The first thing my 2-year-old daughter Maeve said when I opened her door this morning was “Dada.”
“Good morning, sweetie!”
“Dada.”
“Mommy loves you!” I said, pulling open the curtains, hoping she’d note the sun highlighting my form, the madonna to her child. “Did you get some sleep?”
“Dada. Dada.”
It’s Maeve’s favorite word. Her favorite person.
My husband Hall is normally the one to get her up, but today he was already working. A farmer inside a web marketer’s body, he wakes naturally everyday at 5 a.m., an hour before Maeve and two hours before me.
There are two types of people — non-tired people and tired people. Tired people are always tired. Non-tired people are tired too, because everyone is, but their neurons fire slower, tricking them into thinking they’re more awake than they are. Non-tired people fall asleep in front of movies. Tired people never do because they’re already in bed.
I am a tired person. I sleep in. But for each minute I spend dreaming of 30 more minutes, Maeve, like a little blond chick, is imprinting on Hall. Every day, she clocks the characteristics of that first moving object she sees — tall, male, holding a 500 series bowling mug — and attaches herself to it.
By the time I surface, it’s only 7 a.m., but it’s already too late. I walk over to the rocking chair where they’re reading, Maeve in the throne of her dad’s arms, and lean in to give her a kiss. She sits motionless, staring at “Go, Dog. Go!” trying to give me the hint.
When Hall is out of sight, she’s perfectly content to be with me. Overjoyed even. She hugs my legs and kisses my hair. She embodies the meaning of life by running across the room into my open arms. When I pick her up and tell her how much I love her, she pats me on the back like a proud dad.
And while I’ll never be Hall, at least she prefers me to everyone else. Other family members. Friends. Strangers. She prefers me to no one. She does love me.
But Hall returns. Maeve flees my lap and jumps into his.
“She hates me,” I tell him.
“She’s 2,” he says, ruffling her hair. “She doesn’t know anything.”
“But what if ... what if she knows everything?” I say.
She loves me, she loves him more, I repeat when picking at the petals of my daisy-shaped wound. She loves me! She loves him… more.
It doesn’t help that Maeve is with me all day. Though I have the red hair and the patterned clothes, Hall (brown hair, all solids) is the fun one, simply because she sees him less. He has a job. He’s exotic.
When my company laid me off last summer, little did they know that their rejection was two-fold — not only had they thrust a new mom from the workforce, but they cemented that new mom as the boring one, the Christmas-every-day parent.
After they share their sacred morning, Hall goes downstairs to his salaried lair while I act out my one woman show: “Stay-At-Home Mom, featuring: Mom!”
I sashay across rooms collecting toddler detritus, perform rag work on milk that oil spills across the table, tickle the ivories of my laptop to Google rashes and bulk buy diapers, and conduct an orchestra of dishes that encores multiple times a day.
As soon as the curtain comes down each evening and I prepare to take a bow, Hall ascends to Maeve’s squealing embrace and takes my flowers. He does so begrudgingly. Seeing his daughter discard his wife like the crust of a PB&J doesn’t (rightly so) tickle his fancy.
It’s just not fair. As much as I play the role of a sitcom wife, laundry basket grafted onto my hip, I’m also fun. We go to the playground, where I push her on the swing and let her run on the cut-up tires that protect against falls and plant the seeds for lead poisoning. We bake cakes, whisking teaspoons of salt and eating plain flour. We read 30 books (the same book 30 times), and go to story time at the library, where Maeve has helped me make mom friends, like a dog does for its owner at a park.
While Hall sits in the basement responding to emails and not farming, Maeve and I have all the fun.
And it was my influence — mine! — that prompted her first joke.
Since the day she was born, I’ve gazed into her blue eyes and asked, “Are you Mommy’s baby?” She’s never responded. It’s been rhetorical, posed mostly to reassure myself that she always will be.
During lunchtime this past April, I asked her again. “Are you Mommy’s baby?”
She smiled and opened a mouthful of butter bread. “Daddy’s baby,” she said. “Pepper’s baby.” Our dog.
I couldn’t help but be proud. She clearly was my baby. I’m the funny one, the clown — tears and all.
She must know how bad I want it. She can sense the middle child in me starved for attention. The red-headed, black sheep fish opening and closing its mouth as it slowly dies from not being the favorite. She sees that Hall is well-adjusted and confident, too patriarchally assured to demand affection.
It doesn’t matter that when I read to her in bed, she burrows her head under my neck and places her hand directly onto mine for maximum contact. What matters is that when Hall walks into the room, she pushes me away and says, “Dada, read.”
“You know she loves you,” he says, bouncing her on his knee. “And it’s not a competition, Molly.”
I Charlie Brown myself out of the room, off to scrub egg that’s hardened on the high chair, hoping my tears soften the crusted yolk. I could use a win.
My brother Tom gets it. When he was putting his 4-year-old son to bed the other night, Benny asked for his mom, stating simply, “I like her better than you.”
The difference is that Tom is a dad, and despite my penchant for boat shoes and physical newspapers, I am not. I’m a mom, the one kids are supposed to prefer. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Moms rule and dads drool. Everyone knows that.
Beyond the cool clothes and capacity to form emotional bonds with women we’ve only just met (“So where are you from? And what is your current mental state?”), the monopoly that women have on children’s love is one of the few bones society has thrown us. It’s a given.
When you Google why kids favor moms over dads, it instantly spits out a thousand AI-generated answers. If you type in the reverse, “Why do kids prefer their dads?” it has to think for a minute before it throws up its hands and offers a smattering of haphazard results on sites like crapmoms.com.
I’m only assuming; I haven’t done proper research, as I don’t have the heart to learn why I’m failing. I did bring it up with a mom friend the other night, gently encouraged by a margarita. She said that it was just a phase, that Maeve sees me as an extension of herself. Because I’m always with her, I’ve become a buoy of safety and security, and thus, so goddamn boring.
I can only begin to guess as to how to fix it.
I could wake up before Hall, but I can’t. I’m a Tired Person.
I could play hard to get and learn to not squeeze Maeve every time she’s within arm’s reach, but the “wait for him to text back mentality” didn’t work in my 20s, and I’m loath to associate my perfect 2-year-old daughter with an emotionally unavailable man-boy.
I could have another baby, getting Maeve rehooked on breast milk and therefore me, but it’d be a pain to wean when she goes to college.
I could also, as biologists did when they found that human-raised whooping cranes refused to mate once released into the wild, don the costume of the ideal imprinter to guarantee attachment. In their case, a giant white suit with a bird head and a beak. In my case, brown hair, monochromatic clothing, big pecs and a bowling mug.
But I know I can never replace Hall. It’s not just that Maeve sees him first or that she sees him less that places him at the top of her podium. It’s that he taught her her ABC’s, that he showed her how to water the garden they planted together, that he keeps his cool when she continually digs it up.
It’s my fault. For better or worse, in sickness and in health, I married a great dad.
Some mornings when I hear them laughing I wonder, Should I have married someone worse? Forced my child’s hand into loving me more so I could feel better about myself? Hall brings me a cup of coffee in bed, Maeve following closely behind, her face covered in the breakfast he made her. I chose him; I must live with my decision.
My last hope to be number one comes with my very recent job offer, as soon I too will be working during the day. I pray that my Irish exit from my sole employment as a stay-at-home mom will have Maeve looking around and saying to the nanny, “Where’d she go? Life of the party, my mom.”
The evenings, I imagine, will stay the same. Hall and I will give Maeve a bath and get her ready for bed. He’ll read “Goodnight Moon” (“Dada, read”), before turning off the lights and rocking her (“Dada, rock”) as I give her a kiss and sneak out of the room. On the couch, I’ll sigh, loudly, and decommission myself for the day, too tired to mind that I’ve been kicked off love island, and if I’m being honest, grateful for the break, grateful that my child has someone to love so deeply who loves her the same way.
I close my eyes. Hall comes out of the room and Maeve starts screaming. She does this every night. “Mama,” she cries. “Mama, mama.” It’s the only time of day she wants me more. On my bad days I think it’s because it’s dark so she can’t see my stupid face. On my good days, it’s because I know she needs her mom, too.
“She’s all yours,” Hall says, in his own exhaustion.
“Mama!” she says, when I go in. “Mama, rock.” She puts her head on my shoulder and I put my face in her blond, buttery curls (not a metaphor) as I rock her to sleep. I gently place her in her crib and open the door quietly, satisfied to be the one she needed. She’s all mine. My baby. Daddy’s baby. Pepper’s baby.
Molly Devane is a standup comedian turned personal essayist and humor writer. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, Insider and Reductress. She lives in Western North Carolina with her husband, daughter and mini dachshund.
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