Husband rant - SAHM needing a sick day.

[Theworldisyouroyster]

So… long story short I am a stay at home mum to a 3 year old. She’s done two mornings a week at nursery since she was 2.5 but the rest of the time she’s home with me and her nursery is term time only so no childcare over the six week summer holiday.

At the start of the summer I hurt my knee badly playing with my daughter - it’s a very painful sprain which keeps flaring up again when I crouch or kneel down. I have been going to a private physio for around a month now and yesterday evening he wanted to ‘test’ it and it went again, absolute agony and I had to hobble out of the surgery.

I hardly slept due to the pain and this morning said I think my husband needs to take the day off work as I can’t walk or properly put any weight on that leg so it wouldn’t be safe for me to solely be in charge of a toddler. He seemed unhappy about this and said I didn’t show any appreciation that he would miss a day off work and that I wasn’t clear in what I wanted. I’m so confused.

I’ve had other health issues this year and have tried to limit how much they affect his work. I just felt like this was a time he needed to step in and say of course I’m going to be at home today, you need to rest up, I’ve got this. Instead I had to convince him grudgingly to stay off and was told I wasn’t grateful enough.

I am grateful but surely this is the bare minimum a partner does when the other one can’t walk? I’m just very sad and weepy at the moment and feel unsupported and like I am seen as a nuisance.

Thank you in advance x

Do you really think OP is being denied her human rights because her husband isn't using his annual leave to stay home because her knee hurts...? 🥴

Make sure that if your gp refuses to do a scan based on physio advice, they put that in your records that they went against advice given.

Are workers entitled to sick days from work? Are they entitled to pay for work and limited work hours? These are sll limitations on exploitation that workers have fought for.

If your argument is that domestic households and domestic relationships exist outside of contract law, rights, money, etc… —that is a very conservative and ultimately patriarchal and misogynistic view. You end up valorizing and protecting only that which can be monetized in the market outside the domestic sphere—only he “works” and only his eork has meaning or legal protection. While her work—even the literally irreplaceable burden of child birth (labour) is also unrecognized and unprotected.

I get that this is all a bit above your head but its not that hard.

Sick leave is part of your employment rights and yes there are many employee rights that workers have fought for and won.
Being a SAHP isn’t employment. Kids having a parent with them at home is absolutely of value and undoubtedly also facilitates a better work/life balance for a partner with paid employment. My OH and I both had a period of having 1 day each with the kids and 4 days in the office when kids were small & I absolutely believe that was beneficial for the kids and had value for all of us but I never considered that day as working anymore than I’d consider having kids at weekend as working.
Employment regulations to protect workers rights largely exist to avoid employers taking unfair advantage of their employees. In a domestic setting if you want to try and have the same type of rights how do you see that working practically?
It sounds like in this instance the OPs partner was initially unsympathetic and a bit dismissive and that they’ve subsequently talked about it and figured out what works for them. I think in a domestic setting that’s the approach that would work best. To discuss what has upset either of you/you feel is unfair and agree what works best for you as a couple. Framing it as a human rights violation just seems a bit ridiculous. Do you think it’s a human rights violation if a single parent has to care for their kids while sick? What about a parent who has a partner who works away and is responsible for kids alone for several weeks at a time. Or do you really just mean it’s pretty shit for the OP to have to soldier on and that it might be more equitable if her OH was more willing to take leave to help? If it’s that I agree with you but also can see why that might not be feasible for everyone. OP already stated for her OH it’s a possible option and that’s why she was a bit hurt and annoyed. Totally understandable how she felt but still not a human rights violation.

Yours is just an enormously rigid, legalistic approach to what the OP, and I, and feminists and philosophers are thinking about in broad, humanistic, strokes. We are simply talking past each other. “A human right” “my human right” this is “humane”, this is “inhumane” are not terms that we have to limit to the purely legalistic definition. And, in fact, they don’t begin or end there. The declaration of the rights of man, the UN declaration of the rights of women, the idea of legally defensible rights, begins with an idea that originates outside the legal sphere and is brought in it by the hard work of those who choose tovtry to broaden protections, like rights, that used to be accorded the few.

OP rightly observed that to her mind her work in the home deserves the same respect for treatment that her dh’s work outside the hime gets. He is not expected to work while injured and she ought not to either. In effect you are arguing that she has to work with no boundaries or breaks because in a family, the domestic sphere , one can not talk of rights but only duties. But he gets to be half in and half out, doesn’t he? When he is home sick in bed she doesn’t get to require him to keep earning or take over child care or housecleaning to earn his keep.

What I’m saying is that her husband isn’t her employer so discussing domestic sphere as if it’s employment doesn’t make sense.
You don’t have a “right” to sick leave from being a parent regardless of whether you have paid employment or not and regardless of whether you have a partner or not.
You are perfectly reasonable to expect your OH (if you have one) to work with you as a team to raise your children regardless of whether you both have paid employment, one is a SAHP or if neither of you have paid employment.
I think where it’s possible an employed parent should take a day off paid work in case a SAHP is sick or injured but it’s not always possible as it’s basically dependent on most cases on the goodwill of their employer.

You say “In effect you are arguing that she has to work with no boundaries or breaks because in a family, the domestic sphere , one can not talk of rights but only duties”

I suppose I am in a way. Being a parent primarily is about taking on a set of responsibilities that you have to manage even when you are poorly, injured, grieving for a bereavement or whatever else. I don’t think that’s limited to SAHP though.

I guess the original q was about whether it was reasonable or not to expect OPs OH to take leave to care for their child with good grace as she was injured and people are answering in the context of how employment laws are structured. As things stand the OH in this scenario has limited rights to take leave in the described scenario and may well not be entitled to pay. Given that context it’s not unreasonable they might be reluctant to take leave. I don’t think that’s really anything to do with how much they do or don’t value their OHs contribution/labour but more to do with how their employer would react & what’s practically feasible.

You seem to not be talking about what is/is not reasonable in the context of how the current systems operate but rather what you think the optimal system would be. I think I probably agree with you about what the optimal system would be and definitely agree we should place a greater value on the contributions on made in traditionally female roles (even in a commercial setting those who are carers, nursery staff etc are predominantly poorly paid so it’s very obvious the degree to which that work is undervalued). I also think though that while you can work on changing the system you have to operate within the existing one for now. If you only have one person earning there will be a lot of pressure on them to provide and that likely both means they might push through and work when unwell themselves and that they may feel unable to take time off to take over childcare responsibilities when their partner is unwell.

It’s unfortunate it’s such a fraught topic as I think working and SAHP can be very unkind and judgemental about one another a lot of the time which makes reasonable discussion challenging.

On a practical level though, even with me agreeing we should value SAHPs work, I am not quite sure how that would look/operate.

Op is not employed!! By all means if you're a SAHP make your husband employ you (I would!) but you sound ridiculous if you think employment law applies here. Should OP also be subject to working time directives? What about holiday pay? Where does it end? I actually agree that SAHPs should get this but then you have to actually do that - be a contractor to your partner, charge them for your time, have a contract and terms and declare it. Yes there's an argument that domestic labour is not valued but in my opinion that isn't helped when there are women who choose to do it for free. If your husband can afford to have you stay at home, he should compensate you. But you can't choose to leave employment and then cry that you have lost the perks and hard-fought employment rights, it's the same as when you go self employed you don't have them either. I don't think it's fair to impose that OPs partner should his own contractual leave which is there for when he needs leave from his job to share it with OP.

I'm not sure why you are resorting to personal attacks when clearly it's you with no understanding of employment law.

I’m sorry I’m also not with you. Parenting your own child is not a job, no more than being a spouse is, or maintaining your own home. Garden or car. It’s both laughable and deeply disturbing to suggest parenting your own is.