Why do I feel miffed DH is suggesting a 4 day week for him?

[Callistone]

Think I might be being U…

2 DC, 7 and 11. Both DH and I work f/t. Me 9-5, three days from home, two commuting into the city. Him now entirely flexible with 1-3 days in the city per week.

Background, which is important to me, is he worked shifts for the past decade. I stayed mostly f/t, working all week, often on my own with the kids evening and weekends. He’s been in this new role 6 months.

He wants to work Mon to Thurs 7 till 5 or 8-6. He can take breaks when needed for the school run (annoyingly long some days due to the distance to school) and can work on the train while commuting. His argument is he can do housework on his long weekends.

I’m… possibly bitter? Jealous? During shift work he used to have whole days off to himself during the school week. Now he’ll get a whole day off during the week again. I’m worried his long hours those 4 days might yet again leaving me to manage the kids before and after my working day. He’s alright pulling his weight but somewhat woolly on the daily tasks that still need doing - laundry, homework, lunch boxes etc. I have a horrible feeling he’ll finish at 6 and leap straight into making dinner (a bone of contention as he is anal about cooking and won’t eat my less good cooking, but he sees it as something important he does for the family).

I can’t shake this feeling it’ll work out better for him but I won’t see any benefit here. I’m probably being very U. Am I? Or am I justified in being unsure of this?

"We’ve had a brief conversation this morning about needing to be much more organised with shopping and food planning (he tends to decide on the day what he fancies cooking and then someone has to go to the shop and buy that, which drives me nuts) and making sure there’s stuff in for lunch boxes. He looked mildly unimpressed by this, he’s very much not a planner…"

Well if he was the one to usually pick up bits for his daily cooking escapades I wonder would he be "mildly unimpressed" by the OP making a point of mentioning it.

Perhaps the OP might clarify?

I think it’s totally ok to say actually I feel like I did years of hard slog being the one at home doing all the kid stuff and housework and I put my job and career on the back burner to support yours. now I am finally having the chance to both have a normal family life and be able to focus more on my career and it feels like this decision of yours cancels both those options. I’ll be doing more at the end of the day, and there won’t be any push from you into family life to prioritise my career. I don’t want you to cook dinner every night unless you can walk into the kitchen and have a meal in 40 minutes 3 nights a week- the way you do it you are just indulging your hobby while I do the sorting the kids and house. I need you to focus on what our family and I need with this move not so much on what you’ve decided is the way you want to contribute. I need you to understand I need a new job soonish to progress my career and that might mean changes for you to support me, and I need to know you will support me otherwise I resent those years I spent supporting you so much I don’t even know if we can recover from this.

do you want to do something regular like a gym class? As part of this discussion agree that you can enrol in a class at a set time and he will facilitate that by doing some housework and homework etc not just cooking for an hour.

Even if he is he’s choosing to spend over an hour extra ever day on shopping and cooking- that’s a hell of a lot of housework or parenting he’s not doing. We both work and we cook dinners so we meal plan and have lots of super quick thing. Obviously that’s not always my favorite food but my priority most work evenings is feeding my children, quickly and efficiently and minimising clean up because there are 10,000 other things to do. Dh would hear it from me if he did it like the ops Dh as we don’t have time for that, and my Dh would just have to stay up to midnight to fit in the housework adn admin anyway and also wash all those dishes.

I completely agree.

Cooking as a hobby mid week while the OP does the dirty business of organising house and children is not what most partners would tolerate.

I certainly wouldn't.

Dinner promptly on the table as part of the household duties yes, having a leisurely cooking hour whilst your partner runs around like a blue arsed fly? Absolutely not.

Hence I'd love the clarification.

Because it sounds like he does what he pleases when he pleases and has organised things solely for his benefit.

His shift work has kept her on a very tight leash as she works full-time.

To clarify, the DC have been fed at childcare a lot over the years so we’ve got into a habit of him cooking something for us for later in the evening, and that is normally more complicated or time consuming.

I said we need to change to something nearer meal planning and more bill shopping as we’ll now have DC to feed most evenings so there’s more priority for getting a meal on the table at 6, rather than 8.

If he works 7-5, that’s most mornings that I’ll have the morning stuff to sort out. If we works 8-6 he can share some of the mornings but we won’t be eating till gone 7 if he fart-arses around cooking, and then the new secondary age DC will either have to wait ages for dinner, cook herself, or I’ll have to cook for her. Yes, there’s always some batch cooking that can be done for older DC and she can wait some evenings but I didn’t entirely want to make a habit of her eating alone or cooking herself pasta (she’s young and still learning to cook)

Its the little things like that.

An 11 year old can’t eat at 7pm?

Seriously? How about I know my own DC and when they are likely to be hungry after a full day at school and lunch at 12.30?

@Callistone

7pm is a pretty standard dinner time…

7pm is a pretty standard dinner time…

How old are your children? @LuckySantangelo35 What time is their lunch at school?

It’s not for our DC, lunch at school is early and anyway DD has clubs twice a week from 7ish.

I’m always amazed the turns threads take…

Perhaps you need to say we can make this work if and only if you work 8-6 so you don’t leave me to do the mornings on my own and I cook several nights for everyone so our daughter gets a meal on time, and you don’t critique the meal, particularly as it will have been produced in a fraction of the time it would take you and takes less cleaning so frees up both of us to get other things done.

I mean, there are lots of parents who work later so they need to eat a bit later. My family ate at 6.30/7 because that's when both my parents got in from work. We had fruit when we got in from school as a snack. They batch cooked/ used the slow cooker or had things prepped the night before. On the night we had something on there was a sandwich waiting in the fridge. I think you're overstressing around this.

Dh and I get in late usually so we will make batches of 3 meals at the weekend and freeze in portions so all we need to do is defrost overnight and cook fresh pasta or rice on the day which doesn't take long. Why not take it in turns doing that at the weekend and tell him he's not to criticise or he can go hungry.

Note how hard your parents worked so you could eat as soon as they could feasibly get dinner on the table? Batch cooking, slow cooking, prep the night before, sometimes a sandwich. The op wouldn’t complain if that’s what was happening here. Your parents didn’t come home, think ah what do I feel like cooking, waltz off to the shops, then pissfart around the kitchen conjuring up gourmet delights while you all hung around saying I’m staaaarrrrvvvvinngggg. And I think if one of your parents had done this the other would have been deeply unimpressed.
We do it like your parents, we work hard to feed our kids as early as possible. They are eating chicken vegetable meatballs i cooked up weeks ago and froze tonight.

Great idea. His day off during the week will give him the energy to do the legwork on the weekend to give you a day to yourself. Hand over the reins and make him responsible for all sports/parties/shopping for presents, etc. Go to the gym, art galleries, movies, gin with friends.

My DH is a shift worker so I totally get the low grade resentment about how much time off totally they accrue to themselves in the middle of the school day.
Actually I see this new arrangement as positive for you - you just need to set the ground rules now. So he gets every Friday off to himself. Great. You get one weekend day off. Routinely. And then you have one day all together. I think that's a great solution and stops you feeling burned out and resentful.

My children would be home from school by 4.30 from secondary and were always hungry and ready for dinner at 5- 5.30 ish.

Dragging it out till 7pm when they were in bed for 9.30-10pm, and had music lessons or training wouldn't have worked here.

Of course some people have zero choice so they do batch cook to get things on the table asap.

Not ideal for a child to be having to cook pasta for themselves so their father can indulge his cooking hobby which causes dinner to be served late.

Dinner during the week needs to be nutricious and on the table asap for young children.

After a long day, tiredness can affect a childs appetite so dinner when they are hungry is best.

Simple meals can be produced quickly with planning.

Lots of parents do this every day successfully with planning.

His hobby cooking should not come ahead of feeding the children in a timely manner IMO.

Lots of good advice on here - I hope you find some of it useful.

I get your concern, I really do. You're worried that you will end up picking up the slack on his long working days, while he gets a "day off".

In which case you really need to have an honest conversation with him about that. Maybe there's things you might want to do at the weekend that he could enable for you ... like meet up with your girlfriends once a month, or go to a running club on Sunday mornings, etc, etc?

It has been really helpful actually. It’s helped me narrow down what exactly I’m concerned about and made me think about what I want in terms of work/free time, which one I feel takes precedence for me.

He’s going to start the pattern in a few weeks and I’m not going to say anything, we’ll see if it all plays out well as I may be worried about nothing, and if it doesn’t we’ll have an adult conversation about organising our lives and family stuff.

😂

I like to eat later, the DC eat earlier and would not be able to wait until 8pm.

I am actually looking into working 40 hours over 4 days I stead of five. At the moment my OH works less hours. They do more housework than I do at the moment so we will recalibrate tasks.

We are both motivated and responsible. It seems like your DH leaves the wife work and planning to you. I would feel resentful. I would set boundaries, maybe your OH can do clubs on his non working day, grocery shopping and batch cook?

What works for us is set tasks and the same amount of down time. I clean the bathroom and batch cook OH does all of the laundry. We split cooking.

It was not always this way. I was self employed for a while when DC were tiny. I took on the mental load and it was tough when I went back to work ft in the office. Oh had to step up, they had NO IDEA the amount of planning and organisation went into making the morning run smoothly. The clothes were not laying out themselves.

I had to hand the task and planning over and then not sweat it when they were not done the way I would have done it. They took on laundry, I said it works better for the family if the laundry is washed dried and put away on the same day. That doesn't always happen but it is organised (and I don't participate).