To be fed up with DH for not admitting it's hard to commute 1 1/2 hours every day and be the breadwinner?

[MrsSchadenfreude]

I leave the house at 7 every morning and don't usually get in until 7 at night. He works two minutes from where we live and drops the children off at school and picks them up from the after schoolclub.

He can't understand why I am so tired all the time - "FFS, all you do is sit on a train and then sit at a desk and push a few bits of paper around - what can be so tiring about that?" - and gets cross when I refuse to cook dinner when I get in.

Oh God yes foxy we don't need a cleaner, we need a tidier-upper. Preferably armed with a flamethrower and 0% sentimentality about limbless dollies and mangled Maisy board books

Ah, you see our cleaner tidies too. When she started she left me a stroppy note saying I AM NOT A HOUSEKEEPER but I explained that it was part of the job to tidy and so now she does. It's as important as the cleaning, so we come home and it's like a hotel on the 2 days she comes, bliss.

Also, any chore you can do from work, do it from work in your lunch hour. Eg I email boring people like Anglian Water from work and check our bank statements etc.

Marina, your descriptions of the domestic shift (nearly typed 'shit' there, wouldn't have been far wrong!) make me laugh a lot!

Is this about that other thread about the SAHM complaining that her husband won't admit how hard it is to be a SAHM and all he does all day is push papers around his desk and why won't he admit her life as a sahm is so much harder than that?

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Yep Chequers, MK. Why, do you do the same?

Or just ditch evening meals. WE had some periods in our 19 year marriage where that just became easier - husband ate big school lunch, I ate bit lunch in office canteen and then we'd just grab a snack on the hoof each night. People eat huge amounts and get very fat if they aren't careful. We always got the nanny to cook for all 5 children before she left. On the other hand families eating together can be pretty nice if you have a lifestyle which fits with that so policy decisino for each family.

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Yep, London Midlands are bastards too
They're getting new trains in December apparently. When I won't be doing it any more grr.

Marina, you're spot on - we need a tidier-upper too. I actually sacked one of our cleaners because, among other things, she left all the Stuff in Neatish Piles On Chairs. Which induced more despair than the previous detritus.

Quite seriously, I have recently decided NOT to go full-time, precisely because it would put such a lot of strain on us all domestically with both of us working in an office an hour from home, five days a week. And I kiss the ankles of all the lovely people who do keep this impossible juggle going.

Thank you all for this - I had a bit of a lost weekend involving lots of Pimms and Kir, so have only just seen.

I shit on London Midland . Or I would if someone hadn't done it first. I don't see the commute as me time at all - as WWW said, hot crowded and unreliable. I don't see the point in paying extra for a 1st class ticket as it only looks marginally better to me.

He has just over an hour with the DDs (9 & 7, so not babies and fairly self sufficient) in the morning and between 30 mins and an hour in the evening. I don't think that's excessive or unduly hard work.

He also had four days commuting when he was on a course and came in every night saying "Fuck me, I couldn't do that every day."

Have told him that if he won't agree to a cleaner then he can do it.

Will explore working from home one day when we get the IT upgrade that will make this possible. And the light at the end of the tunnel is GOING OVERSEAS again, but not until end 2009/early 2010.