My partner has started sleeping in the garden – and it’s made our relationship even stronger
When Chloe Hamilton’s partner admitted he was struggling to find time for himself after the arrival of their newborn, the two decided it would be best if he left their home to spend his evenings outdoors – and it did wonders for his mental health...
At first, when my partner decided to sleep outside, I thought he was leaving me by stealth.
He started in the garden, you see, camped out in his one-man tent underneath the stars. But, the next night, he moved to a park opposite our house – albeit still, he claimed, within shouting distance of our home. Was this a covert operation to move out of the house we share with our spaniel, toddler, and newborn baby?
Yes, that’s right: we have a newborn. An eight-week-old, to be exact. Some readers may be confused as to why I was happy for my partner and co-parent to sleep outside, while I dealt with nappies and night-time wake ups inside the house we share. It’s a fair question.
Two weeks ago, while driving our boys to swimming, my partner – a man who is refreshingly emotionally literate – told me he was “right on the edge of coping”. He confided that, while my job with our newborn was dully relentless with scant opportunity for respite, his work tending to the needs of our gorgeous but rambunctious toddler was proving to be its own challenge.
Mentally, he felt unable to switch off. While I could chat to friends on WhatsApp while our baby napped, or scroll Instagram while breastfeeding, he was stuck in a never-ending cycle of playing trains, screen time negotiations, and asking our two-and-a-half-year old if he needed a wee. Any time he didn’t spend toddler-wrangling, he was at work.
It’s hard for a dad to admit he’s finding things difficult. My partner later revealed that he hid his struggles from me because he didn’t want to diminish the very real fatigue I was experiencing as I battled through night feeds.
He felt he couldn’t compete – that his experience was in some way less valid because he was Daddy, not Mummy. Besides, he didn’t want to be that dad, forever complaining to his exhausted other half. But as tempting as it can be to play tiredness tennis, embarking on passive aggressive rallies that can go on for hours, neither parent has a monopoly on exhaustion.
What’s more, while I have been asked by midwives, health visitors, and my GP how I am feeling post-birth, no one has checked in on my partner. This, to me, seems to be a real gap in postpartum care, and plays into the outdated narrative that men don’t – or shouldn’t – share their feelings. I’m glad he shared his with me.
Sleeping outside was his idea, inspired by a book he’d read by author and adventurer Alastair Humphreys. In the book, The Doorstep Mile, Humphreys – who went from a round-the-world adventurer to a father of two – talks about “micro-adventures”: small, adventurous things that you can fit into the margins of your life. A margin could be a lunch break or a commute – a small slice of free time. Bedtime, my partner concluded, was a margin: everyone else was asleep, after all.
He tells me now, after a few nights outside, that half the joy is in the anticipation of the night. The big build-up. He enjoys setting up the tent, making a flask of tea for the morning, and settling down with a head torch and a book.
He also says he feels able to fully relax, knowing he is within striking distance should he be needed. Any creeping guilt that he isn’t around for us is assuaged by the fact that he, well, is – just in a sleeping bag in a tent on the lawn, rather than next to us in bed. Each morning, he watches the sunrise before coming inside and making me a cup of tea, a spring in his step.
Of course, finding the margins of your life and filling them with whatever makes you happy – garden camping, running, reading, podcasts – isn’t a substitute for proper mental health support, something I believe all dads should be offered as standard in the weeks and months after birth. But I do think it’s a helpful approach for parents – especially new ones.
It’s remarkable how impactful using these small slices of time in an intentional way can be on the rest of your day. My partner is a testament to that: he is lighter and brighter since digging out his tent and, consequently, so am I. Often, he doesn’t even need to sleep in the garden to feel better – just knowing it’s an option is enough.
Every parent – mum or dad – needs to refill their cup sometimes; but we need to be more aware that dads, for a variety of reasons, may find it harder to admit they’re running on empty. I hope that in time my partner will feel able to do things not just in the margins of his life but – occasionally, with planning – on its blank pages, too.
Big, glorious, scribbly adventures, guilt-free. Certainly, he has my support in this – and I know, when it’s time, he will afford me the same privilege. Until then, we have the margins and the garden. In fact, he’s setting up his tent as we speak.