My husband and I are of the same age. We were both academic scholars and we both studied engineering degrees at NTU Singapore on a fully funded government scholarship. Since we graduated in 2015, we’ve both held similar jobs and stayed within the same pay range. And since we got married in 2018, we’ve lived our life as equally as possible. He’d do the laundry, taxes and insurance while I handled social gatherings and gifting. He cleaned up the dishes after I was done cooking them. He picked up the slack at home when I had a busy week at work, and vice versa. Because of this, we were able to juggle our full-time jobs along with a pregnancy, new home ownership and renovation during most of 2022.
Then came 4 Sep 2022. Easily the best day of our lives, as we became parents to our darling daughter. But what followed was also probably the most challenging period of our lives. Learning to care for a newborn from scratch was incredibly difficult. I was still in pain from my stitches, and we were both severely sleep deprived from round-the-clock baby duty. We’d hired a helper whom we had to let go because of several lapses of character, which only added to our emotional stress. In parallel, partly due to the worsening economic climate but also because of a rare opportunity, my husband changed jobs and he started working 6 weeks after the baby’s arrival, while I continued to be on…
