to wonder why my DH can't/won't do the washing up?

[IceBeing]

I work full time but he always assumes it is my job...admittedly it was my job when DD was tiny and it took hours to settle her to sleep. But now it takes 5 mins....

I have been ill for the last four days and didn't make it into work Mon-Wed but somehow it would seem I am still expected to be the one doing the washing up. I haven't been down stairs all day and just made a raid on the fridge for milk in an attempt to stem the nausea and discovered that the reason he took DD out for dinner wasn't so much that he wanted to treat her and give me space, as that every single item of cutlery, crockery etc is piled up dirty all over the kitchen.

So AIBU to think that when I get well enough to go to work as well as tackling my work backlog I really shouldn't also have to tackle the washing up mountain?

Just read the milk update. For crying out loud. And the missing Movicol packet might be in his trouser pocket? Whoever said mucky student yes that sounds apt.

(Btw you mentioned DD has chronic constipation issues. I know that Movicol is mild and safe to take over a long period of time and that constipation isn't necessarily caused by lack of fibre in diet but have read that a probiotic yoghurt drink eg Actimel at breakfast could help. I am not medical so don't know if probiotic drinks are suitable for DCs your DD's age but just a suggestion).

Nodding and agreeing yet changing nothing must be something he's found works but you deserve better!

When DD starts pre-school DH will have more time to tackle housework. Unless by then you and he have reviewed arrangements. Meanwhile I'd be surprised if he limits his programming to the evenings when you are home.

Can I just ask something. Does your dd have any additional needs?

It struck me that there are some unusual issues, for a NT 3 yo, being cited here as reasons why he cannot do things:

• It is likely that she might wake at night. He must sit where he can hear her at all times, rather than let her get out of bed and shout.

• looking after her precludes doing housework.

(Most 2.5yo I know, as that's dd and her friends' age, love 'helping' with washing up, cooking, cleaning floors, changing sheets, loading, unloading and hanging laundry etc. because it's something I and DP do, so must be intrinsically interesting and, she can do little things, like scoop the powder into the machine while counting, that do almost help. Maybe it all changes when they turn 3 but that's not the impression given here).

• she decided she didn't want to go to nursery one day, so didn't go. He didn't just get on with it, using tactics, persuasion and distraction (as most people would and as he'd have had to if he was going to work).

This would all make more sense if she had needs which made looking after her much more challenging than with most 3 yos.

Otherwise, I'm afraid it sounds as though he's being quite a lazy and indulgent parent. Has he slipped into that 'minimal adequate' parenting role because his SAHD role seen as a back up plan, a 'best I can do so we can get by' plan, filling some gap, for which everyone is pathetically grateful, so he sees himself as 'helping out' not as being a SAHP in any active way?

You will have good reasons why you want your dd looked after at home and we don't know much about your situation really but personally, were I in this situation (as we understand it) I'd probably consider paid care while he works, preferable for all concerned.

I've seen many a thread where the man is told he should consider his SAH wife there to look after the children only and should he want a housekeeper to hire one...... Just saying.

You do say he does very little around the house in general, I wouldn't be happy with that. DP and I both have our jobs. He is dishes/bins, I'm everything else... There is some fluidity to it though, if the dishes need doing and he's studying/on a late shift I'll do them, he's been known to put done washing on too... He's never touched the toilet/bathroom though, does any guy so that?

I think it's easier to separate jobs then everyone knows where they stand. All bets are off when you're ill though, he should step up and do any necessary chores.

Mine does, he's not keen on it but then he knows I'm not either, if it needs doing whoever notices it just does it.

He doesn't really do washing but while we don't have a dryer well take it to the laundrette to dry if the weather is crap.

I suppose the one thing that he sometimes leaves that really does annoy me is baking trays, he puts them in to soak and sometimes forgets about them

Sandpit 5

Sorry Ice I am LOLing at your terse reports of OH's washing-up idiosyncrasies, he does what?! Every item under the tap?! Hope your water's not metered. I bet he says using a bowl of hot water means the 2nd & subsequent items get washed in 'dirty' water. If so, that's a weirdly anal outlook in someone who can leave festering cups of milk around the house.

Fact is, the way men's minds work re housework (or most things really) would be hilarious if it didn't cause so much grief. Not excluding myself, I know I'm still a work in progress. I think many of us persistently make a sort of category mistake about chores. Paradoxically, rather than relegating them to a lower status, we see them on the same plane as higher-order activities like job, art, sex, football, programming. Primarily because they compete for time & attention. So we get furious and ruthless; the washing-up is Strangling My Life, and you, woman, are a Heartless Harpy for insisting I prioritise it.

Whereas chores really ARE lower-order, which perhaps explains why, in the 3 minutes while the microwave's running, most women are chucking the cups in the dishwasher and most men are fiercely & nobly resisting the outrageous, mute demand of the cups.

Not unlike the way this one's having more fun philosophising about the washing-up on MN instead of doing it.

Hah now everyone knows I have 5 sandpits

I assume the poster who said this is abuse was joking??

fifi my DH cleans the toilet Hes 64 and has disabilities. So there is your answer to "does any man do that"

fifi treating someone with contempt IS abuse.

fifi I have to say I am far more of your point of view than anything that goes within a mile of abuse.

My DD is NT, although she has always had sensory overload issues that make crowded places a problem...and may be the issue at nursery.

So he did do it all this morning....just in case anyone was wondering. No complaints or requests for medals or anything!

Oh that's progress. Hope you're feeling better and his toothache vanished.

Of course blokes clean loos. I've lived with three (at different times) and although all annoying in their own special ways, they all did their fair share of cooking/cleaning/housework. What with being fully functioning human beings and all.

He then watched an entire episode of some spy drama that apparently made him so upset that he just couldn't face anything else and has now gone to bed.

What a wanker delicate flower he is.

Oh, well progress!

Interesting point oneeyedbloke, I have found it interesting that, whereas I'm always desperate to fit as many necessary tasks as possible into 'with child time', so as to save as much precious, free, 'without child time' for things that really require my undivided attention, DP has seen most tasks as needing to be done in his 'without child time', thus getting tetchy about its limits and his 'need' for more (from me of course) to do x,y,z.

It was quite a revelation when I pointed out to him that, unless he was making soufflé, cooking could be done in a stop, start way that accommodates baby / child care. Similarly many other tasks.

That's not about so-called multi-tasking, as I understand it anyway, it is about recognising that tasks can be broken down and done in small chunks in a discontinuous way, they do not all require a two hour chunk of dedictated, uninterrupted 'me' time.

Far as I can tell one-eyed bloke doesn't like housework because he doesn't like doing it and it takes up time which he'd rather devote to other things

Funnily enough I feel exactly the same about these 'lower order' tasks

Sounds like some sort of cop out men are from mars bullshit 'explanation' to me

Well, Suzanne, it's true I don't like it when housework seems to expand to fit whatever time is available, I don't like the feeling that, no matter what I do, there'll always be more to do, and no way I'll ever be justified in prioritising anything else, ie stuff I'd rather do. Yes, then I feel trapped and resentful but who am I going to take that resentment out on? My OH? - totally unfair; we both went into marriage, a job each & 3 kids with our eyes wide open, no-one stuck a gun in my back.

Have I ever resented her anyway? God yes, but my OH wasn't having that, I had to change my ways. It's so unfair, but it seems that it's overwhelmingly women who must educate men in the art of living together. I believe in equality but it's taken me a bloody long time to match my actions to my fine words and, like I said, I'm still learning.

So I want to know why I'm like I am, why so many men can talk equality talk but not pull their fingers out. One of the things my OH says to me a lot is, it's not the absolute balance of work that concerns her so much as feeling we're on the same team. And I've wasted a lot of time and ill-feeling misunderstanding that, refusing to accept it, interpreting it, feeling yet more resentment because I think I've 'pulled my weight' yet she's still pissed off with me. Why? What does she WANT for God's sake?

Well, what she said: be on the team. She's bored by my personal struggle of chores vs ambitions and all the fallout of guilt and resentment I caused. Engage brain with the how and when; don't ask why, that's a stupid question. She wants a 'joint account' of housework. Above all, plan as well as do; shoulder the thinking about, the decision-making, not just the labour.

Which is why I'm on this thread; here's a bloke who seems to resent a chore, who doesn't seem to realise that, because he refuses to wash up, it doesn't matter a jot what he thinks about equality, what he reckons is a fair division of labour with his OH, because his actions are speaking far louder and they're saying, 'You do it, wife, because I haven't. Washing up is your work, today and every day I come up with a reason why I shouldn't/can't do it. I, man, get a choice; you, woman, do not.

I hope some of these ramblings help Ice to understand her OH's primitive attitude to a crashingly necessary household task. I don't think I'm copping out, I'm trying to ditch my precious preconceptions about housework, be more like Lottie & get on with it instead of angsting about it.

So are you saying that you intellectually accept the validity of the argument for an equitable division of domestic labour.
But when it comes to the crunch you still have some sort of gut feeling that these menial tasks ought not to be your problem.

Or is it that you resent being coerced into meeting the standards set by your partner.
Would you happily have a household which is less clean, more disorganized?

He is lazy and selfish.

Looking after one 3yr old child is not that difficult (assuming no significant SN). It sounds as if she still has a nap too.

It is not difficult to keep the house tidy, wash up, prepare simple meals for everyone, etc. He just can't be bothered.

There is no need for you to be 'pathetically grateful' to him for being a SAHP. Is he pathetically grateful to you for supporting him financially?

Suzannewithaplan, I plead guilty to all 3 main charges. I definitely accept the intellectual argument for equality. And I don't think housework is menial, if by that you mean, do I think it's beneath me. But I have certainly had that gut feeling that it shouldn't be my problem; I've 'found myself having it'.

I've made heavy weather of equality, spent years talking the talk but failing to walk the walk. I still have problems with this, I don't think they're 100% down to me, but it's a live issue. I think about it a lot - my OH would say way too much - and these trains of thought have sometimes led me to the uncomfortable fact that my actions, as distinct from my supposed egalitarian beliefs, express the view that I think it's someone else's job. Once all my evasions and justifications are stripped away, the very act of not joining in says it all.

I hope I'm well past my worst; I'm quite ashamed because my parents didn't bring me up to be lazy or inconsiderate. And there have been periods when I've flung myself into housework in a furious attempt to show I'm pulling my weight, but really this was a form of sulking. So yes, guilty of resentment. And, like loads of men, taking far too long to bloody grow up.

We constantly struggle to keep our house reasonably clean and tidy. 3 boys make a lot of mess and noise, and the question of how we bring them up, what standards & example we set them, is also a very live one: it's pretty much the dominant issue.

I wouldn't be happy to have a less clean, more disorganised house, though. Mess is such a thief of time, it saps our will to do things when we're constantly faced with a load of chores to do before we can go out or invite people round. So we continue to fight the fight, argue the issues, try to turn out young men with decent attitudes to housework. And my OH sets the best example to us all, she's not a mad, everything-must-be-perfect obsessive, far from it. She dislikes housework more than me - I quite like most of it, it can be satisfying - and just wants us to be partners in keeping it at bay. She thinks that thinking so much about it, intellectualising it, is a waste of time & attention, and I now think she's been right about it all along. I'm not a 'surrendered husband' or anything but in general I think women should never underestimate how bloody childish men can be about some things.

but in general I think women should never underestimate how bloody childish men can be about some things.

Some men may be childish, but they are not children. So if they have a problem walking to walk of cleaning, it's 100% up to them to fix themselves. In the meanwhile their partners have every right to be angry with them and leave their mess for them to deal with until they are ready to do their share.

And instead of 'intellectualising' what it is that stops you cleaning, I would ask myself what is it that allows you to disrespect your partner that you think it's okay she picks up the slack while you are trying to figure yourself out.

Where your account loses me completely oneeyedbloke is at the conception that housework is inflicted upon you by your DW, as if she's somehow created it, rather than it having arisen independently as a byproduct of the physical realities of existence.

I'm sure she, like me, has an independent intellectual existence and also wishes the housework gone and manages it accordingly, so she can embrace this. The battle for time and desire to be doing something more fulfilling is a human attribute, not a male one.

Especially so since you have similar standards. I do think these need to be agreed, sensibly and sensitively to the other's needs.

DP and I each had our own house for a few years and I think that makes a big difference. It provides irrefutable evidence that housework is generated by the fact of oneself living in a house and must be done to achieve comfort and convenience and avoid squalor.

I suspect only those who've moved from the parental home, perhaps through a short, squalid or minimal student and young adult phase, into a home shared with a partner, can maintain the illusion of households being something that are managed around them, of which they are not fully part.

So by all means rage against housework but you're raging against your corporeal existence, the consequences of physics and biology, your failure to exist in spirit form only, not against your wife, who doesn't like housework either.

Thanks for being honest and taking the time to explain Oneyedbloke, what you say does she'd some light on things.

If you lived alone how much time and attention do you think you'd devote to keeping a tidy and organised household?

Also I don't see it as childishness, this failure to bite the domestic bullet, to me it looks like the assertion of male privilege, refusal to lower yourself to women's work.

Then again the continual wriggling out of it, clinging to the traditional male role even at the expense of your marriage does seem infantile.
I can only assume that the traditional masculine identity is ultimately more important than anything else.

As soon as my kids left home I maneuvered him into a situation where he had to agree to sell the family home and live separately, so pissed off was I.

My life is way easier, he has far less free time, we are still sort of together but it is very apparent to me now that the benefits of being a couple were very much flowing in one direction.
Once the kids were gone I realized I had very little use for him.