To think that DH has no idea the weight of responsibility I am feeling

[Pudpud30]

I’ve reached the end of my tether today and have just spent the last ten mins hiding in the kitchen to have a cry 🙈

DD starts reception next week, which is already making me feel emotional, and DS is also at primary school. All the ‘school’ admin falls to me and with DD starting there is extra with filling in ‘getting to know me’ style forms and a summer holiday scrapbook. I love doing things like that with the kids but I also work four days a week in a stressful job, and all the house responsibility - cooking, cleaning etc - also falls to me.

DH would argue that I take it all on and he’d help if I asked him to, but the mental load is on me to delegate and even when I do ask him he isn’t very reliable at actually getting things done, which just causes more work for me in the long run.

We both work from home, and whether relevant or not, he is generally more able in his job to work fixed hours without overtime and I am the main breadwinner. So I also feel pressure to keep it together for work.

I had today off as holiday to look after the kids and to do so I worked late last night after they’d gone to bed. Today we’ve been trying to get school bits sorted and the house has become more of a muddle, I’ve been feeling everything getting on top of me and went into the office to ask DH if he’d be finishing work in time to help get DS ready for football and he snapped that “he’s busy”. I became upset and said I felt like today was breaking me and I could just do with some help and his response was that he “doesn’t behave like this” when he has the kids.

I get he’s busy, but I also don’t think he has any idea what it takes to run a house, hold down a stressful job, and get two kids ready for school. He is also never too busy to go out three times a week to play football (for him!), whereas I struggle to get left alone for long enough to even had a bath in peace!

Aibu to feel like this and am I the only one?!

And split responsibility for whole areas. Eg he does all afterschool activities and the car.

I think you are both being unreasonable.

He is being an irritable lazy arse and needs to step up more. You are being a controlling martyr with a penchant for am dram.

You need to labour 50/50 so you divvy up household, childcare and finance tasks equally (taking into account your working hours.)

That means you are separately responsible for stuff. It does not mean you manage what he does or pick it up when he doesn't do it. You schedule a bi-weekly / monthly diary meeting where you catch up on stuff, and if you feel anything is being missed you can raise it then - but if he disagrees and it's on his list, you step back and leave it to him.

Stick tasks on a whiteboard or whatever at the start so he has no excuse to say he did know or he missed it. Also tell him where you kept the packed lunch stuff, and any other handover info he needs. But that's it.

You cannot have it both ways OP.

Have you ever read this OP? I imagine it resonates. Send to your partner and see how he reacts?

english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/

It’s very difficult to judge on the internet whether he’s one of these men who is simply selfish and useless and will basically not take on any of his responsibilities (there are, depressingly, a lot of them out there). Or one who just needs a push in the right direction and live his best life as an equal partner. Only you can judge this and then judge what you are willing to tolerate. Hopefully he’s the latter kind and you’ve had a lot of useful practical suggestions from PPs to get the ball rolling, in the vein of short term pain/long term gain.

good luck.

So he doesn’t do housework, life admin and doesn’t earn more. So what is the point of him exactly? To snap at you?

Choose your moment. Rather than telling him what to do, say that you are going to stop certain jobs as load is too much- but the pair of you need to decide what gets dropped, frequency reduced, or that he picks up

to prepare for that conversation ask him to write down all the jobs he does for family including “planning and managing” jobs, not just physical ones. Write down what task is, frequency and how many minutes it takes .

also you need to keep a quick diary of times he does stuff for himself vs time you get - keep it over a month to get fair data.

on your list of jobs you do, flag jobs you want to delegate to him or at least share with him

then sit together and start by exchanging your sheets.

hopefully, if he is decent but essentially gormless, he’lll realise it’s an extraordinary imbalance and suggest what he’ll take over. Agree to how you phase it in with “training” if needed.

formalise it..it seems a bit daft with a partner, but once kids come along it needs to be written down as agreement between you both. In practice if he uses phone both of you set up reminders with task and day you do it and repeat frequency so there is no excuse to forget. Agree how long a task can reasonably go overdue - that depend on task itself..some are ok to go overdue by a week, others not even by 5mins (e.g school runs).

also agree his working hours. It is very easy if you are wfh to blur the boundaries of work and home. Say he must formalise his hours with himself and you. If he needs to “stay late” then that must be agreed in advance and discuss how tasks will be a managed. This is not just needed for your relationship but also for his own long term mental well-being…wfh can be very toxic to mental health if we don’t put a discipline in place around start and finish times. But both of you do need to try to allocate “decompress” time between finishing work and starting kids care if possible- most of us, even with school run, get a 10 min decompress time in the car once leaving work before you arrive at school gates or nursery . We do need that of it can be accommodated. Maybe for him it’s come out of office and have an uninterrupted cuppa. But you need same deal

you also need equal hours for your own activities as him- and while you’re at it try to allow each one of you a lie in at least once a fortnight. Agree time lie in is allowed until, and under what circumstances you can be disturbed (e.g house is on fire). Make sure if weekend what time you agree to get up in morning so there’s no misunderstanding with one partner thinking 8 o clock is quite early enough but the kids have been running riot for 2 hours before that.

Think about what can be entirely dropped or “outsourced” or reduced. So does the house have to be cleaned more than every month apart from bathroom and kitchen. Standardise as much as possible - create a menu plan you revise every2 years for, say, a 6-8 week rotation then you don’t have to spend thinking time of what to cook for tea. And he can see what needs to be cooked that evening, and could go shopping without asking you what meals you having etc etc. things like holiday diaries for kids will happen for next few years- so put reminders in now and allocate it to someone with reminder for august. Washing always gets done on certain days - sheets on a Monday, darks on Tuesday or whatever… you do ho,e work with kids Monday, he does Tuesday etc .formalise. Standardise. Replicate. Make it a routine

And Dump the mental load of having to think about it. Ever again.

finally, you are going to have to let your perfectionist traits go on some things . Once he has respnsisiblity for something he has to do it his way. Don’t criticise it. It is worthwhile agreeing up front what that standard is and what is acceptable to you both as compromise, rather than seething with resentment
ater and eating to agree this once you’re heading off divorce🤦‍♀️. If that compromise won’t meet your standards and you can’t live with that, then you are for sake of your own well-being and marriage going to have to try to outsource. Example was that when I was working full time we had a cleaner every 2 weeks. My ex could clean . But his standards were not mine and it led to a lot of arguments where I felt it wasn’t done properly or at all, and he would say he had done it, or it was good enough. We were never going to agree so I said, fine, so we pay for cleaner then as we can’t agree. I could then legitimately feed back to cleaning company if cleans did not meet standards id contracted with them. Same as I would feedback if cleaners did a good job on something. For 20 years that meant we never argued about cleaning. And I did not feel resentful or pissed off that I was cleaning up after him and kids because he couldn’t be bothered to do a good job on it . If he argued about cost of cleaner, Which happened every few years, I said I would only stop getting a cleaner if we sat down and wrote down a full specification of what a clean house looked like at my standards I got with cleaners, in each room, that he would clean to without argument, nagging etc. 🤷🏼‍♀️So we had cleaners for years 🤣🤣

yiu have to brain dump as much as possible. You have to delegate and that is hard . Routine. Written agreements. Lists. Reminders are your tools.

I delegated the meal planning, food shopping and cooking to DH.

Bliss

It was a few years of not the best or healthiest meals as he learnt to cook.

Then I delegated the laundry - first he hung out and then sorted and folded - the DC helped with this. Then washing the darks, then the lights and taught about stain removal then the reds/purples:orange/pink wash.

There is a "specials" basket that he doesn't touch of mainly my work dresses, bras anything that can't go on your standard 30/40 wash.

Clean knickers arrive on my bed like magic 👌

DH would argue that I take it all on and he’d help if I asked him to

Does he think it's acceptable for you to have to ask him? Because it's really, really not. It's no more your work than it is his. He needs to grow up.

During covid I was going out to work every day whilst my DH and 2 children (who had returned for lockdown) all worked from home. Somehow all the housework, washing, ironing and cooking became mine. After two weeks I bought a whiteboard. I made it into a weekly calendar with a list of chores on one side. I gave them the option of picking 3 three chores each a week or I would choose them for them. After a bit of grumbling they actually did it. I made it very clear that if they didn't do their chores it wouldn't be done for them and in return if it was my turn to do the washing, I would not do theirs or cook for them etc... it worked.
Now they have gone back to normal life but I still tell my DH what he is expected to do or I still end up with all of it.

This is all such good advice, thank you!

I needed to hear this - thank you

Hadn’t read this before and really strikes a chord - thank you!

Well it’s not him helping is it? Because that means that appetite your job to run the house. Why is that the case?

and it’s easy for him not to be a perfectionist isn’t it - because he knows you’ll do it.

he is treating you with utter contempt and disrespect.

but I suspect you are ultimately a “what are they like” one and will just keep on doing it all whilst driving yourself into the ground.

as someone unthread said - you would be MUCH happier single - especially given you are the main earner

i really don’t get why women put up with this shit - especially where they are financially okay

I don't like delegating - that still leaves you with the mental load. It's better that you each have discrete jobs.

So you are the breadwinner, the housewife and the default parent and you only work one day less a week than him?

Meanwhile he is breezing off to football whenever he likes, working all the hours he wants whilst assuming his children will be fed, their homework supervised and that they will actually attend a school because someone has organised it, and demanding you tell him what to do instead of thinking of it for himself?

He's not an idiot. He knows these things have to happen. He is actively choosing to leave you with all of this stuff to make you life easier. He is buying the ability to stay late at work (aka further his career potentially at the expense of yours) go to football and not have to do anything by demanding you do everything.

By all means try the ideas on here and see if they help. But honestly if they don't I would ask yourself what you are getting out of this relationship, who is looking after you?

If he was stood over you all day demanding you do everything that you do you would have left him by now I expect. But he is effectively doing the same by checking out of being a partner, by checking out of being a father. Weirdly these men very rarely check out of the sex side of the relationship do they...🙄

This. Don’t give him the one-off or unusual tasks, give him recurring ones that become his routine. Annoying that you need to be more “on it” with ad-hoc things, which do take mental energy, but he should relieve you of some of the base load.

I’m also the main breadwinner, and I also am responsible for all school admin stuff, nursery board of directors, managing our nanny, travel, family milestones and gifts, most of our DCs’ emotional needs, all of our social lives, dentist/doctor/vaccinations, kids’ music and sports lessons, and pretty much anything else that crops up for the kids. However, things I never think about include: groceries, laundry, taxes, daycare pick-up / drop-off. Sometimes he delegates those things back to me, but that’s only once every few weeks. They’re his to figure out.

It works pretty well for us. I feel like I hold much more of the mental load and will tend to have more “intense” stuff with the kids (e.g., spendings hours with them for medical investigations), but DH probably contributes more daily hours to home and child stuff than I do.

I mean I’m not sure that getting him to wash his own clothes is a win

Totally agree with the advice on here re. having a formal chat and then putting a plan in place. It's worth a try, surely, and it doesn't sound as if you're ready for divorce just yet!

I resonate entirely with what you're saying and it's been an issue with me for many years, but only came to the surface after our son was born. I had counselling after PND and the practical things people have said above were actually the counsellor's ideas, too.

I kept saying, "but I shouldn't have to ask him!" and she made me see that, unfortunately with most men, you do. (Perhaps what they see/used to see growing up?) Once the routine is in place, it should more or less stick. As I said, only you know if it's worth trying. If imagine for most families, it is.

It's changed my life anyway! We do have little catch-ups about it and there are certainly improvements to be made, but I no longer seethe in resentment all evening, every evening!

Good luck. X

OK so you need to get this and mean it. And then let go. Whatever his is, is his.
www.fairplaylife.com/

I am a ..little controlling and like things my way. But being also the main breadwinner, was going slightly mad. So some things are DH's from the start - he's in whatsapp groups, he does the papers, he drives the kids etc. I have no idea what's happening with DS's basketball for example except that DH occasionally asks if I want to go see a match. It's amazing! Frees up an entire corner of my brain. But I did need to spell out that if he is taking care of something, I don't even want to think about it.

You've got to have responsibility for certain things and not get involved in each other's!

In our house, I meal plan and do the online food shop but DH is in charge of all cooking and going to get food bits from shops. I clean up after each meal. He's in charge of laundry during the week, me on the weekends and organising it back into bedrooms. We have a cleaner but he has to get the house ready for her (I work more hours and earn more), I make sure she gets paid online. He does all school admin, I do all school based shopping stuff / kids clothes shopping etc.

I don't even give his jobs a second thought. I could not be doing with a man child that needs talking to like a third child.

I've had this conversation numerous times in my 13 year marriage.

A few months ago I sat down and composed a spreadsheet of what we do. Lets just say my DH had his eyes well and truly opened.

We're both self employed running small businesses. He works about 60 hours a week when you take into account his paperwork and I work about 35 but throw in the 24/7 mum duties I definitely do the lions share. To give you an idea on how big the divide is I asked him the other day how much he though a multipack of 20 crisps was 'I dunno, £15?' I mean WTF. That just shows you how often he does the shopping!

Sadly, despite the tides turning in relationships to make things more equal, we still have a very long way to go. Thats not to say that men are useless, I was brought up by my dad who literally did everything for me and made me in to the strong woman I grew up to be.

I also remember (many years ago) when DH was showing signs of doing nothing round the house when we first starting living together and not married and I basically said that I couldn't and wouldn't live with someone who left everything in the house to me to do, so I would leave if it carried on. It stopped pretty sharpish and he needed a lot of nudging to get what needed doing in the early days but he's amazing now.

I’m not sure why getting a four year old ready for reception is really so burdensome. I think you’re not happy with your life and so have decided it’s too much work for one person when obviously it isn’t because people have more or higher needs dependents and other pulls on their time and manage. It sounds like you’re not happy because you feel he has an easy life.

I suggest each of you does one whole week of cooking, taking turns weekly. Cooking means planning the meals, buying the food, cooking, serving the meal, clearing up afterwards, refrigerating leftovers, and doing the washing up. He'll probably suggest dividing this up between the cooking end and the washing up part after two days of this.

He needs to organize the DCs' school lunches too, on the week he shops.

On the alternating weeks he gets to organize the family calendar and see to it that the DCs have what they need for school including clean uniforms, kit for PE, art, supplies for special projects (loo rolls, dry pasta, collage scraps, and all the other crap schools think people leave lying around).

You need to stop doing his laundry. He has to do it all for himself from now on, the entire process from dirty clothes in the basket to clean clothes put away in drawers.

You need to go out three nights a week and leave him to wrangle the DCs, manage homework, bedtime, etc.

He is taking the piss.

You also have this all bass ackwards.
A grown adult does not 'help' in his own home. He takes responsibility.
The other grown adult in the home does not 'delegate' because that involves designing and describing a task and creating a time-line in which it shpukd be done. In other words, she devotes time and energy to organising another adult.

Do not delegate.
Tell him you've decided you'll only plan, shop, and prepare meals every second week from now on.
Tell him you'll only be doing your own laundry from now on, and the two of you will be sharing responsibility for getting the DCs out to school with everything they need and in clean uniforms on alternating weeks.
Tell him you'll be out three nights a week and it will be up to him to see to the DCs' reading, homework, baths, and bedtime on those nights.

It's up to him how he'll organize his share of the responsibility.

Really appreciate all your advice! Going to take a look at and make sure we make some changes to hand over responsibility and make things more equal. In the meantime I’ve gone on strike cooking wise tonight and currently taking great delight in watching him ferret around in the freezer to see if there’s anything easy he can cook for his dinner 😂

Oh and don't forget to agree on a standard. You will still be resentful if you cook nutritionally balanced healthy but budget-conscious meals on your week, but he just warms up frozen pizza on his.