DH and time alone

[marmiteontoastt]

NC for this. We have two DDs (4 and 1). DH always finds time for himself and I’m always left to do the housework. He does do some and also cooks about 50% of our dinners but im not happy with how things are going in our home.

Our weekends often look like this: we go out in the morning (to a park or for a shop etc). We come home for lunch. He cooks for himself and DD4 and leaves me to cook for myself and DD1 (she has food allergies so eats separately, but could easily have peanut butter on toast, etc.) He then tells DD4 to play by herself in her room and goes to his home office to play video games. I’m left to clean up and get DD1 sorted for a nap. If she doesn’t sleep or sleeps for a short while (sometimes only 45 min) I’m responsible for getting her out of bed and playing with her whilst he’s still sat in his office. I love both of my DDs but I also would like time to myself occasionally.

Also, in between getting ready in the morning, he has a shower and takes time to scroll on his phone whilst I am loading the dishwasher and the laundry and setting the pot going for dinner.

I’m juggling all of the balls and I’m exhausted. I’ve pointed out that I don’t get time to myself and he says I do when the children are in nursery, only that’s when I’m at work! (I am PT he is FT). I occasionally have the odd day off when they’re both cared for by someone else but that time is usually consumed by mountains of laundry and other housework.

How do you work this out? He doesn’t seem to think anything is wrong. Im knackered. Is this something a counsellor can help with? We don’t have a cleaner and don’t have the money for one unfortunately. I recognise that might help a bit but it also seems to be more of an underlying issue of DH being selfish. Can we recover from this? I’ve come up to our bedroom to lie down and am frankly fuming.

Truthfully, I found I was banging my head against the wall with DH initially with this type of discussions a few years ago. It didn't work to continuously say "I do more than you" and if you're planning on being together forever your life with ebb and flow in terms of the division of labour for running the house/family.

So I tried a different approach. We sat down and agreed some principles we could get behind. These were:

• we are both entitled to time alone
• we are both entitled to time to exercise
• we are both entitled to sometimes ask for a full nights sleep (with very young kids who were waking a lot!)
• our whole family deserves to live in a clean and tidy home and we think it should be of an agreed standard before we leave for work and before we go to bed.
• we are a team, and need to go out of our way to prioritise the above for each other and pull our weight.

We then looked at our current work/childcare arrangements and worked out how we could deliver on the principles. Sometimes things feel out of whack, usually due to a schedule change with work or for the kids, and we tweak as needed. It's never "I'm going more than you", it's "I'm not getting my exercise time because of the new pick up time for Brownies" or whatever, and it seems to be a less confrontational way to do it,

The fair play card deck is more user friendly than the book, fwiw. It gives you physical cards you can deal out. The book is 300 pages to cover what could have been done in 50, but is useful for principles of how to divide tasks efficiently.

@ohpumpkinseeds I borrowed this script (and mindset) and had a lovely chat with DH. Feeling much better and more balance. Thanks very much to all for the helpful comments xx

Oh good, that's so great to hear