To wonder what the housewives of yesteryear would have thought of this....

[Comedycook]

I'm a sahm of school age DC so probably more of a housewife than anything else

Thanks to the pandemic, obviously dh is working from home. Ds is isolating. There's is permanently someone under my feet getting in my way when trying to do stuff.

Even during normal times, in school holidays for example, kids are constantly around as it's not the like the old days when they'd play out all day and come in for their tea.

Honestly, I find it really quite unbearable despite loving my family obviously. I wonder how housewives of previous generations would have coped? I reckon having their men home all day whilst they tried to cook and clean would have sent them potty!

Anyway I think it's sad that it's now apparently so controversial for a woman not to work and stay at home

OP I don't think you need to wonder what housewives of yesteryear would have thought, I think you ARE a housewife of yesteryear with very old fashioned ideas. You might get a good few years between the children leaving home and the husband retiring when you have the whole place to yourself to polish to your heart's content

[quote Comedycook]@1940s

Well done for being a much better parent than me

Oh and I was also brought up a dad who did loads of housework and cooking.[/quote]
Shame your children can't see that good example themselves.

Honestly stay at home parents who take on the huge bulk of housework makes total sense to me. I wouldn't expect with school age children that my husband would finish work and I'd need him to Hoover / clean / cook.

However his absolute lack of involvement at weekends (has he ever cooked or done anything in the house without being asked) and his lack of bath time / bedtime is truly sad. Why doesn't he want to spend that time with them?

@Comedycook

Anyway I think it's sad that it's now apparently so controversial for a woman not to work and stay at home

It really isn't. Apart from a few bitter posters who resent their work and are jealous of someone who doesn't have to work, but you can always ignore those.

What is very wrong is claiming the house as your own, and telling your partner you resent them so much they have to go back to the office because they are not allowed to use their own home. (that they are paying for, no less).

If you feel so unsettled, it might be time to try to have a life out of your own house (job, hobbies, who cares). It's not healthy, and it's a terrible example for your children.

@Comedycook

Anyway I think it's sad that it's now apparently so controversial for a woman not to work and stay at home

Not at all. I think it's a brilliant option and I fully support anyone who chooses to. I chose to for an extended time.

That's not anyone's issue here. It's you resenting your husband at home and also his lack of contribution to anything aside from a month though wage packet

The OP is right, though.

Many jobs just don’t work well for families. In any event, they’ve made the decision they feel works best for them as a family. That doesn’t need anyone else commenting on it or judging it.

It’s about balance as I said above. I really don’t think it’s hard to understand why someone never leaving the house and taking up a communal space in that house (we don’t all have spare bedrooms upstairs and we don’t even have an upstairs!) gets wearing.

My husband is in the military. I don't know how I could work around that plus childcare.

However his absolute lack of involvement at weekends (has he ever cooked or done anything in the house without being asked) and his lack of bath time / bedtime is truly sad. Why doesn't he want to spend that time with them?

Well be does spend time with them but I do those things. I don't think it's particularly sad. He takes them out at the weekend and talks to them...he's not some silent figure in their lives. I just got used to doing bedtime as they'd go to bed before he was home from work often. I'm also better at reading bedtime stories apparently as I do voices

What is very wrong is claiming the house as your own, and telling your partner you resent them so much they have to go back to the office because they are not allowed to use their own home. (that they are paying for, no less)

I don't tell him that nor do I blame him. It is what it is...no ones fault

@Comedycook

Honestly though I think it's a shame for children to witness it

Do you know something, I don't generally comment on other peoples life choices but after your unpleasant comment about me, I will. I secretly think it's a shame when I see children walking home from after school club at 6.30pm with an exhausted mum who's been working full time, and often a dad at home who will still not lift a finger. So no, I do not think it's a shame my dc have a mum at home who greets them when they get home, sits and does their homework with them, has already made dinner and the house is clean.

You seem to have decided that, in order to justify your own life choices, that women who work FT are married to men who never lift a finger, and are invariably straggling home exhausted from aftercare at 6.30 to face cooking and homework.

Every woman I know works and I know two longterm SAHDs too, though one has now returned to the workplace now that his children are older and none do the lion's share of the domestic work. It's a false equation. Most are like DH and me, who work flexibly around one another, so we share responsibility for DS, and household chores.

It's him working and me trying to do chores around him
I don't understand this. Isn't your OH just sitting at a desk in one room? How is that stopping you cleaning or painting the other rooms?

Also kids didn't use to be outside all the time. They used to be inside helping with chores, supervised by mum. Chores used to be much more tedious and long than they are nowadays.

their own home they are paying for

See this does fascinate me.

DP and I actually have two homes.

There is the one we are currently in. This has a mortgage on it which DP pays. Fine. I’ll be on it when I’m back at work.

Mine doesn’t have a mortgage. I own it outright.

If we moved into ‘my’ house, does it somehow become more reasonable for me to insist he goes back to the office? We are in the home I paid for after all.

He'd rather be in the office too.

I bet he would!

I don't think it's about not wanting to spend time with our husbands. I love spending time with him, at the weekend and in the evenings. I don't love spending our 'work' hours together - his working in his paid job and me 'working' in the home and with the children (I'm a sahm and parent carer too to my eldest who has just started school).

I would feel the same if we didn't have children and I was still working full time but we were both working at home. It would drive me mad.

Take now for example. I've got the eldest at school, the youngest is having lunch and I was trying to eat a quick sandwich and have a coffee whilst catching up on emails before I leave in half an hour to take toddler to a group. I have four emails that I need to respond to, 1) to rearrange a medical appointment for DD 2) to pay an invoice for extra curricular classes 3) to arrange a meeting with the county council about my eldest and 4) sort out some clothing returns.

DH has been in four times whilst I'm (trying to) doing this on his 'lunch', wanting various things. Can he have an order number for something from Amazon as he wants to find it for some reason, can I please cook his dinner whilst I'm doing the children's this afternoon (we normally eat together when they're in bed) so he can go out and watch the football already fed later, do I know where his running trainers are, is it ok to use a carrier bag to wrap up an Amazon return?

Nothing terrible, nothing horribly unreasonable, but just interruptions! If he was at work it wouldn't happen. By the time I've done that I've not got time to sort the emails so I've given up, am drinking my coffee having five minutes on MN and will sort the emails later.

I love DH and he's a brilliant hands on Dad. Him working from home has given him time with our children that he'd never had had otherwise, including breakfast, bath and bedtimes as he has a long commute and usually misses these. That's why he's only going back to the office part time. But my god I need those two days without him here under my feet all day!

Most are like DH and me, who work flexibly around one another

You're talking once again from a point of privilege. Lots of people, especially ones in lower paid jobs, don't have flexibility.

I will almost certainly get a job at some point. We are definitely not rich. But in an ideal world, i would rather be at home doing household stuff rather than us both working and sharing those chores.

My husband retired two years before me (older). He had two years at home pottering and working out a pleasant retirement routine. Luckily, he didn't throw a strop after I retired and joined him at home. He knew it was my home as well.

@Comedycook

Anyway I think it's sad that it's now apparently so controversial for a woman not to work and stay at home

You lost the moral high ground with your nasty pop at working mothers, and the implication that working is not the honest default for an independent adult, barring some alternative private arrangement, but some sort of dirty, lesser thing. When women do it, that is.

Most of us are firmly in the "to thine own self be true" camp, or at least the "needs must" one. However, you did irritate me with your "oh it's not good for MEN to be at home all day" and "men going out to work from time immemorial" as if working class women are a weird newfangled 21st century thing.

Very few people on here have any issue with your preference to stay home, but the attitude you're taking as a result of it towards both your husband and working mothers is unworthy.

@Twickytwo

My husband retired two years before me (older). He had two years at home pottering and working out a pleasant retirement routine. Luckily, he didn't throw a strop after I retired and joined him at home. He knew it was my home as well.

So both retired with no kids around presumably? Would you have enjoyed spending six months in lockdown trying to keep your children quiet whilst he works from home in the living room?

You lost the moral high ground with your nasty pop at working mothers

Only after I'd be repeatedly insulted for my own set up.

Working class women should be merely "working women", though it is true that working class women have always had to work.

@Comedycook

You lost the moral high ground with your nasty pop at working mothers

Only after I'd be repeatedly insulted for my own set up.

Well you're clearly no better, are you? You judge as hard and ignorantly as they do.

I was told it was really sad that my dc didn't see me working...I see it as no sadder than children who are their mother's exhausted from working full time and still doing everything at home

*who see

@Comedycook

Most are like DH and me, who work flexibly around one another

You're talking once again from a point of privilege. Lots of people, especially ones in lower paid jobs, don't have flexibility.

I will almost certainly get a job at some point. We are definitely not rich. But in an ideal world, i would rather be at home doing household stuff rather than us both working and sharing those chores.

We're both working-class, and worked very hard to put ourselves in this position before having a child, postponing parenthood because getting to where we are now in both careers required a lot of moving about and covering short-term contracts which involved us living in different places at times, and which would have been incompatible with parenthood.

@Comedycook

I was told it was really sad that my dc didn't see me working...I see it as no sadder than children who are their mother's exhausted from working full time and still doing everything at home

Not sad to not see you work. Sad to see your husband do so little (nothing around the house at all) that's more damaging to them having a SAHM

But in an ideal world, i would rather be at home doing household stuff rather than us both working and sharing those chores.

I can't blame you, it barely takes 1 hour to do all the chores, so if you get them done before the school run, you have your entire day to yourself.

Unless you are the poster whose bedroom was in the living room because they had no space, nothing should stop your DH from working in the bedroom and getting the living room back for the rest of the family.

Even if it means rearranging things around, but it's been more than a year... normal people got that done in the first 2 weeks last year.