A Thank You to My Husband

I don’t publicly boast about my husband much or if at all, but he has been really good to me while I have been pregnant and through the birth of our daughter. My husband is a fabulous cook and normally we split the cooking or I do more of it, but during my first trimester I felt nauseous all the time and had a busy school schedule which left me exhausted by the time I was getting home. So my husband cooked most dinners for us during that time and on the weekends he would occasionally cook lunch too. Lucky to say I always ate well!

I was always really thankful for his help and said if I’m not tired or exhausted I will cook, as well. A few times I came home from work to see that the entire house was cleaned, laundry was hung to dry, or folded and put away. Now, maybe many people back home expect this of their husbands to a degree, but still it is normally that the woman is the one who does everything. Tibetans have varying customs when it comes to housework and cooking depending on where they are from. In my husband’s village, men don’t help with the cleaning or cooking much or at all. So the fact that he does cook and clean is an added bonus for me. But, normally we clean the house together on the weekends. I might have been slower with the cleaning and mopping during pregnancy had become a little impossible, but that was okay.

My husband sometimes worried that if he was working late, when I came home, I might be very tired and unable to cook or clean. He kept asking me, “Do you want my mother to come? She can come now to help cook and clean.” I always told him, I might be tired and slow, but I’m still able to cook and clean.

My mom pointed out that it was because he loves me, worries about me and the baby, and that he wants us to be well taken care of, and I wholeheartedly agree. It was super sweet of him. Regardless, he said his mom would come a few weeks before I gave birth to help out before and after the birth of the baby. (In reality, she came the in the evening after I gave birth and stayed for two weeks.)

One night I was telling him that the dinner I had cooked wasn’t yummy and he had asked if I wanted him to cook for me. I told him I was fine, just whatever I decided to put together that night wasn’t good. Sometimes it was just the small things that really made a difference being pregnant, especially far away from family.

He let me take naps on him on the couch while he watched a movie in his free time or would accompany for a random purchase at Walmart. Knock-off Nutella was one of those such purchases because I wanted to eat some bread with it. He was always asking, ‘Do you want some fruit?’ Or telling me to eat the last of whatever fruit we had because it’s good for me and the baby.

The sweetness to me is incredibly awesome. Our bodies change a lot when we are pregnant and it is hard to know how we will react to ourselves and the changes as well as how will our partner react. I swear I have a mole that never used to exist on my forehead and I want to remove it so bad. My husband always says it’s beautiful don’t worry about it. (I’m gonna remove that sucker once I can afford to do so, because it bothers me.) But I appreciate the comments of you look beautiful today, or telling me that even though I’m changing I’m still beautiful. And it is of course still fun to snuggle together!

As, I wrote part of this post prior to giving birth I had to change it to the past tense and now I’ll write about other reasons I am so thankful for my husband. I went into labor 4.5 weeks early and we rushed to the hospital in our neighborhood. My husband, at the time still hadn’t said if he would attend the birth with me ( this was due to cultural differences and men not being present at the birth), but in the end he was with me in the laboring room. He brought a friend who also helped translate as well as run back and forth to our house for things we forgot (more on that in another post). He held my hand at times, talked to me and encouraged me through the labor. He helped lift me from one stretcher to another when being moved in the hospital (Nurses don’t do this in China, its you or whoever is with you t help move you.) He was with me in the delivery room as I gave birth to our daughter, holding my hand and encouraging me. Also telling me to ignore the doctor saying push, if I wasn’t ready, do it at my own time. He saw our daughter being born and followed the doctors immediately to the NICU to do paperwork, he handled all the paperwork and translations because I don’t speak Chinese.

During my hospital stay after giving birth he helped me sit up to pee in a bucket, helped change the pads on the bed that was catching the bleeding after birth. He helped clean my stitches every time after I peed. The first time I did it by myself, he asked why I didn’t ask him to help me. The thought alone stands out about how much he cared and worried about me. He always made sure I was warm enough and my favorite part was when he crawled into the cot at the hospital and slept beside me for two nights. (He scared the nurse off the first night, I had to tell him the next morning.) But that was a huge comfort to me being in a hospital room with another roommate listening to their baby cry, while ours was in the NICU.

He ran home every morning, noon, and evening to bring me food his mom had cooked. He fetched my mom from the airport and brought her to the hospital, and he checked on our daughter. When I was discharged and couldn’t walk much he brought the breastmilk I had pumped to the hospital everyday for our daughter to have.

During this whole time he provided a lot of emotional support to me, even when my mom left and I was crying ( I rarely cry at departures) he just held me and kissed my forehead to say its okay to cry, cry it all out. Culturally, he isn’t big on PDA, so when he does, especially at that time, it meant a lot. I love my husband a lot and I am so thankful he was by my side through it all. Even though there were times we might not have seen eye to eye, and we had to navigate cultural differences, we have built a stronger bond through this and I am so happy to have him by my side while we build a life together with our tiny little family. Adrang, I love you. འ་སྒྲང་ང་ཁྱོད་ཤིན་ཏུ་དགའ།