To think giving me one day a week actually isn’t ok?? Or AIBU?

[wpur]

DH works away in the week and on Saturdays he has to do ‘admin.’ He is high up in the NHS and prior to having dd he did always work Saturdays in his office room in our house. I wouldn’t see him pretty much all day.

Since having dd he had to relocate for work, this was not his fault and he has taken the best job he can. It is not possible for him to come home in the week, it’s too far and would be pointless anyway as dd is long in bed before he gets back. No point me relocating with him as I have all my family nearby and his contact is only fixed for 9 months… then the search will begin again for another job.

He has started coming home late Saturday night (after dd is in bed) and then staying all day Sunday until she has gone to bed. He relocated for work when she was 6 months and she’s now 17 months. I am sick of doing everything alone. He has said I can take the entire day on a Sunday to myself, either go out alone or we all go out as a family, or he will do entertain her all day while I am in the house doing my own thing etc.

I feel like this is unacceptable and he should be back late Friday night to help on Saturdays too. He says it is pointless as he can’t avoid the Saturday admin work and he would just have to do it when back at home and it would take him longer to get through it. He thinks giving me a day to myself a week is sufficient in the circumstances. AIBU? I am so fed up and angry that I genuinely don’t know if I’m being unreasonable.

I think a lot more understanding and credit should be given to your DH op.

My mum is also high up in the NHS and the amount of pressure on her to do huge admin paperwork in unreasonable time frames is immense.. she does admin for an entire department which is extremely busy all year round (fracture clinic) and ensuring each patients info in input accurately is very important as they can be held accountable for mistakes.

It is energy and time consuming so for the fact he is still offering his sundays - probably his one and only full day to himself is more than reasonable imo - and its a 9 month contract so it will not be forever.

You are in a partnership. Try and understand what he does and why it takes so long. He will not be allowed to share info with you because he is bound under GDPR but the NHS were not protesting for no reason and all they were offered was claps and thank you signs.

Support him through it and try to understand how important his job actually is. Explain how much time you would like and see if he can work around it with the next job he takes.

It does not seem very fair of you to expect more from him when the NHS has been short staffed across all departments for a very long time meaning his admin load may well be sky high for all kinds of reasons like my own DM.

I feel for you OP, but YABU imo.

Hoping things get better for you all when DH's contract is up

This is a really difficult situation with so much stress , not to mention wondering what you are all going to do in 9 months. The NHS can be a brutal place to work and I feel that expectations for employees are increasing all of the time. They want more for the same or less.
If it were me I would try to accept that he is doing his best , you are also doing your best and dig in until the contract ends.
The Saturday thing, I can see both your points, both are equally valid so maybe try alternating or some kind of similar compromise.
When you know what will be on offer next time you can negotiate again with more knowledge of what will be your 'deal breakers'
Good luck xxx

Is he the only earner? It’s hard to be objective without knowing that.

wpur · Yesterday 11:50
Hi, yes I work too

This

I would LOVE an entire day to myself! You knew his work commitments before hand, yes its not ideal, but its the way it is. Im sure he would much rather be with his family then working, he is missing so much but it is what it is.
I have 3DCs U6 and the most time i get alone to myself is when i go to work!

What was the deal when he took the job? If you knew he would be working 6 day weeks I think you just need to suck it up until his contract finishes. Then have the conversation about how you can’t do it again.

you are sounding a little unreasonable at the moment.

are there things he can take off your hands from a distance like organising an online shop and other life admin.

Take him up on it and see how it goes for all your sakes. Then you know what the deal breakers are for his next job e.g. no Saturdays.

Consider a few mornings at nursery. Being rested will make you a better mum x

not so. once you get to be in senior management, your contract says something like "your hours are a minimum of xxx and you will be required to work the hours required to do the job" Its why i stopped one grade below that.

I'd say about 90% of consultants I know (including CDs) work way more hours than are in our job plans.

I remember when I was a new consultant people would say that life would settle down when I got a substantive role. Ha ha ha. It got worse.
I'm a CD and still at work, taking a short break to eat some shitty sandwiches from the canteen as I haven't had chance to have lunch today.
We're lucky as we have another consultant on this unit. Other depts in the hospital on,y have one. We have exactly half the number of staff that we need to run this place safely. For context, this is an oncology unit so the work is pretty intense. The nursing staff are hardest hit with 3 cancer nurse specialists rather than the 8 that we need to cope with the volume of patients we treat. This means that we have less experienced, less specialist nurses supporting patients with life limiting, life threatening and life changing conditions.

Our unit manager (non clinical band 7) is in the office next to mine and I can hear she's still around as well. She often has the role of unit counsellor as she's a,ways in her office so available for when my nurses and doctors have regular meltdowns. Like today when our registrar burst into tears when a patient died. He is used to it, of course, but this patient was supposed to survive but 🤷‍♀️ and he was tired and emotional and spent two hours crying in her office. That meant I had to cover his workload on the ward and my manager lost two hours where she was supposed to be reviewing a report. Hence why we are still at work at 7.
Our admin and managers can see the problems, but have no l means to help us because there is no more money and no one to recruit anyway. They too are emailing at 11pm after spending all day listening to us clinicians complain to them and then have to explain to the ICB why there arw 17 ambulances outside ED.....
It's shit.
Whoever it is that doesn't believe what NHS staff are saying, please stop gaslighting us. This is our reality. And yes, 500 emails a day is about right.

This is not a work life balance I could accept. For me this set up would make married pointless. I’d rather have less stuff and more family life.

How long do you envisage this continuing?

I really feel for you. Neither of you is having a marriage or a family. And you both must be exhausted. But seriously, what are your longterm plans and goals? And happiness? He has holiday leave. So no excuse not to plan time together? With or without child? And you have family you want to stay close to - so free childcare? Just where do you want to be in 5 years time, living in what house, doing what job, spending how much time with your child, spending how much time with your husband? What goals do you think you are both working for? Everyone needs to put in the effort to plan for happiness. Because we all have ticks in boxes that make us feel secure (paying the bills), we all have aspirations (living in that home or our child going to university) and we all should have fun (chill out time on holiday, leaving kids and responsibility behind for a weekend and going away).

It’s tough. I get that, but it’s tough for him too. Given that, I think YABU. He must be knackered. What’s the long term plan?

@Icklepicklepumpkin I expect though that your husband helps in the week? Cooks some meals, does some bath times, puts them to bed, puts the rubbish out, does some housework? You also under estimate how important it is to just have adult conversation in the evening, a glass of wine together here and there? I think it’s the company too and on the one day together want to do things as a family rather than go out and be on your own again?

I've had the kind of crazy job where you have to work away during the week and pick up all your 'admin' tasks in non-work time.
What I'd say is that if he's away from home during the week, what's he using his evenings for?
When I was working away, even if I left work at 7 and then hit the gym I'd still have an hour or so to 'play' with to get some of my tasks done.
If I'd been at home I'd have been tied up with domestic duties instead, but in a hotel room or 'Monday to Friday let' I didn't have that. So I could gym, eat, do an hour of work and then wind down for an hour or so before bed.
So working away was shit, but it meant I had much less to do at the weekends (workwise). If I spent the week at home I really noticed how Sunday afternoons were entirely swallowed up by work admin.
What's he doing in those evenings? It surely can't be working til 9pm, gym, bed every single day?
And I'd also suggest he probably should come home Friday evening. Even if your daughter is in bed when he gets in it still gives you some grown-up company for a little while and allows him to spend Saturday breakfast with your daughter, even if the rest of his Saturday is taken up with work. Even just popping into the kitchen for a brew for 5 mins while your daughter is having her lunch is better than him being entirely absent.
It's such a challenging situation to be in as your husband is obviously doing the right thing for his career and - presumably - his family in the longer run as this position will (hopefully) help him secure a permanent senior role in the future.
I'd say give his suggestion a go, but also see if some of the ideas outlined above might be workable for him too. At very least, coming home on a Friday should be workable.

He is not in corporate law, he has a real job, he is responsible for people's lives.

Corporate Law is as serious and real as medicine Ffs. Having a hierarchy of "worthwhile" jobs really doesn't help how doctors are perceived and the pressures on us to be perfect. It also doesn't help if - like nursing, teaching, other public sector roles - we are seen as having a vocation as that's just an excuse for not paying the public sector what it is worth.

Im sure he would much rather be with his family then working

Wouldn't he drive home Friday after work then? Instead he chooses to stay way until the child has gone to bed on Saturday.

She said 500 emails every evening with 250 that have to be responded to urgently. I'm not gaslighting, I’m asking how that is physically possible. At 1 minute per email that is 4 hours just to answer the 250 urgent ones, and that must be conservative surely.

I don’t think op means he stays in bed all day, she said he stays all day Sunday until their dd goes to bed. So he spends the day with them Sunday then leaves after dd has gone bed

What did you discuss regarding his work before you decided to have children, or (if unplanned) once you were pregnant?

My husband works long hours but at home. Having him home is invaluable for quick chunks of adult contact whilst he makes a cuppa etc. I think it would be much better for you to have him there on the Saturday.

She said 500 emails every evening with 250 that have to be responded to urgently. I'm not gaslighting, I’m asking how that is physically possible. At 1 minute per email that is 4 hours just to answer the 250 urgent ones, and that must be conservative surely.

Well, as neither of us actually know that poster or have access to her inbox, then how about giving her the benefit of the doubt?

I easily get that volume of emails in a day. If I have no time to read and deal with them during the day, then they don't magically disappear jn evening. Luckily I do have a medical secretary with access to my inbox so she flags the things I need to do urgently, but apart from the CEO none of the managers have that resource. Yeah, I believe it.

My first thought was also does he has another family he’s hiding. It’s suspicious to me. Why can’t he do some admin in the evenings when he is away? For those saying when does he get downtime, well he has 6 evenings a week to himself when he could otherwise be helping out with a baby. To be fair you knew about the Saturdays before having a child though, you should have said then it won’t work with a family. I would tell him it needs to change as soon as he gets his new job and he should start looking now.

Agree but people on here are arguing about 'admin', when OP has not given everyone the full picture which would actually radically change the responses.

Yep, definitely within a feasible range of email inbox hell.

I'm quite lucky in that respect, as my colleagues in Admin field a chunk of them for me, but I still get a lot.

There is a big difference between having a large backlog of emails to deal with and saying that you have to spend every evening clearing them all. I know that you think I am being picky for the sake of it but I am trying to make an important point- yes, it can be in no doubt that NHS workload is unsustainable but throwing around exaggerated stats does nobody any favours when you are trying to convince people to change the system.