Do you think I do enough as a mum?

[Needaweekspabreak]

I work full time from home and I mainly do all cooking, cook from fresh do breakfast in the morning and get kids ready for school.

DH works part time 15 hours does all school runs and is the main carer for 1 year old dc during the day.

I do still help out with dc in the day if not too busy with work.

DH will wash the clothes and put them away and is the main tidy upper should I say. I will mop floors and do bathrooms and change bedding.

DH feels I’m not doing enough and wants me to help him out more with cleaning and washing. I just find once I log off work at 5 and start dinner I’m absolutely knackered and 3 evenings a week when DH goes to work I’m with all 3 kids.

DH has 2-3 hours in the day where DS is napping he could achieve so much but he usually goes for a nap. Which I’m not against as DS is draining.

DH takes DS football training on Thursday and Sundays too for an hour.

Should I be helping out more?

Sorry, I missed that.

I can’t believe he looks after 1yo all day THEN goes to work. I think that too much for any parent. No wonder he wants more help with chores. Sounds exhausting.

Sit down and work out how many hows of paid work/house work/childcare you each do per week.
And how many hours of free time/down time you have.

Presumably you have an hour lunch break a day, so why shouldn't he have an hour nap?

Rather than adding up and comparing the hours you both put in to work, childcare and chores, it might be easier to compare total leisure time, whether that's spent on hobbies, seeing friends, napping or sitting on your bum in front of the TV. Is that equal?

FWIW, we have similar working hours in reverse (it's me on 15-25hrs/wk) but with 2 school-age DCs. DH does 2 early-start mornings with DC1 (I do the other 3 plus both weekend mornings for clubs). He does all the washing up & putting away, cleans the bathrooms once a week, does all the showering/hair detangling for DCs and is in sole charge of the veg patch. He does all the admin related to the cars plus a number of ad hoc admin jobs throughout the year. I do the rest. We have broadly similar leisure time.

When do you get your afternoon nap?

Parenting a 1yo is very intensive compared to a teenager who can fend for themselves most of the day. Sounds like the DH needs extra help.

You could get a robot hoover?

Her husband is working 15 hours a week
BUT also doing full time childcare for the 1 year old so it’s not like he’s dossing around. He’s saving you both thousands in childcare.

He has a full time job looking after a baby and doing the daily cleaning of the home, and then he has a part time job outside the home too. It's a hell of a lot.

The audacity of this man.

You're doing the night wake ups and yet he is the one napping during the day.

Why does a healthy man who slept all night need a nap?!

You do more than enough.

i think it sounds like you do enough, but perhaps he’s a bit bogged down with the ground hog day-ness of it, then when he goes to work it isn’t really a change/break, because rather than a day away from home, he does his full day of sahp and then goes to work as well. I felt a bit like this during lock down, it was my two days at work when my kids were little which kept me sane.

it is also more frustrating when the other person is in the house but not available (or possibly choosing not to be) to help you - this was also a common lockdown experience.

I guess some of this is the payoff for not using any childcare when you both work. Maybe he needs a change and is feeling frustrated generally? Is there anything else you can do to make things easier for both of you?

@Phleghm yh this basically. Sorry his schedule does sound pretty full on and if the genders were reversed the replies would be different. This place is weird at times.

Most people can keep a house clean and tidy, washing done and floors mopped in 2 hours a day over 5 days tops.
Your dh is busy, you’re busy. The difference is that your job keeps a roof over your head and his presumably is much less well paid.
Considering what you both do I think it’s fair.
The problem is that you wfh and your dh can see what you’re up to.
If you left the house at 8.30 and returned at 5.30 he may take your job more seriously. You need to start making yourself look more busy and important, that’s what men do.

It’s what most of my female friends did in the 90’s. Parented all day and then handed the dc over at 6 so they could stack supermarket shelves. Strangely they still managed to do 90% of the housework too.
I couldn’t as my dh worked away so I worked every Saturday.

Doesn't make it a fair division of labour though. And also, just because it's possible to do the housework in the time he has doesn't mean it's practical... A 1 yo is a lot of work, plus the mess made by the other two needs tidying...

I guess it depends on the nature of the one year old ... when my DS was that age it was quite honestly the easiest stage of my life (I was a SAHM) ... DS had two long naps a day, we'd go out for a long walk (DS in the pram), drift around having coffee with friends or go to Baby groups, DS would be quite content in the playpen if I wanted to do a bit of housework or cooking (never more than an hour a day max) Most of the time I spent lying on the sofa reading ... but I do know I was very fortunate to have an incredibly laid back baby.
What exactly does your DH expect you to do be doing ... are his housework standards incredibly high?

It's quite funny how different the responses are based on genders.
Everyone would be focusing on the childcare aspect if the other half was a woman, how she was full time caring for a baby and working 15 hours on top! But as soon as it's a man at home he's only really dossing around all day and only works 15 hours a week.

@Needaweekspabreak

you don’t need to cook from scratch every night op

you could be using that time to do other stuff round the house

Not everyone. I'd feel the same no matter what based on the fact that her DH says her full time job which assuming provides for the family financially for the main isn't even a real job.

I don't think he's dossing around at all but then OP isn't either, carrying the financial load isn't easy and neither is working full time on broken sleep knowing that DH gets a daily nap after always getting a full nights sleep.

What exactly does your DH want you do more of? If you do all the cooking, getting the DC ready for school, mopping floors, cleaning bathrooms & changing beds? He does laundry and 'tidying' ... unless you are clean freaks what else is there to do on a daily basis? Dusting, vacuuming - quick blitz at the weekend? Surely things like washing windows, paintwork, skirting boards etc aren't regular daily jobs?
Who does the shopping or do you get it delivered?
Or maybe my standards are very low ...

DH just wants everything perfect and unfortunately I can’t live up to his standards.

I think that's the root of the issue - you have different expectations of what should REASONABLY be done. A discussion about that sounds like a way forward, as compromise is possibly the only way this will be resolved.
If it was me, I wouldn't do extra just to meet someone else's expectations of cleanliness, but I'm a miserable old bat.

I think the expectations thing is common if one is at home more than the other, especially with young kids- I think the one at home ends up going in circles and getting frustrated because of all the tasks they can't do because the baby is demanding/crying/poorly and it builds up and up in their head. The one working finds it easier to have lower standards because they can step away for a bit and are understandably tired and don't want to jump into dusting the sideboards as it's just not a priority. Does that seem like what's happening? Or has he always been quite fastidious with housekeeping?

That would have killed me. Adorable though babies and toddlers are, they take an extraordinary amount of energy and a lot of physical fitness to look after, especially on the 5 hours tops sleep I was getting. Even when I was a full time au pair 9 am - 6 pm five days a week when I was 18, I ended up so exhausted I had to cut down to three days a week.