a baby shower for the following weekend – a small gathering of family and close friends to celebrate our upcoming arrival. Originally, I had intended to handle most of the planning and preparation myself, with Tom helping with setup and cleanup. But as I sat at the kitchen table that morning, making lists and checking details, I decided to change the plan entirely.
“Tom,” I said when he emerged from the bedroom, “I need to talk to you about the baby shower.”
He looked up from his coffee with the slightly wary expression that had become his default when I wanted to discuss anything related to baby preparations. “What about it?”
“I’ve decided that you’re going to handle it,” I said simply. “The planning, the shopping, the setup, the food, the decorations, the cleanup. All of it.”
His expression shifted from wariness to confusion to something approaching panic. “What do you mean, handle it? I thought you were taking care of that stuff.”
“I’ve been taking care of everything,” I replied, my voice steady but firm. “And I’m tired. I’m nine months pregnant, Tom. I built a crib by myself yesterday while you watched TV. I think you can manage to host a baby shower.”
“But I don’t know how to plan parties,” he protested. “I don’t know what food to get or how to decorate or any of that stuff.”
“Then you’ll figure it out,” I said, echoing the phrase he had used so many times when I had expressed concerns about tasks that fell to me by default. “You’re a smart guy. I’m sure you can handle it.”
The Crash Course in Reality
What followed was a week that I watched with fascination and a small amount of guilty satisfaction. Tom, suddenly faced with the responsibility of organizing an event for twenty people, discovered what I had been managing all along: the incredible complexity and stress of planning anything while maintaining work responsibilities and dealing with the physical demands of late pregnancy.
His first challenge was the guest list and invitations. What seemed like a simple task – inviting family and friends to a party – revealed itself to be a complex web of relationships, dietary restrictions, scheduling conflicts, and communication preferences. Some people preferred phone calls, others wanted text messages, and still others expected formal invitations.
Then came the food planning. Tom stood in the grocery store for over an hour, calling me repeatedly to ask questions about quantities, dietary restrictions, and whether certain combinations made sense. The confident man who had dismissed party planning as “not that hard” was reduced to texting me photos of cheese platters and asking if I thought we needed more vegetables.
The decorations presented their own challenges. Tom had never considered the difference between streamers and garland, had no opinion about color coordination, and couldn’t understand why balloons needed to be arranged in specific patterns rather than just scattered randomly around the room.
By Thursday, three days before the shower, Tom was in full panic mode. He had made multiple trips to different stores, changed the menu twice, and spent an entire evening on the phone with his mother trying to understand the logistics of hosting a party for people with different dietary needs and social expectations.
“This is so much harder than I thought it would be,” he admitted on Friday night, surrounded by shopping bags and lists that seemed to multiply rather than shrink as he checked items off.
“Really?” I said, trying to keep the satisfaction out of my voice. “What makes it so difficult?”
“Everything!” he said, gesturing at the chaos around him. “There are so many details to remember, and if you forget one thing, it ruins everything else. And everyone has opinions about what they want or need, and you have to keep track of all of it while still doing everything else in your life.”
I nodded sympathetically, recognizing the exact frustration I had been feeling for months as I managed the endless details of pregnancy, baby preparation, and household maintenance while Tom remained blissfully unaware of the complexity involved.
The Day of Reckoning
The morning of the baby shower, Tom was up before dawn, frantically trying to complete preparations that should have been finished the night before. He had underestimated the time required for food preparation, had forgotten about setup activities like arranging furniture and setting up serving areas, and was discovering that hosting a party required significantly more energy and multitasking ability than he had anticipated.
I watched from my position on the couch, where I was genuinely resting for the first time in weeks, as Tom rushed around the house trying to manage multiple tasks simultaneously. He burned the first batch of appetizers because he was distracted by hanging decorations. He forgot to chill the beverages until thirty minutes before guests were scheduled to arrive. He realized an hour before the party that he had forgotten to prepare activities or games, which led to a frantic internet search for “last-minute baby shower ideas.”
When the first guests arrived, Tom was still in his pajamas, covered in flour from his cooking disasters, with decorations hanging at odd angles and a dining room table that looked like it had been arranged by someone who had never seen a party before.
What followed was three hours of watching my normally composed husband stumble through the complex choreography of hosting. He forgot people’s names, served food before beverages, and had to excuse himself multiple times to handle crises in the kitchen or retrieve forgotten items from upstairs.
The breaking point came when he tried to coordinate the gift opening while simultaneously managing the food service and cleanup. He became increasingly flustered, dropping packages, forgetting to record who had given what gifts, and eventually having to ask my mother to take over the gift coordination while he dealt with a kitchen disaster involving melted plastic and smoke.
By the time the last guest left, Tom was exhausted, stressed, and covered in various food stains. The house looked like it had been hit by a tornado, and he still faced several hours of cleanup before he could consider the event complete.
The Conversation That Changed Everything
That evening, after the dishes were done and the house was restored to something approaching normal, Tom collapsed onto the couch beside me with the defeated expression of someone who had just discovered that his assumptions about the world were fundamentally incorrect.
“I had no idea,” he said, his voice heavy with exhaustion and something that might have been humility. “I thought planning parties was just making a few phone calls and buying some food. I didn’t realize how much work was involved.”
“It’s not just parties,” I replied gently. “It’s everything. Every detail of our life together, every preparation for this baby, every aspect of running a household – it’s all much more complex and time-consuming than it looks from the outside.”
Tom was quiet for a long moment, and I could see him processing the events of the day in the context of our recent conflicts. “The crib,” he said finally. “You weren’t just asking me to put together furniture. You were asking me to be your partner.”
I nodded, feeling tears start to form as I realized that he was finally beginning to understand. “I’ve been doing so much alone, Tom. And every time you said you’d do something ‘tomorrow’ or ‘eventually,’ it felt like you were telling me that my needs weren’t important enough for your immediate attention.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and his voice carried a sincerity that I hadn’t heard in months. “I kept thinking that you were better at this stuff than me, that you enjoyed planning and organizing and I would just get in the way. But that wasn’t fair to you.”
“I’m not better at it,” I said. “I just do it because someone has to. And I was starting to feel like I was going to be parenting alone, like you were going to be a supportive observer rather than an equal partner.”
The conversation that followed was the most honest and productive we had shared since learning about the pregnancy. Tom acknowledged that he had been treating many household and baby-related responsibilities as optional for him and mandatory for me, without ever discussing or agreeing to that division of labor.
He admitted that he had been intimidated by the complexity of baby preparation and had unconsciously defaulted to letting me handle things because it seemed easier than learning how to do them himself. He recognized that his delays and avoidance hadn’t made the tasks disappear – they had just transferred the burden entirely to me.
Most importantly, he apologized not with excuses about being busy or stressed, but with a genuine acknowledgment that he had let me down when I needed him most.
The Beginning of Real Partnership
The baby shower incident became a turning point in our marriage, but not because it magically solved all our communication problems or instantly transformed Tom into the perfect partner. Instead, it created a shared understanding of what equal partnership actually looked like and what I needed from him as we prepared to become parents together.
In the weeks that followed, Tom began taking initiative rather than waiting for assignments. He scheduled and attended the remaining doctor’s appointments, researched pediatricians and made the calls to interview them, and took responsibility for completing the baby-proofing projects that had been languishing on our to-do list.
More importantly, he started asking questions about my experience rather than making assumptions about what I needed or wanted. Instead of dismissing my concerns about labor and delivery as pregnancy anxiety, he researched childbirth preparation and suggested we attend additional classes. Instead of assuming that breastfeeding would be “natural” and therefore easy, he read about ways partners can support nursing mothers and prepared to take on additional household responsibilities during the early weeks.
The change wasn’t immediate or perfect. Tom still occasionally fell back into old patterns of procrastination or assumption that I would handle certain tasks. But now he was aware of those patterns and willing to be called out on them. When I pointed out that he was defaulting to “I’ll do it later” mode, he would acknowledge it and either handle the task immediately or give me a specific timeline for completion.
The Arrival and New Challenges
Our daughter, Maya, arrived two weeks after the baby shower, and the early days of parenthood tested every aspect of our newly improved partnership. The sleep deprivation, the constant feeding and diaper changing, the overwhelming responsibility of caring for a tiny human being – all of it was harder than either of us had anticipated.
But the foundation we had rebuilt during the crib and baby shower incidents served us well during those challenging first months. Tom didn’t treat nighttime feedings as “my” responsibility or assume that I was naturally better at soothing a crying baby. Instead, we developed systems that acknowledged both of our needs for sleep, support, and breaks from the intensity of newborn care.
When Maya was three months old, I was finally ready to laugh about the whole crib assembly debacle. Tom had become so committed to being a hands-on father that he had assembled not just the crib, but also the changing table, the rocking chair, and every other piece of furniture in Maya’s room, often staying up late to complete projects before I even knew they needed attention.
“Remember when you thought I should have just waited for you to put together the crib ‘eventually’?” I teased him one evening as we watched Maya sleep in the bed I had built while nine months pregnant.
“I was an idiot,” he said without hesitation. “I can’t believe I let you do that alone. I can’t believe I let you do any of it alone.”
The Lessons Learned and Applied
The experience taught both of us crucial lessons about partnership, communication, and the importance of recognizing when relationship dynamics need to change. For me, it demonstrated the power of setting clear expectations and following through with consequences when those expectations weren’t met.
I learned that constantly accommodating Tom’s procrastination and taking on tasks he avoided hadn’t been helping our relationship – it had been enabling a dynamic that left me overwhelmed and resentful while allowing him to remain comfortably disconnected from our shared responsibilities.
For Tom, the baby shower experience provided a visceral understanding of what I had been managing alone. It wasn’t enough for him to intellectually acknowledge that I was doing “a lot” – he needed to experience firsthand the stress, complexity, and overwhelming nature of managing multiple responsibilities simultaneously.
The crib incident also taught us both about the symbolic weight that seemingly simple tasks can carry in a relationship. The unassembled crib hadn’t been just about furniture – it had been about reliability, partnership, and the kind of parents we were going to be together.
The Ongoing Evolution
Today, Maya is two years old, and we’re expecting our second child. This pregnancy has been a completely different experience, marked by Tom’s active involvement in every aspect of preparation and planning. He schedules his own doctor’s appointments, has opinions about nursery design, and takes initiative on baby-related tasks without being asked.
When we went to buy furniture for the new baby’s room, Tom insisted on assembling everything immediately upon delivery. “I’m never leaving you to build furniture alone again,” he said, and I could tell he was remembering not just the physical difficulty I had experienced, but the emotional message his absence had sent.
Our relationship isn’t perfect – no marriage is – but it’s built on a foundation of genuine partnership and mutual respect that we had to work to create. The crib that I built alone while nine months pregnant still sits in Maya’s room, now converted to a toddler bed. It’s a daily reminder of how far we’ve come and how important it is to address problems before they become insurmountable.
Conclusion: Building More Than Furniture
Looking back on the great crib assembly crisis, I’m grateful that it happened when it did. If Tom’s pattern of avoidance and my pattern of accommodation had continued unchecked, we might have found ourselves trying to navigate early parenthood with completely different expectations about partnership and responsibility.
The crib became a symbol of everything that was wrong with our dynamic, but it also became the catalyst for everything that we fixed. By forcing Tom to experience the reality of what I was managing alone, I created an opportunity for genuine understanding and change that years of explanation and argument had failed to achieve.
The lesson wasn’t just that husbands should assemble furniture when their wives are nine months pregnant, though that would have been nice. The lesson was that partnership requires active participation from both people, that good intentions without follow-through aren’t actually helpful, and that sometimes the most loving thing you can do for your relationship is to refuse to accept behavior that undermines your partnership.
For other couples navigating the transition to parenthood, I want to emphasize that pregnancy and early parenthood reveal relationship dynamics that might have been invisible during easier times. It’s normal for these challenges to surface, but it’s crucial to address them directly rather than hoping they’ll resolve themselves once the baby arrives.
The physical demands of pregnancy and newborn care make it tempting to accept unequal partnerships in the name of efficiency or avoiding conflict. But building a family is too important and too challenging to handle alone, and children deserve to see their parents modeling genuine partnership and mutual support.
Today, when Tom assembles furniture or handles party planning or takes initiative on household projects, he’s not just completing tasks – he’s demonstrating the kind of partnership and reliability that our children are learning to expect from relationships. He’s showing them that love looks like showing up when you’re needed, that families work best when everyone contributes according to their abilities, and that the most important gifts we can give each other are dependability and support.
The crib I built alone was sturdy and functional, but it paled in comparison to the partnership we built together after recognizing that something essential was missing from our relationship. That partnership – built on mutual respect, shared responsibility, and the understanding that love requires action as well as intention – is the foundation on which we’re raising our children and building our life together.
Sometimes the most important construction projects aren’t the ones that involve tools and instruction manuals, but the ones that require honesty, humility, and the courage to demand better from the people we love most.
This story is a work of fiction inspired by common experiences of couples navigating pregnancy and early parenthood. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.
