Working mum Vs SAHM

[ificouldwritealettertome]

This is about the personal struggle I am facing against myself, AIBU to think that I'm just doing an absolutely shit job of everything?

I enjoyed my 9 months of maternity leave so much. It took a while to get over an EMCS and birth trauma but me and DD bonded really well over time. I embraced my new role as a mum. My house was tidy and I spent ages cooking nice veggie stuff I like (I love to cook and bake).

DH, me and the baby all had an hour of family time each evening and sat down to a nice dinner then a film once DD was in bed. All nice and settled, very happy in our routine.

Then I returned to work last month. While I've been away the place has become even more busy and I was straight back into things from day one. I work Monday to Friday and (very luckily) have help from the GPs for childcare.

But my God, it has been so hard. Getting DD up and out in the morning is a nightmare. No lazy cuddles and tea in my pyjamas... it's a big rush to get dressed and have my make up on in time to shove everything in the car and go. I am stressed. I am shattered. I felt like I was doing such a great job of being a mum and now I'm horrible, short tempered and grumpy.

My best self is saved for work (customer service) so my patience is gone. The upheaval of the routine means the baby is no longer sleeping well so I am horribly sleep deprived. We have no time for sex, I'm too bloody knackered. Weekends are spent catching up with housework and laundry and our healthy home cooked meals are turning into fish and chips thrown in the oven while we bath a screaming baby in time to get her in bed by 7:30pm. Last night, after a stressful day of cleaning, shopping for food and new work outfits (gaining weight due to poor diet) I lost my temper with the baby when she cried for 40 minutes and shouted at her then cried for the rest of the night because I felt so guilty.

I feel like a shit mum. I feel like I'm shit at work. I'm doing a bad job everywhere but the thing is I actually like my job and my team mates and aside from everything, we REALLY fucking need the money.

Please tell me I'm not alone. I already work the minimum hours I can do (no evening or weekend shifts) so is this just an adjustment period? I feel like I was a great SAHM but now I just can't do it all. I burst into tears at my parents' house this evening and they insisted on keeping DD for the night.so I could sleep. They can see my eyes are black and my skin is awful from exhaustion and stress. When we got home I told my DH he has GOT to help me out more. I feel like I'm drowning. Is it just me? Am I BU? The reality is that this is life for most women and they all seem to be coping much better than I am. Any advice welcome but please don't be too harsh as I am feeling really low

@speakout - the 13 weeks I don’t do it, it’s done by a nanny

Kokeshi123 - what an excellent post. That is exactly what it was like.
I adored my toddlers but really struggled with those years.

Just to chime in, for the benefit of those who have been fearstruck by kokeshi's post, it is not like that for everyone. There are ways of enjoying the toddler years without throwing money at them. Of course there is the occasional stressful moment but there is no way I would have chosen not to be a sahm at this point. And no, I'm not saying it should be everyone's choice, just that it doesn't have to be the nightmare that kokeshi describes.

Like some pp I have a job list, made up in an excel spreadsheet (I'm a bit of a nerd), and printed out and put up on the fridge, it has daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual jobs... It helps me use my time more efficiently in the brand new whirl wind of a newborn (DD will be 3 months this week). At the moment DD has a 3 hour nap most afternoons, so I am happy picking up the lion's share of chores whilst on maternity leave, also house still requires a lot of diy which DH is better at than me, so he gets on with that! But one job I have firmly delegated his way is picking up the dog poop from the garden... As long as I do all the nappies he does all the dog mess!!
I'm not an obsessive cleaner, so having the list to prompt me is a massive help, and if DD napping takes a turn for the worse, DH will be firmly pointed in the direction of the list, that way he won't need nagging on specifics, just that any outstanding jobs for the week get done.

Kokeshi is right about toddlers needing money.

Looking further ahead, children need more and more money right up to adulthood when they have overseas school trips, want driving lessons, uni fees, get married and buy a house.

There is a growing divide between children whose parents can give them a financial leg up (especially on the property ladder) and those whose parents cannot. Parenting is a long game and the decisions, especially whether to SAHM, light a long fuse which impact all the way down the road. Nothing is immutable but the fact is, it is far easier to go on the off ramp than to try and get back on the on ramp to a career after you have been out for a few years. Providing a stable financial set up is as important to being a parent as cuddles and emotional support the older the children get and start to notice.

Glad the OP is trying to make it work at staying in paid employment. It gives more options and pays dividends in promotions and flexibility further up the career track, pensions and cash to help your dcs, if you so choose.

It’s bloody exhausting.

And yes your DH needs to help more. It’s very easy to slip into that 1950s mode isn’t it? And it works well when one of you is home but as soon as you’re both working again everything needs to be split. All the night wakings, all the housework and all the general faffing around. He’s had a taste of how it is to have Staff - now both of you have to draw up a way of working that allows both of you equal time.

You need to devote a few hours together at a time that’s not fraught. Sit down together and split everything. DH and I do alternate days of dropping/picking at nursery for example. So Monday: I do drop off and pickup and a shorter workday. Dh does a longer workday, I do dinner and bedtime to let him work. While I’m doing bedtime he clears up from dinner, pita laundry/dishes on, tidied etc.

Tuesday: roles reverse. He does the nursery run, bed and bath so that I can work longer.

Obviously how you work it is up to you but he WILL have to accept some restrictions on his work hours and his leisure time. The goal is that both of you work, both do roughly equal housework and both get roughly equal leisure time. If he goes away for a weekend you get that time back another week.

I know it sounds like a corporate flexitime system but it does work. If he reacts by sulking, you need to lay it on the line that right now you are doing TWO jobs. Your workdays are one Full time equivalent - when you’re home, both of you have to pitch in. If you don’t, then you will end up with massive simmering resentment.

Also: yes to everything people say about lowering standards. Work out what’s non negotiable and leave the rest.

Queen of shortcuts here.

Yes to plan your meals, you can find some healthier versions and very fast to prepare, but it needs planning.

Toddlers don't need a bath every day. Make it every two days instead. I change the beds every ten days instead of every 7 days. I do one load a day in the wash instead of all in one day - all that needs ironing together so that the ironing can be done in one go (DH does the ironing whilst watching sports on tv. Good selling point).

I work a lot less hours than DH but he does specific jobs, if I tell him exactly what to do (I know what it sounds like). I fill up the dishwasher in the evening and start it, he always, always empties it in the morning before breakfast. I batch cook at weekends. He changes the beds. He does the ironing. He looks after the garden.

And we have a wonderful cleaner and it's so worth it.

Duchy, you do 3 hours of work for the kids per weekday then? Or less? Get them up and send them away to be fed and looked after then your DH takes over? Then you get 13 weeks of full nights if sleep. Oh and you get full nights of sleep every weekend? Is that correct? I can’t believe you’re actually comparing this to full time care of small children. Please note: full time. It doesn’t stop after a few weeks and you don’t just drop them off and have done for the day. It’s not a matter of wanting it enough. Your 4am wake up really wouldn’t be so easy if you’d been up 5 times already taking care of sick twin babies. Oh and you did it all day too. And all night the night before too. And you haven’t had a full night of sleep since early second trimester. Almost 2 years ago...

I think for most people part time work would be best to achieve a balance. However for a lot of people it doesn’t work out that way. I had a choice of full time work or SAHM and chose SAHM. For lots of reasons that has worked out best for us. However as was pointed out it is also a struggle staying at home unless your DH earns a very good salary. In the summer it’s easy, in the winter it’s harder. I spend a fair bit of time worrying about money and budgeting and stuff. As I’m never going to be a high earner the whole career track thing isn’t really relevant- I worked as a teacher and in youth work so neither is ever going to be fantastically well paid even with loads of experience. Also while most people go back to work after baby no1, (including me!) a lot of people don’t after baby no 2 as it doesn’t make financial sense to do so. I think it’s a decision only you can make for your family. Don’t forget you are likely to be working until you are 70 so even if you feel like it was a mistake cutting your hours or whatever you have a lot of years of work ahead of you to make up for it! I would also be concerned in your situation about what would happen if your parents were no longer able to care for your child - is there a back up plan is they get ill or go back to work? Do the maths add up for you to work if you then have to pay for childcare? It’s a big ask for someone to have your child full time even if they think they want to.

I don't understand how men (/partners) assume everything will carry on as normal for them when mat leave ends. Do they really think you've been doing nothing for 9 months?

If your OH thinks that, he hasn't been nearly involved enough with looking after LO so far. Time for that to change asap.

If he doesn't think you've been twiddling your thumbs, does he just think you'll carry on doing it all while working full time? What sort of person does that make him?

Glad you’re feeling better after posting @ificouldwritealettertome

Your feelings about being crap at home and crap at work are you only measuring yourself against your own expectations, not against others’ expectations.

Someone said to me around the same time I went back to work, lower your expectations. You initially can’t have it all - your priorities have changed once you have a little person depending on you. That’s not to say you can’t have it all in the future, but for now whilst your baby is still young, accepting that you’ll be 75% good at work and home is ok, and it doesn’t need to be 100% perfect and efficient. I speak generally, but we tend to put such high expectations on ourselves as working parents and then feel immediate failure when we haven’t met those expectations. Lower them and the drop down doesn’t hit you as bad.

Planning and communicating both at work and with DH is essential. Things I did that could help:

1. Shared diary in iPhone with DH. Everything went in the diary: working rotas, who’s picking up DD, who’s starting dinner; even down to “put washing on - DH” It would ping a notification to DH’s phone.

1. Shared food shop on notes calendar with a meal plan / joint log in for regular online food shop. We did both online and Aldi, to save money.

1. Use Sunday afternoon to cook up a curry / chilli that will give you one or two meals for the week. It wasn’t batch cooking as we didn’t have the time, but it gave us a meal to ping and ding when we got in. Also we’d cook a Sunday dinner for 4 and plate it up and have it Tuesday evening. Not original but it helped. Food shop contained easy bung in the oven type meals too and ready chopped things to save preparing (some call it lazy but for 99p a bag of frozen onion is a fucking genius idea IMO)

1. Divvy up all house tasks and admin. Work it out who takes responsibility for what, from food shopping, to cooking, to cleaning each room, changing beds, bins out, gardening and replacing fucking toilet rolls . Once you write out every single activity that it takes to run a house, it’s a visible reminder for both of you to see that it physically can’t be don’t by one person and it isn’t a competition to declare that you’re doing more than the other person. Share it out based on who is more efficient at the job!

1. Cut back financially to get a cleaner. If you can afford takeaway twice a week, you can afford a cleaner. It’s as simple as that. You will be surprised how much pressure this takes off both of.

1. Get efficient at work: plan you work day at the end of the previous day; cut the chit chat; always ask “is this priority” / “when do you need it by” to be sure to meet expectations of others; utilise lunch time to nip to the shops for essentials or catch up on house admin/bills;

1. Decide prior to the weekend which day you both get up with with DC. One takes the Saturday and one takes the Sunday - and don’t give in and get up when you can hear tears or DH not doing things how you would! We adopted this early on and still, 6 years later, agree who gets up on sat and sun, and we make each other a hot drink, shut the door and let the other sleep (or chill) until 9am. It’s not late, but it helps.

1. Linked to sleep - we agreed as a couple that if one of us wanted to nap on a weekend, we just had to ask each other. I can live off 5-6 hours sleep easily, DH couldn’t, he needs his full nights sleep. There was no point me being pissy about it, so I supported him with having a nap. He’d then send me to bed early if DD was up late, or give me a lie in for longer on my day of lie in. It worked both ways.

I’ve gone on far too much. Hope this helps.

I worked FT throughout my kids growing up (and was a single mum for many years).

At the time, if I'd only thought of the immediate benefit, I would have opted to be a SAHM any day. Nowadays, that they are teenagers and I get the benefit of the income, which means that the mortgage is almost paid and we can afford nice things for us as a family but also the kids, I definitely am happy that I worked FT all those years.

Would I do it differently, I don't know. Some things would most likely been better if I hadn't worked FT, but some things would not be so good now. In the end, there is no perfect solution, so it's better to get on with one and focus on the benefits of that choice rather than what is missed as a result.

DrCorday makes some excellent practical points.

Ificoukdwritealetterhome- don’t beat yourself up. You went back to work only last month! And you say you’re the sort of person who loved child cooking, baking and keeping a spotless house, so in his defence, if you’ve been happy doing all that for 9 months, your dh needs a bit of time to adjust to the fact that he now needs to step up on the domestic front. Just as you are having to adjust to a new routine. I’m not defending any man being lazy, I just think it’s inportant to remember that if the woman has happily taken on everything and hasn’t wanted to, eg share parental leave, it takes a shift of mindset on both sides to accept that when you’re both back working, the balance needs to be recalibrated.

Let me tell you my own anecdote. I returned to work with dc1 when she was 3 months old (back before long Maternity leave.) We had no choice financially (rocketing interest rates) though tbf like you, I liked my job and took pride in it too. But if the night before I was due to return to work, someone had waved a magic wand and our mortgage disappeared, then tbh I would have stayed at home, because it’s the easier option than returning to work with a 3 month old! However, a few months back into my work role and I wouldn’t have changed a thing. There’s a massive difference between how you feel in those early weeks and how you feel when you’re established back in the workplace and most importantly, have a new routine which involves you and your husband both taking responsibility on the domestic front. If I tell you that i returned to work (albeit after longer ML) after dc2 and dc3, even when childcare was swallowing up my entire salary, it’s a measure of how well things worked for us.

Try to remember no one does everything perfectly! But it’s perfectly possible to be great parents while also doing well in your jobs.

Child cooking?! Don’t know where that came from!!

Thanks again for all of this great help, 😂 child cooking! That's My favourite typo so far!

singingpinkmonkey your post wasn't a downer, my post was a downer! And you're no failing- after posting this thread I've reaslied nobody is. Being a mum means sometimes choosing the lesser of two evils, so even the right choice is wrong.

The support on here is for you too- I've already started using a few tips like washing on the night before and DH hangs it out next morning. We are sharing cooking and housework now... it's already so much better. But we need to keep this UP!

The only thing I can't do on here is afford a cleaner! I'm on NMW and we are saving for a house deposit so no two takeaways a week either! But thanks again so much for all of this great advice, we are already coping much better as a family and one of my colleagues even commented yesterday how bright I was looking!

does anybody know what my rights are regarding rotas in work. my rotas have been up for 2 weeks so far and as i noticed i had a fri/sat/sun off i booked a weekend away. now my work have changed the rotas (i have pictures of the original) and have told me i cant have that weekend off. im now due to lose the few hundred pounds that i bought my weekend with. do i have a right to refuse to work that perticular weekend?

sorry i never meant to hijack this post, i was trying to start a new thread and now i cant delete it!

YANBU and fwiw you have very neatly put into words how many mums feel.

None of us are coping that well- we are all just saving ‘our best selves’ for work x

I remember my first 6 months back at work - it was bloody hideous!

DS was at nursery and although he settled well and loved it, he typically got every big going because he started in September (so Autumn and then winter). My mum helped where she could but she was working too. We both did jobs at home but we're permanently exhausted and on first name terms with the local Chinese takeaway

However, it did get easier after that! We got into a routine, accepted that sometimes, things just have to be good enough and DS got less bugs!

For us, at the time, we could, at a push have afforded for me to go part time or even be a SHAM but I continued full time and I am so glad I did. My husband had to give his job up 18 months ago due to health reasons so we now rely mostly on my wage (he does some part time work and does drop off/pick up and more around the house - works well now that DS is ready to start school) so I am glad I kept it up.

Also, in the 3 years since I returned, I have taken promotion and doubled my salary so massive gains for us as a family.

Hang in there - ensure your husband does equal household chores and childcare, keep midweek meals simple (could you batch cook at some point?).

Can the grandparents come to you once or twice a week to save the rush? Maybe they would start dinner for you or do the baby's bath before you get home. If My mum babysits for us, she generally busies herself doing some dusting/hoovering too!

Take care