AIBU - motherhood has ruined men for me

[Bettercallsaul2024]

I expect I am being unreasonable but since becoming a mum I have gone off men.

I had always adored men but now I see an incompetence I can’t get past. My husband is an ICU consultant - can handle huge pressure and stress but can’t be trusted to pack a fucking bag for a day to the zoo. He can handle the resuscitation of a child but can’t cope when OUR child has a tantrum. (I too am a hospital doctor so feel like I can make the comparison, and I do appreciate the workload of his job). He would never cope being up all night with our ill child yet can do nightshifts in ICU - I don’t get it?!

and it’s not ‘just’ him. I now see it everywhere. All the men in my family, though lovely, have so much less expected of them. Seen as great dads when they take the kids swimming despite the women doing all the parenting the rest of the week plus having a job/career.

sometimes I say to my mum - how are men able to organise complex things like war when they can’t do the sainsburys food shop without ringing their partner at least twice. She reasons that it’s because men usually only have one task to focus on at a time and so can do it well - behind the scenes women are doing EVERYTHING else.

I find myself unattracted to my husband but also all men really. At the park I see dads standing on their phones, getting cross and stressed when their kids are upset after a grazed knee. It’s so ugly to me!

I KNOW I am being unreasonable. But do others feel this way? I know not ALL men. It just so happens it’s ALL men I’ve ever interacted with

YABU: this is a DH thing. Men are just as wonderful as women

YANBU: men wouldn’t last one day as mothers

No, YADNBU.

He absolutely does everything, I was on the phone to him the other day, he was the one in the garden with them, we exchange pictures of meals we make as he likes to get ideas for something different. The DIL doesn't work, she just sits k her phone on the sofa with the TV on, even if they come here, she has watched her daughter be sick over the floor, carried on eating her dinner and my son, husband and I have cleaned it up and put her in the bath.

This is a good point. Having sole responsibility for a child does force a parent to think differently and comprehensively about what’s needed to look after them.

Yes. We don’t have children but still identify with how utterly useless DH pretends to be around the house. I do literally everything but if I complain he says ‘oh you don’t need to do that, I’ll do it’ but then he does an absolutely shit job so I just have to redo it all. We had an argument about this the other day when I pointed out he hadn’t once changed the bedding in our 18 years together. He said, just ask and I’ll do it. But he couldn’t understand my point was why does it have to me who thinks to do these things. Why is it my job to ask? If I didn’t ask and I didn’t do it these things would literally never get done. I also clean the whole house but there is one room where he has all his stuff for his hobby and I generally just leave that. Occasionally I will go in and the filth and the mess is unreal. Literal rubbish, bin over flowing, clothes everywhere. I actually cried in frustration over this last week as we have people coming to stay and I know they’ll see in that room as husband likes to show off all his gadgets he has in there but I’m mortified for anyone to see in there. He says the house would be fine if I didn’t clean every week, he’d do it, but clearly the whole place would look like that room if I wasn’t keeping on top of it. It’s exhausting. Oh and I also do ALL of the ‘men’s work’ too like DIY (painting, laying floors, fixing things, cutting the grass, looking after the cars)

I don't agree with you at all, my son has 3 children

^

Here we go. NAMALT

I agree... but we allow them to become crap. Most of them could do all the stuff we do, but they never learn early enough and then it just becomes easier to let mummy do it! I think we need to train them in early marriage/ partnership- you CAN settle the baby, you can do the supermarket shop. But we allow them to become crap and then it's just easier to do those jobs ourselves.
It helps if you have a hands on husband to begin with. Even then they need training and practice!!!

An old saying springs to mind, Behind every man stands an exceptional woman,
Never a truer word said!

Reading the whole thread it always comes down to one thing: men show no forward thinking and initiative unless they can look good in front of an audience. Can be observed at home and in the workplace.

Oh my lord. That wins.

My DH said he’d cleaned the kitchen and I went to find dirty pans in the sink, stuff left out on the sides and table. He meant he’d wiped the surfaces. He is improving though to give him his dues.

I fear you might be right.

Trainer here. It’s harder than just doing it yourself and there are sacrifices along the way. The things that get missed, forgotten, ruined etc. It’s hard to let things go wrong when you know they will but it does work. If he’s willing. I have literally had to threaten to leave. Soooo many difficujt conversations. Only it wasn’t a threat. I was done. He’s still a bit resentful and I still occasionally get ‘I do this for you’ but hopefully it will just be the norm eventually.

It’s infuriating! My husband is exactly the same, he says that he can’t do certain jobs around the home (like make the children’s packed lunches, or complete an online shop) because he “doesn’t know how” and yet he can work out solutions to very complex problems at work, and is considered highly intelligent, pragmatic and proactive by his work colleagues (I know because I also work in the same sector with some of the same people).

I think it’s that a lot of men do not see the value in certain things like the content of a decent lunch box or why it matters that kids are not still in pyjamas with bean juice down the front at lunch time or that little stains on the washing up should not be there - and a thousand other little things that they simply do not value.
But it is infuriating and I agree with OP and so many other posters. Men can be a PITA.

My DH is a good dad and after years of nagging he has gotten much much better about proactively doing washing, ironing etc without me asking. I do however bear most of the mental load.

This thread reminded me of DC5’s school trip last month. I was due to be in the office that day and leave before she was up. I therefore packed her bag the night before (DH will often do her school bag, but I couldn’t risk anything be forgotten), and made her a packed lunch and put it in the fridge. I showed DH where it was and told him what she needed to wear the next day (school uniform on top with jogging bottoms so not the norm). His response was “oh I didn’t realise she needed a packed lunch”, to which I replied “it was in the email sent by the school”, to which he replied “oh I don’t read school emails we get far too many”. He then said I’d need to remind him of all this in the morning as he’d forget.

At this point I flipped and told him he manages to hold down a senior job, so he could remember or write down my instructions now, and it wasn’t my job to tell him a second time.

Of course I ended up texting him all the instructions from the train (he regularly forgets things - coats, water bottles etc when taking the DC to school), to make doubly sure DC was not going to go hungry or wear the wrong thing.

So many red flags. LTB.

It's because for the most part it's probably the woman who pushed to have X amount of children and the man just went along with it to keep the peace, so they're not overly motivated to do the "kiddie" stuff and see it as the woman's job.

So it’s the woman’s fault? Please do expand on your theory here.

I think it comes down to responsibilities. It's reasonably normal human nature that if something is not our responsibility we don't spend the energy to think about it. Hence the need for project managers in large projects, it's their responsibility to make sure that every job gets done by whoever is supposed to get it done, to the standard it is supposed to get done to. Everyone knows what is supposed to get done in general terms, but if it's not their explicit responsibility they won't do it.

In families, it is fairly common for women to start out with almost all the responsibility for the babies, specially if they bf. Most aren't great at then handing specific responsibilities and letting the men get on with it. Yes they wouldn't get it perfect initially, but they'd figure it out. Instead, we expect them to do it exactly in the way that we would do it, and take over if they don't. Which perpetuates the cycle of them feeling it's not their responsibility and so not doing it.

With dh, we divided the dc 'jobs' between us. Each takes the lead in their areas, they can ask for help from the other when needed but it's clear whose responsibility each is. And the other gets out of the way and only helps when asked, and doesn't dictate how the responsible person does their jobs, unless we need a strategic change of direction with something, in which case we all sit down together, agree on a way forward and redefine responsibilities if necessary. In reality it means that each ends up responsible for the things we care more about. I buy them clothes which are not awful and sometimes persuade them to wear them, dh couldn't care less. Dh spends time on their spelling and languages, I only half heartedly engage with that, which means that he has taught them more of my mt than I have.

Yes there are things he does which he doesn't do the way I would do them, and vice versa, but our dc have survived and done fine, and we and our relationship have survived too.

Where'd I say that?

Doesn't resonate with me at all.

My husband is highly competent at work & highly competent at home, including with our kids.

This is weaponised incompetence and just not wanting to do the boring stuff!

Agree, I don’t find my partner attractive anymore and it’s because I do ALL the mental load and with a SEN child and complicated rescue dog I have struggled to hold down FT jobs and run the house. And I do everything organisational, filling in endless SEN forms, attending meetings, every bill, insurances, trip, day our, holiday, food, cooking etc etc. I often have to undo his mistakes which drives in insane, however I know it’s not deliberate, he’s just absolutely useless at thinking ahead on any level and probably neurodivergent.
what I do though is make him do all the cleaning, more childcare and most bedtimes etc. He does these with good grace and it’s the only reason we are still together. I hate the way that all our lives are essentially ran by me and rely on my organisational skills and incredible ability to multi skill!

I completely agree with you.

You need to take some responsibility here for your choices. It's kind of obvious from your husband's background that there was zero reason to think he would be a good, hands-on father. He was raised by nannies. He doesn't know what being family oriented looks like. His whole adult life has been about building a career. I have no idea why you thought any of that was going to change when children came along.

And the reason men like this continue to exist is that they still find women to marry them and have children with them, who are then raised to think this kind of father is normal and then go on to find women to marry them and have children with them to raise thinking this kind of father is normal...

I am (in all modesty) a very capable person and (I would say) did my share of the drudge jobs when the children were small. But I just didn't care as much as my wife did. It was boring. She had and has much higher standards but I just don't care enough about it. It's not that I'm lazy or incompetent. I just don't care.