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We British are polite, which is not the same as being nice. We may be the ones to apologize if someone stands on our collective foot, but don’t be fooled into believing the apology doesn’t contain disdain at its core. (This chart on what we British say versus what we mean is scarily accurate.)

We say please and thank you — often, and normally within the same sentence:

“Would you like some tea?”
“Yes please, thank you.”

Compared to the more efficient American:

“Tea?”
“Sure.”

And that’s if you’re lucky. Thirteen years together and my husband still hasn’t grasped the emphatic rudeness of making oneself tea without offering it to everybody in the room (this makes for lengthy tea breaks in open-plan offices). Although I think my family has finally stopped waiting for his casual “sure” to take heed of the silent pause which follows and magically morph itself into “please, thank you.”

All this is to say that, for me, please and thank you act as punctuation to my speech and do not always even mean please or thank you so much as just being the thing you say as a normal respectable (British) human being. So it was natural for me to ask my husband to please change our son’s diaper. Or to please watch him while I nip to the loo. Or thank you for getting up with him this morning so I could sleep in (after being up with him on my own all night).

But in those early weeks and months it’s so easy to start keeping score. To feel hard done by. To start to weigh a week of sleepless nights against a week of work in an office. Or a day of repetition, screams, and diaper changes against the coming home from work to a house in chaos and a wife near despair. So I began to notice that I was the only one saying please, and the only one saying thank you.

“Why do I feel like you’re doing me a favor whenever you’re with him? He’s your son, too.”

My husband looked at me blankly. “Huh?”

“Why do I feel the need to thank you every time you do anything with the baby?”

He shrugged and went back to blowing raspberries at our son. And I realized that this was all on me. I was the one casting him as the babysitter and me as the primary parent. I was the one feeling guilty for taking a shower or not handling the most recent diaper blowout. He was just getting on with being a dad, not noticing my pleases and thank yous, because they were just a part of how I speak. And he wasn’t caring if I didn’t say them, either. I realized that if I wasn’t careful, I’d establish a pattern, a mold, for how we parented, and resentment would start growing bitter roots.

So I resolved to stop saying please, to stop saying thank you for all the times my husband simply fulfills his role as a dad and to start simply assuming it’s something he should be doing — and that he’s happy and willing to do it. I stopped being polite to my husband.

I daresay he hasn’t noticed.