Do I have unreasonable expectations of SAHP role?

[Babysharkdodo123]

Currently on mat leave with 4 month old. 22 month old in nursery couple of days as no family around to help and wanted to keep routine.

Dog needed to go to vets this morning for routine boosters so I asked DH if he could take her as i would have to juggle both kids and dog. Appointment at 8.30am so before work. He said no "why couldn't I do it as he was at work earning the money" (for ref I only get SMP).

I then got asked what I was doing today (meeting friends new baby) which was met with "oh, I thought you could get through some of the laundry".

So AIBU that household maintenance ie dogs, drs appointments, cleaning, laundry, cooking, grocery shopping should be shared in non working hours? If I was at work and DCs in nursery then no one would be home to do all of these jobs so they'd have to be shared out. Just because I'm on mat leave I don't think it should be expected that I do everything and DH wakes up, leaves and earns money.

Did he agree to take the dog? If he didn’t YABU, just book it for a nursery day.

It’s hard to comment on the laundry day without knowing where you are with it.

Most 12 week old babies are sleeping through? Where the fuck did you hear that? Never heard of the 4 month sleep regression? Most children don’t sleep properly until around age 2/3. Let me guess, you’re the dad that doesn’t have to get up and feed them multiple times a night.

My advice would be this - don't do a single chore more than you intend to continue doing when you go back to work.

If you get into a pattern of being responsible for them all, he won't take them back when you restart working. You'll be on your knees.

This is part of how maternity leave screws women.

Far better that your husband steps up and does a little more than his share now, when you're exhausted from night wakings and getting to grips with balancing the needs of two DC, than that it all gets pushed onto your plate and he gets used to a dynamic where he does a single shift and then comes home and relaxes, while you go to work and then come home to a second shift of housework and then all the night wakings as well.

You are asking him not even to step up but just to continue doing what he would have been doing anyway (his share at home).

He is a working parent with two children. You will presumably be a working parent with two children. Plan your lives based on this dynamic. Maternity leave is a very short time.

Strap the baby to you, let the older child ‘help’. It’s a great way to make a mess and get jobs done. My eldest learned loads counting clothes, sorting colours, naming items from the dishwasher, putting clothes away, sweeping up. Youngest waggled around on my chest as we did things together.

My 1yo is not sleeping through yet.

@Mikimoto many babies are not sleeping through the night at 12 weeks and on some days OP has a toddler to contend with too.

When I was on maternity leave and then went back part-time, DH and I agreed that wasn’t so I could spend my time doing chores, the idea was that I spent time with DC. Yes I would do some whilst at home, but if some days were either overwhelming, knackering due to lack of sleep or full on fun, then DH would pitch in when he got home

Deary me, when did having a baby/child become such an ordeal? all this time to bond, enrichment days out, can't possibly do a thing except gaze at baby??
I know we don't like to say back in the day, but seriously how do you think women managed without all the mod cons for housework and multiple babies?
I think half the pps here think they're the first person to have a baby and seem to want fawned upon for this achievement.
I actually cringe at half the nonsense on here, the entitled dozy attitudes.
You'd be quick to moan if the roles were reversed and the man was sitting on his arse or at baby groups and the house was a shit tip!

@HerMammy yes we could go back to the olden days when mums were tied to the kitchen sink and lived a life of drudge and men would never lift a hand to do either household chores or childcare.

If DH was at home with baby I wouldn’t see it as sitting on his arse if he was going to baby groups.

Well said @HerMammy maybe it would be better OP if you spent less time gadding about visiting friends and more time being a homemaker for your whole family.

Not RTFT, but I think YABU. Posters saying you're not a SAHP whilst on Mat Leave - this is just silly, it's exactly what you are. I am a SAHP to one 2 year old (so it's not the same as having a baby and toddler. I have friends in that position and it is definitely harder). DH and I have had many of the same difficulties over who should be doing what. Bottom line is I am in the home way more than he is and am only in the position of being able to be at home with my child because he works very hard in a stressful role. Our biggest issue is the time around teatime when he arrives back from work. I am frazzled from looking after DC all day and trying to get chores done, DC is getting tired and being hard work / demanding, I'm trying to cook dinner for everyone. I need him to take DC off my hands for a bit so I can get dinner sorted. He needs some time to get changed, breathe etc after a day at work in a job he doesn't enjoy. Neither of us are unreasonable.

As a general rule, I try my best to pick up the chores - laundry, putting clothes away, recycling, bin emptying, general tidying, cooking, changing bedding etc in addition to childcare and activities with DC. Gardening is shared and DIY tasks are DH. He also washes up after dinner and puts dry pots away in the morning before work. Anything I don't manage to do during the week, he will help with at the weekend. We are lucky enough to have cleaners in once a week, which reduces the load. Essentially, the person going out to work and providing the financial means to fund the lifestyle enjoyed by everyone needs to be able to function effectively. Of course the SAHP also needs to be able to function effectively too or everything collapses in a different way but I do think that if you are at home, especially with a child in nursery two days a week, you should be aiming to pick up the majority of chores. It's a tricky balance sometimes but I think of both partners are respectful and understanding of what the challenges are for the other and do their best to support and pick up any loose ends, it all comes together more or less ok.

Regarding the dog, you should be doing this as the person at home. Regarding other chores, you should be doing as much of this as you can. You can meet your friend and get some laundry done, they're not mutually exclusive. You can't just fill your days with nice activities and ignore the chores because you think they should be split during non-working hours. Meeting your friend's new baby isn't work. Regarding your DH questioning you about what you're doing - this is a bit controlling and I'd be telling him that it's not up to him to tell you how to organise your time. However, if the laundry has really piled up, I can see why he might have said something.

@IDontOftenComment do you live in the 1950s

Hmm neither of you unreasonable really. I have to say I just did all the housework when I was a SAHP. I saw it as part of my role. DH worked long hours and when he wasn't working I wanted him to spend time with the kids.
Yes my main role was childcare but I had plenty of time to do the laundry and prepare meals.

@Missdemeanorz My daily chores? Well I got up at 6am with the baby, pooey nappy change, dressed for the day, breastfeed. Took him in to wake up DD for school and supervise her brushing her teeth. Put the dishwasher on because DP forgot last night, but first took out the high chair tray and breakfast things and hand washed them while he sorted breakfast. Supervised the baby’s breakfast then cleaned him up, then he did a poonami so a nappy change and starting again with a new outfit. DP’s currently doing the school run while I supervise the kamikaze baby practising cruising (Mumsnetting over his head, obviously). He’ll nap at 9am for precisely 30 minutes which is my window to clear up breakfast things, wipe down high chair, unload dishwasher, prep his snack and lunch, assess the calpol stocks because it’s sick season, and whip round the house to tidy all the rooms for the cleaner who’s coming at 9.30. If I’m lucky I’ll have time to shower.

I’m actually not fully sure on what DP’s chores are because we split things fully to decrease the mental load (though he does like to give me endless laundry reports). He does bins, recycling, the tip, food shop and top-up shops, all laundry. Plus a bunch of other stuff I can’t remember, and as and when stuff like DIY, tech, changing lightbulbs. I do all cleaning (in-between weekly cleaner visits), tidying, the garden, decluttering as the baby rapidly grows through things, weekday dinners, half the weekend meals, meal plans, school communication, childcare admin, manage home renovation, everything car-related, everything cat-related, school holiday planning, homework, celebrations (anything ever needed for Halloween, Christmas, birthdays, Easter, tooth fairy, pancake day, firework night), bunch of other stuff that’s more as and when – tonight I have to make a fancy cake and tomorrow night prep some side dishes for a family thing we’re hosting this weekend, for instance.

Generally in the baby’s lunch nap of 90 mins I clear up his lunch and the blast zone, make and eat mine, prep the family dinner for that night or batch cook or batch freezer bags of sofritto, and deal with the endless to do list of random shite that family life entails. I usually sit down for a whole 20 minutes towards the end of the nap with a cup of tea, as that’s my last chance til the oldest goes to bed at 8pm. The rest of the day he’s awake and it is filled with breastfeeds and the baby’s dinner and going to the library for rhyme time and the playground for swings and the ducks to throw kale at them even though they want bread, and supervising him going up and down the stairs and nappy changes and snot sucking and calpol for teeth and occasional baby classes and, rarely, coffee with a friend – we’re all too busy. Although I don’t touch laundry I do put the baby’s clothes away because he’s always asleep in DP’s window to do that. Once he’s in nursery I’ll be completely hands-off.

When the baby was four months I did far, far less and DP either did more or we let things slide: my job at four months was surviving the sleep regression, regaining my fitness (I couldn’t walk during pregnancy so had completely atrophied), breastfeeding approximately 9,000 times a day, and watching 19 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy while I did so, because it’s not often you have a baby and it’s a big deal. I cannot fathom DP questioning anything I was doing at four months: I was doing exactly what I was supposed to. Everyone was fed and bathed and the house was a bit of a tip.

how do you think women managed without all the mod cons for housework and multiple babies?
Gin, drugs, nervous breakdowns, probably.

And a lot of really poor quality parenting.

I am usually on the side of splitting it but I don’t think your DH is being unreasonable.

flip it round, you go to work and your husband is at home where 2 of the days he is home with a 4 month old who are pretty easy to care for and take round and do whatever with and he is not doing laundry or the general hits and pieces of house chores. you would come home annoyed too as it’s n it a difficult task.

That’s a total breeze to do in those two days. When you’ve got your mobile toddler that’s very different as logistically you are doing a lot more.

Why organise a vets appointment 830am in the middle of commuter traffic and right before work, presumably making him late if he were to do it? Wouldn’t it be better to use your 2 easy days to get ‘admin’ done so you can all be together in the evenings? It’s also not much time commitment to throw clothes in a washing machine.

when he gets home he can spend time with the kids. Bath time etc.

I don’t think he’s being unreasonable at all.

Don't understand why you wouldn't want to do as much as you can so your family can spend time together after work or weekends.

Threads like this feel like the two adults are too busy tit for tatting each other to even care about each other. Why wouldn't either of you want to make the other ones life easier as a base of being together. Rather than it's your turn to do the washing!

SAHP should do the bulk of domestic stuff, including taking the dog to the vet. I count 'parent on maternity leave' as SAHP for the purposes of this thread. Being a SAHP is brilliant fun. You get to choose what you do, and when, and with whom. You can see friends and drink at least one mouthful of tea and manage half a sentence before a small person needs something. You can be outside a lot. No annoying boss is telling you what to do, and if you want to stay at home all day, you can. The payoff for that is that you have to do more domestic shit. Or the minimum, if you're that way inclined (as I am - doing things with the children and friends was more interesting than housework when they were little).

The only thing that is not ok is the working parent trying to tell the SAHP what they should be doing at home. I always did the bare minimum when it came to cleaning etc - if my husband had wanted the skirting boards to be polished, he could have done that himself.

OP has an easier time than most SAHPs/women on mat leave as her older child is at nursery part of the time. I just used to have to take my children everywhere. There was a very long period when I just didn't do things like have my hair cut, because it wasn't feasible to do it with the DC in tow.

@NumbersEverywhere there is a difference between maternity leave and being SAHP. You don’t go on maternity leave to do chores. It is a legal right to have maternity leave. The whole point of maternity leave is to recover from the birth and then have time with the baby. Then becoming a SAHP is a choice

It’s not a time no one can do; he just didn’t want to do it.

This is such a non Mumsnet thing to say and think. But when I was a SAHM I was aware that my dp was doing a shit commute and working at a very hard stressful job and missing his children fiercely, my job involved a lot of playing in the park in the sun with those children and drinking coffee with my friends. Obviously there were tough bits to my job too-but the good bits were so very good.
Also- on my bad days, I knew that he would come home and happily take those children and do whatever needed to be done with them. I would a million times rather cook some dinner than spend another second with those children! 🤣 So fair does not mean equal.

And I am so sorry so many people seem to have had a shit time raising small children.

Wherever possible, children should not be in vets - imo. The animals (esp the dogs) there are often very scared, stressed and there is a liklihood they are also in pain. That makes them behave in ways they wouldn't normally and the presence of a child may stress them further (lots of dogs not that used to children) and or react if the child gets too close. Waiting rooms are often small and vets often run late in my experience - and all that makes it even harder to keep everyone safe and happy.

SAHP here, husband out the country a lot, no family, no help, 3 kids under 3 years old. You just strap a kid on you, and you just get on with it.

They're both very well behaved, thank you. But the vets is a place that can cause the best behaved dogs to act out, because they can be afraid of it. And at our vets, there's occasions they'll ask you to hold the dog while they do things. I'm not willing to risk my toddler (who isn't even 2 yet) getting hurt because I have to hold onto and reassure my dog, who's possibly having an injection, and therefore don't have enough arms to stop the toddler from getting in the way because she's curious, or worried about her best friend (dog) being upset.

You do you though, I'm not judging you for doing what I don't consider safe. Don't judge me for doing what I DO consider to be safe. Jog on.

There's a difference between SAHP and maternity leave. I never considered myself a SAHP when on maternity leave.

If someone is at home more and currently not working, it does make sense for them to do a little more at home but when on maternity leave, I wouldn't expect them to be doing every single thing.