To leave dh alone with the baby all day tomorrow without telling him

[reddyt]

Dh has gone to sleep in the spare room after our argument tonight, which I have told him I hate!

To top it off, this now means he gets a lovely nights sleep & I am left to do night feeds alone!!!

Im honestly thinking tomorrow i will take our other ds to school, then swan off to the shops or somewhere, leaving him with the baby & not telling him.

I am fully aware this is probably a childish response but this is just where I'm at.

Do it? Or don't do it?

EXACTLY

anger needs to be expressed

this is flouncing out the house in a huff.

will achieve nothing

@Lockheart that’s a giant leap you’ve made about me. Not sure how you twisted that from what I posted. If you saw my pp I advised the OP she let her OH know that she was going out.

There is no way to have a perfect, healthy conflict. There are two people with differing needs so what is is needed and respectful for one person can be invasive and disrespectful for another. It’s about communication and compromise which is very hard to do when you’re angry. It’s normal to get it wrong.

With a few tweaks the OPs strategy is a timeout that is very healthy. She came on here to vent and figure things out. To insinuate from the information shared that she and I are abusive and unhealthy is just weird.

I was mirroring your own wording back to you. It's not a personal assumption, although your initial one that posters were not adept at dealing with anger was.

@Lockheart there is nothing in your post that mirrored my wording or reflected the meaning of what I said.

No one can adeptly manage their anger. That’s a fact, not a judgement. It’s not a stretch to think that posters responding by dismissing and judging the OP are likely to do that to expressions of anger in their own lives. I help people manage their emotions and conflicts for a living. I have had years of training and therapy to do this. I am pretty adept at helping others manage their anger. Am I adept at dealing with my own anger? Hell no. No matter how many changes and strategies you put in place you can’t side step how triggering anger and conflict is.

I don’t judge others for grappling with their anger. I actually respect the OP for publicly expressing it and don’t think people should be so quick to judge her for not expressing anger perfectly when it is impossible to do so.

Whilst I agree it's not a good idea for the OP to go off for the day without telling her DH, I find it depressing that so many on here are ignoring the fact that OP's DH just went off and slept in another room, leaving her to be the default parent, and are just putting the boot into OP.

There doesn't seem to much criticism about her husband, and just accusations of OP being 'childish'.

Stop behaving like a pair of sullen stroppy teenagers. You are the adults, with children to care for and be their role models and guides to life. Plan and have a polite, civilised, adult conversation that has the family's welfare at its heart.

Having carefully read your contributions to this thread Melloyellow, I would avoid anger management and conflict resolution therapy at all cost. I’d prefer to find my own strategies, and they wouldn’t involve provoking further conflict, anxiety and potential risk to a child’s welfare.
That doesn’t mean that the answers lie in suppressing anger, far from it, but there have to be more positive and mature ways of dealing with issues like this one.

No one can adeptly manage their anger.

**I am pretty adept at helping people manage their anger”

So which is it @Melloyellow1983 ??

The OP’s “expression of anger” was to start a thread on an anonymous chat forum and ask whether she should flounce off to the shops after drop off without telling her DH

Let him know you're going to be out a while, by text, sure.

Someone asked why should you be the reasonabke one? Well, someone does have to be otherwise things spiral. That doesn't mean you can't be angry, or you can't take some time out -of course you can. It does mean that in time of conflict, someone has to be the adult, and that may be you this time and him another.

Take your time out. When your anger is gone - luckily, we're actually talking about rage here and that will probably ge gone by morning anyway - then you can talk. That's the key. When you can talk without getting enraged again you can sort out what he did and why it's not acceptable to you.

@Feef83 they’re two different things. Both are true. I can be adept at helping people manage their anger and not expect them to be able to manage it healthily every time. Because it is very difficult to do so.

@Phelicity thanks for the advice. Ill look into a career change

@Feef83 also, flounce is so sexist! As a previous pp. where’s the outrage at the DH ‘flouncing’ off?

🙄

So not not possible to manage every time

whereas before you said it was “fact” that people can’t manage their anger

you’re getting yourself in a twist here @Melloyellow1983

Not so much “advice”, more a gut reaction Melloyellow to the idea that the OP’s proposed strategy, if acted upon, would be a healthy expression of her anger. However, today is another day and her anger has hopefully burnt itself out by now, and the couple have resolved their differences without having to resort to anything drastic. Let’s hope so.

Well, I think the OP's DH's action of disappearing to sleep in the spare room was 'drastic'! Or is it only drastic behaviour if a woman does something?

@Phelicity no, I didn’t say it was healthy. I wasn’t bogged down with the healthy thing. Other posters are using the healthy thing as a stick to beat her with. I offered that with a few tweaks - such as letting him know she was going to go out for the day and having a proper conversation after her day away - it could be seen as a time-out which is a very healthy part of anger management. I did say all this in the posts you read

@Feef83 I said no one can adeptly manage their own anger. I completely stand by that and haven’t contradicted myself. I didn’t say no one can manage their feelings of anger, ever. There are too many factors involved in conflict and anger that are out of our control for anyone to be able to respond in the ‘correct’ way every single time. It’s impossible. I can develop the healthiest strategies and maintain them for month, even years then one cross word from my mother brings me straight back to feeling and acting like a teenager

Leaving a baby without letting the other person know is a terrible idea.

Imagine he assumed you took them all out and then went out himself or something.

Leave him to look after the kids all day by all means but he needs to be told.

Has he ever snuck out and left without you knowing?

I really don’t know how to answer that one Penelopestrawberry as it bears absolutely no relation to anything I’ve said.

You said that hopefully the couple have resolved their differences without resorting to anything drastic, which means that a) you are glossing over/ignoring the fact that the OP's husband buggered off to sleep in the spare room leaving her to deal with the baby and b)you are saying that OP's plan was 'drastic' but that was her DH did was not drastic

@PenelopeStrawberry1 going out all day and not telling a partner is drastic.

DH buggard off to another bedroom, OP could've taken the child to him, I'm still struggling to understand the reason why she couldn't have just taken the child to him, if he didn't get up. What about being in the other bedroom means he couldn't deal with the child.

But OPs idea is a much bigger step than that.

Penelopestrawberry, yes, I said “hopefully the couple have resolved their differences without resorting to anything drastic”. The rest of what you wrote is a figment of your imagination.

If someone posted on here saying their husband had gone off for the day leaving them to do childcare and not saying where they'd gone there would almost certainly be posts on here saying 'Bless him, men need their space' or 'parenting doesn't come naturally to me'. But because it's a woman she's akin to the devil

*parenting doesn't come naturally to men

How did today go?