In the early days of parenting I pretended to be confounded by swaddling. I overcomplimented Nick’s ace abilities to wrap our baby like a burrito. This paid off in spades. His confidence in swaddling led to his dominance over bedtime and allowed me to start reading novels alone before bed again.

As he got older, Charlie needed different things from us. I decided a full immersion was the best training I could give my husband. So I left. First I left for two days and two nights to copy-edit my novel. Another time I left for five days to go on assignment for a story.

I imagined it a little like Outward Bound or one of those reality television shows in which people are thrown naked into the woods, but for parenting. There were some women who criticized me. “How could you leave your 3-month-old like that?” they said.

“Because he has another parent,” I said and decided not to be friends with those women anymore. I left him because my husband needed to learn to be a dad the same way I needed to learn to be a mom: through trial and error.

Babies are resilient. One day Charlie ripped off a dirty diaper and pooped right on the couch. Another day he ate dirt. He’s fine. The two of them figured it out and when I got home, Nick’s confidence about being alone with Charlie was nearly as high as mine.

These days my husband puts the baby to bed most nights. He’s better at shushing (I tell him this all the time). He does a lot of the feeding. He does the laundry; I usually fold it. He loads the dishwasher and I unload it. He’s just as good at reading Charlie’s mind as I am, which means he gets it right half the time. We both empty the smelly, smelly Diaper Genie.