DH pressuring me to find a job

I was sorta on your side until your comments about wearing a uniform and snubbing retail and hospitality workers… you sound like a snob

Sorry about your crap upbringing and not as an adult being able to get a better life and surround yourself with normal people with healthy relationships.

You should do something about it. You really should.

He’s a lawyer - who has said he is not willing to change the current set up. (Where he does naff all at home).

So OP then works and does everything at home and all the school drop offs and pick ups. And all the illnesses and school holidays. Wonder what job is going to work in that situation?

Far better that she gets a decent job/retrains and demands he pulls his weight at home. However, I would bet it would become a ‘my job is more important than yours’ situation.

The thing is that never having to think about who will have the kids does make things so much easier for the man with a SAHM at home.

I thought much like you. Then two things happened:

1. I was stupid enough to have a relationship with a divorced man whose exW was a SAHM. What I came to learn is that he had never experienced having to take an unexpected day off work, or say ‘sorry I have to go now’ and cut short a meeting. He’d never had to say no to (or give any real thought to) going out for after work stuff or saying yes to business travel. And so on, and so on. He’d basically swanned through being a parent without really giving it any thought in relation to work. What is more, I discovered that he in no way understood (or understands) any of this. He just fees utterly entitled to having his work treated as sacred.
2. Seeing a male colleague at work whose wife finally returned to work after about 15-20 years (his entire career) as a SAHM. Suddenly his need to pick up his children etc became everyone’s problem. An entire team full of women with children who’d never been SAHMs ended up furious with this man who simply couldn’t bring himself to believe that he wasn’t facing the most unique and most challenging circumstances ever because he needed to cook dinner on a Thursday night.

So, while having a SAHM isn’t the sole or determining factor in a man’s career trajectory, having one does make his life so much easier in many ways. And often he is completely oblivious to this.

OK, take it or leave it. I am not from UK and I am older than you so different times. I met my husband working for a major multinational. May sound awful, but I was a woman who everybody wanted - by the age of 27 head of a function, international travel, generous remuneration etc. Fast forward 3 years - two lovely kids, but no help from anyone, one born in California where I arrived heavily pregnant after UK home office f*d up my visa extention and lost my passport. No rights to work in US for me. Still phone is ringing, "if only you could go and do two years assigment in country X". At the same time my other half is struggling to keep his job (linked to a visa and permission to stay in US), conversations at night "please don't take more that 30 dollars from the cash machine". Kids are so yound and full of allegies - I stay at home, cook from scratch, clean, do my very best. Back to rural Britain after 5 years of staying at home, kids 4 and 5, youngest is at reception. Ok, sod it, I am not a high flyer anymore, who cares, I love my husband and have two lovely kids. I get a job and a nanny. NO help at home. I am on my own, 8 to 8 corporate life, no luxury of WFH. Crawling home to kiss kids good night, put things away, all paperwork is mine, cooking dinner is mine ("I am so good at it"), sitting in front of tv to be a good wife and social, at 11pm my dearest goes to bed I am marching to the kitcnen to cook for next day - kids need tea before swimming, tennis whatever. Bed 1am alarm 6am.
Two years forward I am a nervous wreck. Children can't add up within ten, never mind substract from twenty (I've sent them to school with reading, writing and maths skills). Love of my love on his third job, conversations are still about "don't take more than 40 quid from the cash machine". M&S knickers are a luxury.
My children are grown up now. I stopped working after those two years for good. Life was tough, but we did manage. My children had a good education and went to top universities. Their father rose to the challenge to provide and made himself a good career. I am thinking of that other woman I once was as a complete stranger. I clean church, cook lent soups, edit village magazine and submit returns to HMRC for hundreds of thousands my husband would never earned without me.

What a lot of monologuing nonsense,straight out daytime tv playbook. The Yea fuck him take him to cleaners sister. Meanwhile in real life the op is out of touch,entitled and too indignant to get a job

a minority of women lead a cushioned perfumed solvent life after divorce, the majority are divorced and then have to earn to pay their way. I’m not getting MC huge salary vibes from the op. So not sure she fall into the rich ex wife club. If she remain in London she’ll need to pay her way or find another man who’ll support a housewife without complaint

👏👏👏👏👏
everyone i know
without exception

But who is looking after the kids when she does all of this training?

What do you actually want op?

I don't think there's anything particularly suspicious about the financial side.

I suspect the DH is well paid but not mega bucks, say more like £100-150k. If you don't get inheritance or parental support with a house deposit and you are supporting a wife and multiple children, it takes a while to save up for a deposit and you can live comfortably but not with loads of luxuries with a London mortgage to pay.

Jeez!! Do you know how hard it is to get a part-time job after being a SAHM for years, that fits around with school drop off and collection times, plus your husband's full on full-time career? If it's so easy, please tell me where to get one!

I gave up a high earning career when we started a family, and have struggled to get a part-time job after a career break, that also fits around my husband's work, sure I've done a couple of minimum wage jobs, but shift-work, coupled with working in low paying industries that treat their staff like shit, when you're a highly educated individual capable of highly skilled jobs (but can't get one because you can't work full-time), is bloody soul-destroying, not to mention not a valuable use of your time for the poor remuneration.

She's not an "unproductive consumer", she's raising their children and keeping their home, which is something he is unprepared to take any part in even if she does manage to get a suitable job.

No, of course childcare is a shared responsibility. But ultimately, if it costs the household more to have the lower-earning parent at work than to have them at home, many families may feel that there is little choice but to go down the SAHP route.

I don't think it's right, but it's the economic reality for many and I don't think it's helpful to deny that.

*Medschoolmum · Today 20:13

No, I never understand this insistence on the idea that the SAHP has somehow been instrumental in facilitating the WOHP's progression at work. If that were the case, you would expect all senior professionals to have SAHPs in the background, but that certainly isn't the case in my experience.

More often, in the families that I know, it is either the case that one spouse's earning potential has been high enough to facilitate the other spouse being able to make a choice about whether to maintain their career or SAH, or that the other spouse's earning potential is too low to make paying for childcare cost-effective.*

This. Dh and i are both senior/successful professionals. We don't have a nanny.

We have a weekly cleaner, we use a childminder for wraparound care, we have to pretty organised about who's doing what but overall it works.

Did you plan to never work again?

I'm sorry but that really isn't a reasonable expectation.

Exactly.

DH and I are both senior professionals and obviously don’t have a SAHP at home.

Hallelujah. After reading pages and pages of this thread completely aghast at the ‘get a job’ brigade. Finally a post that gets it.

He won’t change a thing! He won’t help out at home. He likes his life as it is - he’s not suddenly start helping out at home and being around at bedtime is he? So OP will be doing everything and working. Whilst he carries on as before. Yet it’s oh poor DH. And lazy OP. He loved the arrangement whilst it worked for him
didn’t he?

I’d also wonder where the hell all the money is going if he is a lawyer in London and you live in a flat with no childcare costs or debts yet can’t afford a holiday.

That is almost always the preferred narrative.

It isn't often the truth.

It only works if it's the woman's responsibility to pay for childcare out of her salary - when in fact it should come out of both in the ratio that they earn at.

Don't forget that many women's jobs are historically underpaid because... women's jobs

I also was at home 9 years. I started volunteering first to build confidence and get a relevant reference. You can also pretty much pick your hours. Very, very worth while. I did this a year while applying for jobs. Have now had a part time role since my youngest started school and am looking to increase those hours now he is off to high school. You will enjoy it. It'll be stressful at first but it's great to have something that's yours.

and it isn’t always the rushed around nightmare where working parents can’t even manage to give their kids a ‘decent’ breakfast or packed lunch either (as a pp seemed to think) which always seems to be made out on threads like this.

No, I never understand this insistence on the idea that the SAHP has somehow been instrumental in facilitating the WOHP's progression at work. If that were the case, you would expect all senior professionals to have SAHPs in the background, but that certainly isn't the case in my experience.

More often, in the families that I know, it is either the case that one spouse's earning potential has been high enough to facilitate the other spouse being able to make a choice about whether to maintain their career or SAH, or that the other spouse's earning potential is too low to make paying for childcare cost-effective.

Given he currently works long hours and just occasionally dips in for the picturesque bits of family life, I suspect things would look very different had the OP not been a SAHM.

Your response is very ‘well I do it this way and it’s fine. So it must be the same for everyone.’ But clearly this situation is quite different to yours.

Lots of parents do really have to juggle work commitments and childcare. It’s not always nice and easy bar ‘the odd disorganised day’ for everyone.

It wouldn't have fallen apart but it would have been dramatically curtailed.

He's stressed now - can you imagine how much more stressful he would have found it to actually have taken a truly fair share of all the shitwork that needs to be done to run a family with small children in childcare and two full time workers?

In the vast majority of families I know with this set up, the wife still does the vast majority of said shitwork, including almost all the mental load and almost all the emotional work involved in helping kids survive such a set up.

I don’t rush around at all minus the occasional unorganised day. We do juggle it between us which seems much more ideal to me that one parent spending so little time with their kids.

I’m just not convinced that OP’s DH’s career would’ve fallen apart without her as a SAHM.

I haven’t misunderstood her OP, I am stating that her husband is ridiculous in thinking her going back to work will have no impact on him. What a selfish pov he has. I also find it ridiculous that he doesn’t want her to retrain, he sounds controlling and unkind. Further, I would hope she will look beyond retail and service jobs. Why should she settle rather than aim a bit higher?

Not this man though.

This family has had a SAHP which has allowed him to opt out of family responsibilities and be treated like the second coming of Christ is he turns up in time to do the occasional bath time.

Families where both parents work rush around doing childcare drop offs and pick ups and juggle it all between them. This man wants full SAHM service with his wife also bringing in a wage.

Why shouldn’t her DH (and the family!) pay towards her retraining @MarygoldRose?

He has massively benefitted from 9 years of having her at home looking after the house and kids. Now, he should be thinking about how he can facilitate her to build a career.

They are married. It’s supposed to be a partnership. But so many posters on this thread seem to think she’s just some kind of parasite.

She didn’t help herself with the uniform comment but people just seem to have decided that is a good reason to be nasty and pretend she hasn’t been supporting his career for the best part of a decade.