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I leave the house at 7 every morning and don't usually get in until 7 at night. He works two minutes from where we live and drops the children off at school and picks them up from the after schoolclub.
He can't understand why I am so tired all the time - "FFS, all you do is sit on a train and then sit at a desk and push a few bits of paper around - what can be so tiring about that?" - and gets cross when I refuse to cook dinner when I get in.
YANBU He should appreciate the fact that commuting is pants I won't work more than 45 mins commute away for this reason and am v supportive of DH and his commute. A little support goes a long way
My dh commutes 2 hours a day - he enjoys it because he gets time on his own & can listen to the radio, music, or audiobooks (when he gets the train rather than driving he gets to read). I would love to have 2 hours a day to myself
my dh commutes for three hours a day and it is tough.
I commuted when we first moved in together so I have been there so can empathize.
I think that what people who don't commute do fail to see is that it really isn't just about sitting on a train. Trains are notoriously iratic so although you may intend to get the 7:00, it might be cancelled and then the 7:15 will be full so you'll have to stand, and then you'll be later for work than you planned and then have to come home later and the train might be cancelled or there might be a signal failure or a fatality or a bridge strike, or the wrong kind of leaves/snow/sun/<<insert weather finominon of your choice>>. And all the while you are paying for this privilage.
DH's commute is 40 mins by bicycle which he enjoys. If he dares moan I point out that I would love to cycle like that cos I love cycling. But I'm with the OP, when I was at uni in LOndon it would often take me 2 hours on the tube to get from Hounslow to Aldgate East and 2 hours back. Exhausting having your nose in someones armpit that long.
YABU You should be far, far more appreciative of everything he's doing to help [sic] you. You obviously need to Work On Your Marriage, and find more Mutual Trust.
I don't think the commute is hard work exactly, sitting on the train reading a book is actually quite relaxing (assuming you get a seat, the train turns up and isn't delayed!). I turn it into me time and indulge in reading which I never have time to do at home.
I think you could make your life easier and buy some healthy ready meals (M&S?) and do a heap of pre-prepared veg and voila, dinner is served. My DH doesn't cook much but can rustle something easy up for a midweek dinner like spaghetti or something. Sounds like time for a chat about the way your marriage works rather than blaming it on the commute. Maybe?
commuting is mainly crap though kbear. I had the smelliest person alive squashed into my back for 45 minutes on Thursday and it was farking hot and stuffy too.
you sound resentful and put upon and irritable MrsS (not unreasonable)....I know you've complained about this before. Is it a situation you are stuck in?
So he doesn't understand that a 12 hour day is tiring? Sounds like an idiot to me.
And all this 'commuting is me time' stuff? WHERE do you people live? Do you travel first class?
When I was in London travelling to work was hot/smelly/knackering and uncomfortable. Now I'm outside, commuting in is even worse because when there are problems, I don't have any alternative routes and if I don't get a seat that's the whole journey buggered (in London any one leg of the trip would be 20 mins max). Even if I do, there's bound to be one of those bloody men who takes up ten times their allocated space...
Public transit sucks… I mean, it’s good because you can get anywhere but it is absolutely draining. When we lived in Gerrard’s Cross, it would take 1 1/2hours to get to school. The situation made worse because King’s Cross Station was still closed after the bombings. But one day, I was walking through Marlybone Station heading up to Chiltern Rail platforms, and the place was packed, really packed, of people shuffling along, and not a single person was speaking. It was eerie. That’s what long commutes do to commuters by the end of the week.
EDAM… are you talking about those guys that sit with their legs spread open, encroaching on your leg. The best line that I use, and I’ve never had a rebuttal (and I think it’s because when I open my mouth, I sound American) “Honey, nobody has balls that big. Close your legs up please.” But you got to look right at them too.
I remember once too, (now that I’m thinking about it) this one guy had all his work stuff spread out all over three seats and not a single person said anything. I walked up and said I would like to sit down please, and he said he was working on something important and said ‘move it or loose it buddy, I’m not standing 40 min because you didn’t do your homework’. He moved it.
And all this 'commuting is me time' stuff? WHERE do you people live? Do you travel first class?
yes! lol lol lol! completely agree. try this test - would you do it for pleasure if you didn't have to? No? then t'aint me time. no more than ironing with the radio on is me time.
I think YABU. You might think you work hard, but your husband looks after the children before and after school is work. Having two to three hours of tired, hungry and hot children can be as bad any London commute.
If both of you are working during the school day then both of you need to do the chores. Its not a matter of who earns the most.
You need to be a bit of an adult and take turns with cooking and house work.
am really really really chuckling at commmutes being enjoyable good lord, yes if in a-c limo, not on hot sweaty train which keeps being cancelled never getting a seat yes DCs are hard work, but so is 7-7 work plus commute i work 2 days with 20mins commute and get home generally 530ish and find it tricky to cook dinner after bath on those nights. usually keep it simple on those nights, or get takeaway, but i think MrsS has it hard. On the days when i am home, i always prepare dinner, it is easier as i am physically in the house your Dh is unreasonable
if you at home during the day, you are physically on site to do the chores work out of the home parents are not there is give and take, yes, but the person at home during the day should end of doing more than the person out of the home
Drive 20 mins. Worry if car in front is slow as it might make me miss train sit in queue to pay at poxy kiosk, hand over extortionate amount for parking find space on top floor of grey stinky multi storey walk 4 mins to station get to platform maybe wait for a train if they've screwed up get on train, first class, which on London Midland means erm fk all. OK, I get a seat, big wupp. No air con, doors that flap in the wind because catches are broken no coffee no loos 40 mins later (if lucky and no long wait in siding for no apparent reason) get to Euston me and 1000 other people all go for same exit queue to get to escalators x 3 to tube stand on platform, let 4 ish trains go by because you cannot humanly get another human on. It's illegal to transport cattle like this but ho hum, London Underground do it Spend 2 stops in extreme heat and claustrophobis, ALWAYS standing. Tube stinks. Face in someone's armpit and that's NOT a partic crowded train change 2 stops later, walk to another line get on another tube, which may or may not stop randomly stop in tunnels and / or sidings get to work, work 8 hours Repeat. Except the journey on the way home is hotter than hell and everyone stinks even more (includnig me no doubt). As a woman said to me on getting off a tube last Friday "Gosh, it's like being boiled alive isn't it?" Yes, it is.
On the way home I might not get a seat, even though I pay £162 a week for a first class ticket. The carriage is crowded, no air con.
There are often delays, sometimes you might not be able to get home at all or until much much later than you attended.
It's shit, utterly shit. You should make him do it, swap him for a week. He'll apologise at the end of it.
Oh sorry, missed walking up 4/5/6 flights of stairs in vile multi storey once I get back to get my car. In winter it's poorly lit and a bit scary. There are no lifts.
applauds WWW with her true portrayal of commuting i commuted for 8 years of my life in London and I hated it. HOT hot tubes winter or summer, smelly rude unhelpful people, fighting to get a seat when you are pregnant
And my dh is grateful that I bring in as much money as I do. Thankfully, we can manage without it once my contract ends in November but he does massively acknowledge my contribution. As I acknowledge his. - I couldn't do the job/commute I do without his doing the childcare etc (he works ft oth too).
sorry if my commute isn't as bad as yours girls but i sat in traffic on the M25 for four hours in total on Thursday and that was far worse then being on the train. And it is me-time if you do something you dno't normally get time to do, for me it's reading. Sorry!
And yes it does get really hot and yes people stink. I just think refusing to cook dinner and blaming the commute on the way your DH is weird.
I do a 90 minute commute, am out at 6.30am and back at 7pm every day and it is gruelling but it sounds like MrsS is feeling a bit crap over all and the work thing is the focus though maybe not the cause?
Just read your OP again. I didn't remember the bit about the FFS all you do is sit on a train and a desk etc. I'd tell him to fuck off anyway just for saying that.
Actually - I do count dh's 1h20 minutes each way commute as "me time", but then he does travel first class (is that an option MrsS - it does make such a difference) and rather than his commute being the hell you all describe, it's a 10 minute walk through leafy village streets to train station, get a seat in a carriage that is practicaly empty for 3/4 of the journey, fall asleep for 45 minutes, wake up, drink smoothie from pile that magically appear in the fridge, eat homemade muffin lovingly made by yours truly, get off train, walk 1 minute to coffee stall, buy vente latte, walk 1.5 minutes further to office.
On the way home he tends to stay awake and read the newspaper, but again, always has a seta, and usually a carriage to himself after the first 30 minutes. So I don't see anything wrong in getting him to take over with kids bath and bed when he walks in (on the 3 week nights he actually comes home)
My DH drives to work, a hellish journey I wouldn't swap with him, to wear safety clothes in high temperatures in a potentially hazardous environment. My job is a breeze compared to his. The bottom line is we both contribute to the family, we don't have a breadwinner, we both earn the bread.
I work 37 hours a week and my husband works full time. I leave early in the morning and pick my son up from after school club. I drive about 20 minutes to work, but that is the job I chose. My husband has 30 minute drive to work, but works longer hours than me. He leaves for work at 9am and gets back at 7pm.
Generally my husband gets my son ready for school and then I pick him up from after school club, make dinner, bath and put him ready for bed. My husband also helps around the house quite a bit.
Rather than thinking about the commute, its fairer to think about the length of day someone has been working. The OP husband is not a stay at home parent. He works full time as well as doing child care. He gets no respite with the kids at school. The length of his day is 7 to 7 as well, or prehaps longer if he has to put kids to bed.
i agree RT, I had answered you thinking that the OP's DH was at home, but he was at work and then home to look after DCs which is hard. Tired DCs, stroppy bedtime routine Difficult time really maybe they need to cut each other some slack, think laterally about ways in which to sort out an evening meal
However my DH commutes 1.5 hours a day each way, thankfully to a job he loves. To this end, I ask nothing of him when he comes in in the evening.
We both work really well together in the morning, but in the evening he takes DS up to bed, reads a story and collapses. That is OK with me, and do you know why, because commuting is fecking hard.
I used to do an 1 1/2 hours on the train and it was very hard. I love that I don't do that anymore (although the money sure was nice). DH still does that commute though and comes home to dinner on the table these days. That said, he enjoys reading and napping on the commute and most days I don't get a minute to myself.
I don't think it's about the commute though - his comment shows that he doesn'tactually value anything you do during your 12 hour day. But I doubt very much that that is true either - it sounds very much like the sort of thing a stressed out person would say if he didn't feel properly appreciated either - do you think you could possibly rise above it, get the kids in bed and sit down and sympathise with each other about how difficult both your lives are on a practical level and any solutions you can come up with?
IMO with 2 WOHM parents (I can still remember those days) a cleaner is essential, as is bulk cooking at the weekend (together, with wine and chat) so you have easy stuff to eat in the week (or buy ready meals). Could you have a regular Friday night takeaway so there is no pressure on anybody to cook at least one night?
I would be extremely irritated with his comments belittling your job and circumstances - but he probably feels exhausted dealing with the the tired / hyped / hungry kids every day straight from his work. he probably (completely unreasonably) sees himself doing 2 jobs - woh and childcare - to your one.
2 full-time WOH jobs in one family seem to undermine anyone's ability to be reasonable. IMO. Does he generally cook - or do you share it, or get ready-meals / takeways?
1) we weren't both doing it, leaving us a minimum of one hour away from the dcs by public transport during the day
2) it was reliable. SE Trains descends into chaos and anarchy at the slightest disruption. Trains are randomly half their advertised length/cancelled/re-routed. Staff are so poorly informed that they come across as surly and defensive because they often know little more than we do.
But I agree the length of the day is a major issue. Mine is normally 10 hours plus by the time I am back with the children
WWW speaketh sense on this one, as ever
We don't file papers or have a cleaner We do eat quick from-scratch meals and argue about chores
And critically, MrsS, we box and cox so we both share the varied thrills of either jackbooting the dcs out the door at 7.50am, tonsils raw and bleeding from barking orders, or picking two crabby little urchins up from school/club and "enjoying" Mister Maker with dd while ds flicks ink over his homework, all the while cooking dinner and wrestling with the world's crappest dishwasher What's my drudgery hell is dh's drudgery hell and vice versa
yes I agree actually. With both of us WOH, without the nanny, we fall apart. She keeps us all together in many ways because although she doesn't clean, the house is pretty organised when we come back (and it wouldn't be if either of us had anything to do with it ).
I think you do need to share out the cooking otherwise you get back every night at 7, spend a bit of time with the kids, then end up cooking for a bit and you hardly have ANY time to yourself before you need to go to bed to be able to get up at 6 and then you feel like you're on a treadmill all the time and that's a shit feeling.
Oh God yes foxy we don't need a cleaner, we need a tidier-upper. Preferably armed with a flamethrower and 0% sentimentality about limbless dollies and mangled Maisy board books
Ah, you see our cleaner tidies too. When she started she left me a stroppy note saying I AM NOT A HOUSEKEEPER but I explained that it was part of the job to tidy and so now she does. It's as important as the cleaning, so we come home and it's like a hotel on the 2 days she comes, bliss.
Also, any chore you can do from work, do it from work in your lunch hour. Eg I email boring people like Anglian Water from work and check our bank statements etc.
Marina, your descriptions of the domestic shift (nearly typed 'shit' there, wouldn't have been far wrong!) make me laugh a lot!
Is this about that other thread about the SAHM complaining that her husband won't admit how hard it is to be a SAHM and all he does all day is push papers around his desk and why won't he admit her life as a sahm is so much harder than that?
Or just ditch evening meals. WE had some periods in our 19 year marriage where that just became easier - husband ate big school lunch, I ate bit lunch in office canteen and then we'd just grab a snack on the hoof each night. People eat huge amounts and get very fat if they aren't careful. We always got the nanny to cook for all 5 children before she left. On the other hand families eating together can be pretty nice if you have a lifestyle which fits with that so policy decisino for each family.
I am lucky enough to work from home WWW but on the days that I have to go into the office I do the evil commute to London. Those stairs in the multistorey are a bastard eh?
Marina, you're spot on - we need a tidier-upper too. I actually sacked one of our cleaners because, among other things, she left all the Stuff in Neatish Piles On Chairs. Which induced more despair than the previous detritus.
Quite seriously, I have recently decided NOT to go full-time, precisely because it would put such a lot of strain on us all domestically with both of us working in an office an hour from home, five days a week. And I kiss the ankles of all the lovely people who do keep this impossible juggle going.
Thank you all for this - I had a bit of a lost weekend involving lots of Pimms and Kir, so have only just seen.
I shit on London Midland . Or I would if someone hadn't done it first. I don't see the commute as me time at all - as WWW said, hot crowded and unreliable. I don't see the point in paying extra for a 1st class ticket as it only looks marginally better to me.
He has just over an hour with the DDs (9 & 7, so not babies and fairly self sufficient) in the morning and between 30 mins and an hour in the evening. I don't think that's excessive or unduly hard work.
He also had four days commuting when he was on a course and came in every night saying "Fuck me, I couldn't do that every day."
Have told him that if he won't agree to a cleaner then he can do it.
Will explore working from home one day when we get the IT upgrade that will make this possible. And the light at the end of the tunnel is GOING OVERSEAS again, but not until end 2009/early 2010.
