Changing roles in marriage

"ething terribly unfeminist and asked my husband what he thought"
Oh, ffs!

so you'd rather spend time with rapists and murderers than with your baby...great mother

Just try to remember those people will hold that view regardless. If you were a paediatric nurse they would say "so you'd rather spend time with other peoples kids than your own?".

ILeaveTheRoomForTwoMinutes

Nah my fault, I would normally use a smilie, I don't know why I didn't.

"so you'd rather spend time with rapists and murderers than with your baby...great mother".

Well you join the ranks of mothers working in criminal justice, medicine, law, policing, mental health services, probation, social work.
Who are trying to make the world better for their children and everyone else's

sorry mycrispbag

I do have a sense of humour honest!

ILeaveTheRoomForTwoMinutes

It was tongue in cheek.

So as well as the unpaid work looking after the baby and the house, you're also working part-time and doing a PhD? I think you need to treat the academic work as a job and be doing that during work hours (even though presumably you wanted the flexibility to be able fit the academic work in around the baby's schedule) - you're both working full-time, irrespective of the income.

There's no point bottling the resentment up once the friend has gone. This needs airing. Best case scenario it's just thoughtlessness and once it's spelt out to him he will see that perhaps the best way to tackle it is to each have a day at the weekend where you are the 'lead parent' and will be assuming main childcare responsibilities, the other is free to do as they please. However, don't underestimate the weekday work as well, you've got a decade of nursery and school runs to negotiate.

Sorry am not illiterate- my phone screen is temperamental!

Oh

You really need to have a talk with him.

Set out plans/expectations. You need to spell out what works for you as couple - a baby is a major adjustment fir everyone.

It's annoying that you even have to point this out to him but mZny if us will have even there.

I have a few male colleagues now who have gone part time/compressed hours and share childcare equally with their partners. This is such a great step forward as expectations are better balanced.

Talk to him, stAte clearly your concerns and work it out together.

Rant away

What's he doing outside? is there room in the garden for you to take baby out too, sit and have a coffee in the sun, engage in their conversations?

The baby stage is the toughest, or at least in my experience, and especially if you are breastfeeding. It's all well to say that the view of mothers taking on childcare is just a social construction but from a biological point of view it's how we are programmed. Safe alternatives to our own breast milk are a very recent development in the broader arc of our growth as a species.

It's not long ago the woman HAD to be home with the kids because she was the only one who could sustain a child. So it's not just a product of patriarchy, that's part of it, but it's also a biological imperative.

It means that it takes work and effort to break from both our biological and societal rules.

For me I EBF and they fed to sleep so until I stopped that I was the main parent. It was my choice. It was hard. But DH helped by stepping up around the house and his emotional support is great. He's never given me anything re his social life as a fait accompli, and even when I know I'm unreasonably grumpy about something he takes time to talk about why I feel it properly.

Once I nightweaned both the kids, at about 1 each, care became shared more equally. I picked up my hobbies etc again.

I wanted to be the person who fed my kids, I wanted to BF. That meant I chose to be tied to them. Talk to your H about how he's treating you by just making the assumption that you'll be there. Ask him how he'd respond to you saying 'I'm off out for the day you know where everything is' without a moments concern for whether he feels happy and comfortable to be in sole care.

It's not an easy balance but it can work and you can find it. If you had a strong equal partnership before my bet is you can find it again.

I did something terribly unfeminist and asked my husband what he thought

Whats unfeminist about that?

I think the thing that would have set me off on the path of resentment, is the fact that his arrangements were made with no discussion with you.

It doesn't matter what/how much he does, its the fact you are no longer a partnership. If you were you would have already been part and parcel in the decision making on what you were both doing on that particular day. This is the crux for me.
Yes you need to sit down and talk to each other.

As for my own experience, dh and me decided long before DC, if I had pursued my then chosen career, it was agreed he would be the main carer, possibly haulting his career to a stand still, or changing his job. Our decision was purely financial. Who would bring in the most money for the family and had most prospect for furthering in their career.

But in the end dh career was the better. So I became main carer. During the week I did all night time wakes, but dh would do whatever was necessary when he got in from work, if one day he came in and I was exhausted, he's take over DC and house, I'd go have a rest, he's call me when tea was ready, what pissed me off was that in couple of hours of being home he could entertain DC make tea, put washing on, and tidy the downstairs. Something I hadn't managed all day! He can multitask but I'm fucking useless at multitasking.

BTW I'm not holding him up as some kind of hero and what a marvelous relationship we have. Because actually we all have our faults, and I could just as easily tell you his.

But what we did do and still do is talk to each other a lot.

Fair enough. Knocking down walls isn't baby friendly!

Talking about your plans for the weekend in advance is probably the way forwards. You go first though initially so he learns and remembers that he can't just organise himself anymore. He has to remember he has a DC to consider.

I do understand what you mean though. Last night for example I said to DH it was a bit addling to not only sort out my own clothes but what the children needed for summer. He said he'd go shopping for them and he would, but 1) he wouldn't think to do it himself without me thinking of it and asking him to do it first and then 2) he'd want a shopping list. I'd still have to do all the thinking!!

He will generally happily do anything for the children and me and the house but more than often I'm doing the thinking, planning and organising. It's sometimes knackering!

It took us a long time to get to a working partnership. In fact it took three children!

I was a SAHM for 5 years, p/t worker for 2 and now f/t for 2 years. I am
Exhausted but happier.

The key is to
Get your partner to
Understand the baby is his too

So
If he is playing golf and had just assumed you will look after baby then you just need to
Ask what he is doing with the baby at that time as you have made other arrangements.

You need to talk expectations. Could he compress his hours/work
Part time? So that you could share childcare equally?

It's really worth thinking about you tiles and what each other want.

I think the reason you are feeling frustrated is in anticipation of him not recognising the inequality of the situation you're now in. You described a reasonably equal marriage prior to the baby (although I note that his chores were the more obviously rewarding ones of making stuff, rather than the drudgery of repeated, invisible tasks like cleaning). From your first post I thought 'well this sounds like it can be sorted out just by sitting down and having a proper chat about things'. Then you posted I have worked bloody hard at getting him to do his fair share in all other aspects of our lives together. This will be such a fight and I thought 'ah. That's the problem.'

You're starting from a very difficult place if he doesn't already accept that roles within the house should be equal (and that all work is valuable?). However, there is nothing stopping you from having a conversation that says:

• would you consider going part-time as well to reduce our childcare costs and mean you have sole caring responsibility for our dd? [Frankly as the main earner it would have made more financial sense for him to have gone part-time and not you, why was that never discussed?]
• I ask because you seem to have fallen into a pattern of assuming that is my job unless I specifically request 'time off'.
• this is not the case. We are equally her parents and we need to work out a routine that gives us both equal downtime, and where neither party is presented with a fait accompli by the other.

If he actually says you're nagging, I'd respond with 'nagging is a word used by sexists to shut down a discussion they don't want to participate in. I hope you have more respect for me than that'.

But the first step is to initiate the discussion and see how difficult a task this is (or isn't) going to be.

I think it's very difficult to avoid becoming the default baby-carer for a while, especially if you EBF. You're on maternity leave, you're with the baby all the time, you're more tuned in, you develop expertise (in such thrilling questions as how to stop the screaming and when not to make sure they nap!) You may well criticise your partner for not doing it your way (I tried really really hard not to and I know I still did on occasion- out of pure exasperation that he was doing something I knew/had told him would be a disaster). He resents being told he's incompetent and withdraws. It's a bloody nightmare.

What made the difference for us was when I finished maternity leave. We both went back four days so we each have two days a week at home with DS (DH works Saturdays) and we became equal parents. DH has developed as much expertise as me and has been forced to remember changing bags/stick with nap routines etc because he is also the one who gets it in the neck if DS has a nap at 5! He is now, incidentally, thoroughly infuriated by societal assumptions that men are crap at childcare and regularly rages at me about it: the other day he met up with a (female) friend for lunch who congratulated him on arriving complete with a bib and a colouring book for DS. He was fuming at the sexism!

I'm currently 31 weeks with DC2 so it'll be interesting to see how things are this time around.

I did something terribly unfeminist and asked my husband what he thought.

I should add that now my husband does the majority of housework and childcare and I am more career focused. We agree on reflection that we should have divided the work like this from the start (although we couldn't have done really but that's another story).

He gave very similar advice to the advice AStreetcar gave. Tell him what you are planning and see his reaction, then use that as a starting point.

Your DD is not crawling is she yet. I assume not. So she could be sat in a corner of a room with her toys and be quite happy.

Is there any reason your DH can't look after her and do the DIY? Clearly it depends what it is but it isn't a given that DIY can't be combined with childcare.