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No, parents are not just a “super team”

This post is taken from the weekly newsletter “Darons Daronnes” on parenting, which is sent every Wednesday at 6 p.m. You can subscribe to this newsletter for free by following this link.

Photo from the book “One bed, two blankets”, by Sabine Hess and Nicolas Polli, Ciao Press, 2023. SABINE HESS & NICOLAS POLLI

There is an expression that I don't like at all, and that we sometimes hear from couples of parents: “We make a great team. » I started to wince a few years ago, in American films and series. « We are a team »declared themselves looking into the (wet) eyes of the lovers facing the various trials of parenthood.

This bothers me, because I have the impression that we have suddenly switched to La Chaîne L'Equipe, while I thought I was watching The Young and the Restless. The Lebrun brothers make a great team. The adventurers of “Koh-Lanta” form a great team (just before killing each other). Kylian Mbappé and his new teammates form a great team (well, not quite yet). But a couple, no, definitely, for me, it does not fit into this register. This does not navigate an imagination of performance and efficiency, of pats on the shoulder and “going to the end of the adventure”.

Maybe what I write here is too prescriptive. Everyone finds their happiness as they wish. So let's say that, for me, I would definitely not want one day the first sentence that comes to mind when someone asks me to define my relationship to be: “We make a great team. »

In survival mode

The good news is that as you read, this is not going to happen any time soon. It's the beginning of December, and my partner and I have been living with the unpleasant feeling of being locked in a washing machine drum that has been spinning at 1,400 rpm for a good month. The “Family” calendar on our smartphones serves as our beacon in the endless night of the shortest days of the year, flashing sometimes at 7:55 a.m. with “swimming school affairs”, sometimes at 8:15 p.m. with “prepare maternal picnic”, when the fridge is completely empty, even though we had scheduled a grocery delivery the next day and cooked meals “for the week” which lasted two days (five big eaters).

Sunday, we returned from our walk to discover that the oven had decided to restart on its own, charring the quiche Lorraine prepared in the morning with the satisfaction of a job accomplished. It brought tears to my eyes – which says more about my tiredness than my love for bacon. But how are we going to find the time to think about the best solution for this crappy oven (which is only five years old), when we can barely talk to each other about our days? In which to-do list endlessly will we write it down, between the articles to write, to reread, to order, the meetings, the Christmas presents, the boxes of the Advent calendar to fill, the family quotients to update?

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