5128gap I am not sure I need to bother to reply to you. After many years of marking University exam papers I can see when someone is trying to show off and cram in as much of the latest 'pop' psychology or crazy ideas as they can and aiming to look clever by deriding the down to earth words of older more experienced Practitioners in the field.
I'm happy with all that I said. No gymnastics required. Maybe your desire to be spiteful or your anxieties about the status of women or your own role makes you unsettled? You would have us believe this is some kind of social revolution. It is not. We are asked to respond to one thing the Op's husband is doing.
The OP's situation should not be that her husband forces her into going back to work after 15 years and while their youngest is 3, just because he has decided to start being critical of her or has changed his attitude after all this time. It sounds as though until he started this idea to bully her she was contented and fulfilled in her SAHM role which is a very demanding one but you may not know this. I've know many women over many years who have told me after having a baby they couldn't wait to get back to work 'for a rest'.
As for my response to the discussion about decent men, I see no reason to be apologetic about that. Sometimes it can appear that we are only concentrating on the bad ones but the nature of MN naturally leads women who are experiencing difficulties in relationships to come here for advice and help.
You seem to have a strange attitude that leads you to see motives that simply are not there. What rubbish to say, "your support of the trad wife lifestyle " and then you go on to trash the choice of the SAHW! Such judgmentalism! Plus your comment "Your desire to pin the failure of the set up on the man, rather than the lifestyle model," Are you serious? Six complete fallacies! In just eighteen words! It must be a record. You invent SIX lies to 'pin' on me!
You produce are entirely cliché-filled bogus ideas. This OP has been a SAHM from choice for 15 years or perhaps you missed that. She is not just embarking on motherhood or marriage.
When I respond to the letters of an OP, I simply do just that. I respond to their situation and address all the elements as far as I can which they have chosen to tell us. I do not embark on a lecture about modern and ancient lifestyles or models of running a family or marriage. That would be crass, a complete waste of time and wholly disrespectful to the OP who has been living the way she chose some 15 years and probably knows more about running a family than you ever will., She wrote to us regarding a problem that has only just arisen about which she seeks our advice.
You may well think that the arrival of a baby automatically means a woman should carry on working because she must not "perpetuate" "dependency on a man" in case he "turned out to be a dud (as many sadly do)" - all words on quotation marks are yours. I am sure you espouse that all mothers pass the baby over to the services of professional childminding institutions, and continue to reap wages which in some cases may not cover the child-minding costs.
But it is not for you to judge those women who choose to care for their babies at home themselves. Some have strong feelings that they want to be with their child rather than go out to work just to hand over their salary to the child minder and miss out on those irretrievable early years of their child's development and the closeness of the relationship that grows at this time. People have their own different choices. Many women manage work and a baby brilliantly. But some, especially if their job is not very good at blending with having a baby, do not like leaving their baby with someone else.
5128gap I don't know which political or sociological degree you did or what you read, but your ideas are way up the creek. You have left the common-sense feet on the ground experience most of us have. You're living some weird socially manipulated ideal that was invented by someone who wants babies to be manufactured in machines. Comments like "Your desire to pin the failure of the set up on the man, rather than the lifestyle model" are pure word-salad or gobbledegook. They sound clever but are a]untrue and b] rubbish. I have no 'desire' to 'pin' anything on anybody. I do not judge. I listen to what the OP says! Her problem is being given the written list to do and having it checked later on. If that's what you call "the failure of the set up" then why can't you stick to facts and say, the man decided to ...... and the OP is made unhappy by it? After 15 years of doing her job as a SAHM she seems to have coped OK to me!
Honestly - you are really rather nasty aren't you 5128gap? Why do you need to come on here to show off your 'newspeak' and try and put down someone who simply has only good will towards a person she would like to try and help?