Are we lying to our daughters?

[Granville1]

I would like to start by saying that my husband is a really good guy. A lovely, kind person & a doting dad. Yet here I am, a burnt out millennial 40 year old mum of two girls (age 4 & 6) feeling utterly overwhelmed & exhausted by life. My head is barely ever above water

My mum is one of those superwomen. Always has seamlessly held the family together by doing everything. The full mental load is on her, but she never complains. In fact she seems to thrive on it. She always worked but perhaps not in the same “career” sense that our generation do, so perhaps didn’t quite have that additional pressure

I have now fallen into the same role as her. Although both my husband & I work full time so no reason I should take it all on. He does earn more but I also have a decent, fairly well paid & highly stressful job. Sadly we don’t earn enough for any additional help (aside from a cleaner). Yet I have become so accustomed to doing everything, I’m now stuck in a trap where my husband is -25 years of practice down & no amount of explaining or “training” 😂 would get him even close to taking on what I do

But I can’t help thinking that we are teaching our daughters that taking on everything is the norm. And even more cynically, that marriage & kids is great. It’s not. There might be a handful of exceptions but most of my friend’s (admitting it to varying levels) are miserable as sin. And most of it comes down to utter resentment of them having to balance full time careers & pick up the vast majority of the mental load (as well as physically carrying it all out too)

What do we do? Show bad role modelling by continuing to do almost everything & them thinking that’s normal? Also do we lie & say marriage & having kids is great? Or (if asked) do we generally encourage open conversations that alternatives do exist. I would never go on an aggressive tirade telling them that all women take on too much & will end up even more miserable if they get married & have kids, but at the same time, they are learning from me that masking the misery of working full time / having a career & taking on everything is normal

Has anyone else had similar thoughts? What do we do about it? How do we break the cycle? Would welcome comments about the future of our daughters not judgement on whether my husband does / doesn’t do enough

Thanks for reading

Well, your daughters might surprise you. I was brought up by a mother who did everything and a father who just asked and cups of tea appeared before him, with a biscuit in the saucer .

my wonderful husband does his fair share, and can even anticipate and do extra if needed, we are a partnership ( and I don’t think he ever realised just how much he was interviewed and asked to give practical demonstrations before I gave him the job of my husband. This may sound cynical but far too many people don’t have the full discussions on splitting all household chores, splitting money and how a relationship will look if one person is disabled and needs more care.

but we don’t have kids, as we realised that would change the dynamic and wasn’t what either of us wanted.

so my martyr mother berates me for not giving her grandchildren, but it washes over me. We are very happy, my husband and life partner, and early retirement is beckoning and we can’t wait.

Your daughters have eyes and ears, they will be aware of who does what etc. Unless you're an Oscar winning actress then I'm sure they will pick up on your unhappiness and resentment.

As for your DH, when you say it's 'too late to train him' and then 🤣 well that says it all really. Either he's another responsible adult you're sharing your life with, or he's a toddler like man-baby who will not muck in when needed. His choice to be like that, your choice to abide by it.

I didn’t teach my child that taking on everything was normal because I refused to do that and I was quite upfront about it

there was other stuff going on that finally led to the split - but DH1 preferred traditional family roles and that didn’t sit well with me. He tried to get me to give up work after having DD. DH2 came fully house trained. So it is possible if you are canny.

i think it’s hard if you have lived a particular way for a long time to change though

I don’t buy the excuse of earning difference meaning your DH should get an easy ride. Longer hours do matter but not just a job that pays more. These can be lower stress even if they are hard and important. At one point DH2 earned less but had a long commute so the home split was me doing more based on an even sharing of total working time.

yiu need to teach the boys not just the girls. Boys on average are given less household responsibilities as they grow up. Treat boys and girls the same as they grow up would be a good start. Praise both for the same things. Punish the same behaviour. Make sure they all can cook a dinner, wash their clothes , keep the bathroom clean by the time they ar early teens

tbh I always think MN is full of insecure perfectionists which is why make themselves miserable insisting that they must "take on everything" and "maintain appearances."

Those of us with lower standards don't have OP's guilt hangup... of course we have other guilt hangups.

Mind, my daughter tends towards being an insecure perfectionist herself... it's like she's absorbed that culture in spite of me being laid back and laissez-faire. Like when my kids insisted on believing in Father Christmas even though I told them FC was just a fairy tale... they wanted to believe and I just told them to respect people who chose to believe so then I had to shrug & let them believe...

I don't know what the answer is, but I have been a single parent for 16 years, and I can tell you that life is much more manageable now than it ever was when I was married.

One less person to cook and clean for, and no festering resentment because there's another adult sitting on their arse watching me do everything.

Why would he need ‘directing’? If he has a big important job, surely he can work out when he needs to leave work early to collect DC for a hospital appointment or take them on a Saturday morning for new school shoes?

So you have the same dynamic I'm talking about, just reversed. I've got no issue with it but studies show that women who are breadwinners usually do even more housework.

Do you have children? You didn't mention them.

It's not internalised misogyny. I'm looking at the women in my actual lives and seeing them run ragged doing everything, and I want them to be happy.

I chose my dh based on the fact I could clearly see he could run a home and took pride in those areas of life. He finds it embarrassing when other men can't do the basics.
If I died tomorrow nothing would miss a beat in the running of the home and school life for the children.

So in that regard we are very 50 50 great examples to my children.However the way the government and society works is still shockingly very 1950s.
Many families where the parents both work full time are only able to do that due to good avaliable childcare or family that help. Wages that afford paid help. If you have no family to help, limited access to childcare, are on the way to trying to achieve the wage to pay for paid help. It feels impossible to change that 1950s dynamic. School expect one parent atleast to be working part time or retired grandparents to be involved. Work expect you to work without having any other commitments outside. Society expects women to raise children in this idyllic way yet puts no real worth on the caring role. No financial protection/help into jobs/careers after caring for children which by then many women are then heading towards caring for parents too. All of which doesn't look great to an employer.

I'd love for us to both work part time but my oh outearns me by miles he is a few years older so was working when I was getting my degree then add in maternity leaves and having a child with additional needs well it made sense as the lower earner to go very part time. So we are stuck in this dynamic unless magically we win the lottery because even the childcare we would need would be very specialised and expensive.

So whilst yes for many it's a husband/partner issue it's also a much much wider patriarchal, society and government issue that compounds it all. It serves society for women to do more unpaid labour. To just fill in the gaps that are missing.

Having children can feel like a trap to women I can absolutely understand why many women are choosing not to. The support isn't there which means we have to sacrifice so much of ourselves in order to do it.

Role models are funny things too.
I grew up where mum did everything and dad... nothing. Because he went to work 5 days a week. He was on what would now be minimum wage.
When my mum went back to work it, she still did everything.

I married a man who does 50/50. My dsis married a man like my dad.

I'd hope dd gets a good one, but she's a people pleaser. I think she also assumes that all men are like dh.

Incidentally, my advice is to find one who's lived on their own first. At least they way you know they're house trained.

This! I think you’re making it way too complicated.

My DH has some quite significant faults and can be challenging, but we’re generally a happy family of four and never had any issues like you describe when I was working full-time (in a stressful job).

I don’t recall ever being burned-out like you describe and I think it’s just time to get your DH to do more. As a PP said I BELIEVE IN HIM.

There’s an awful lot of questions about the future of work, family life balance, economics, and the future of civilisation hanging over us. There’s the practical problems to solve and then choosing the political directions in which we’ll solve them. The first is hard enough. The political choices made so far have been towards authoritarianism and inequality. In Britain at this moment it’s hard to see how that won’t increase, and women will be taking the shit unless we do something collectively to stop it.

Ever since people were forced off the land with Enclosure and into Factory Time these questions about how to balance family life have been there, as working from your own home became impossible. We can now chuck a ridiculous level of housing costs, climate change and burgeoning AI - which worsens climate change - into the mix.

Housing costs should never have been allowed to outpace wages, forcing everyone into full time work. The baby boomers were told they’d have to work less due to tech, and took full advantage, forcing us to work for them instead.

AI could further reduce need for work, but Britains direction has been to use tech to induce gross inequality and suffering and I really can’t see that changing. Plus it really does double environmental impacts so I don’t know where that’s going.

Youre not alone in seeing problems and raising questions. The automatic reflex of men in any time of economic change is to push the women out of the way and kick them harder. The only way I see forward is for women to organise society for ourselves in the same way as men have, and perhaps some groups in big areas will do that (think USA). There’s an awful lot of chaos and fracturing coming our way and we’ve only seen the dim beginnings. Thank fuck the birth rate is dropping.

Surely you mean more childcare support for parents !
Women were told 40 years ago we could have it all but they forgot to tell men they would have to change their lives as well and do 50% of the family life.

Honestly, yes he does. I had a look at the score sheet link that someone shared earlier in this thread and he’d probably score higher on that. I don’t need to remind him to do stuff, as it’s not my responsibility.

I also don’t carry more of the mental load than he does - he’s the one who notes that toddler DC nails need to be cut in a couple of days (and then does it), that we’re going on holiday in X months, so DCs passports need to be sorted (and then does it), that our usual babysitter’s mum just died and the funeral is at X, so we need to send her flowers and sort someone else for this weekend (and then does it). We both do this stuff, and - while I love my husband very much - I really don’t believe it’s that rare a dynamic.

I’ve never been in a relationship where I felt like I was carrying the load in the way I see described in these posts. I think a lot of that is to do with the fact that this wasn’t the dynamic that was modelled for me growing up. So it just seems insane to me.

Yeah. This is so annoying when women say this and then follow up with oohhh he won’t change he can’t. Well he will - if you weren’t around anymore bet your bottom dollar he’d be perfectly functional. If he ever has an affair and leaves you I’d also bet you’d see him running around after his new mrs. Don’t encourage men to do nothing by doing everything for them and saying they’re too thick to learn new tricks but then declare them lovely husbands?! Let’s set the bloody bar and stick to it. If youre exhausted by doing everything, don’t do everything. Say I’m exhausted, you aren’t doing xyz to help, if you feel you can’t help then I need to hire help to xyz. In fact, just start hiring it out and see how quick he changes his tune.

@Granville1 you are lying to yourself you are struggling and burnt out and you are telling me your husband is just fine with that. He isn’t an idiot he presumably works in a good job but chooses not to do anything?
Your first statement about him is at odds with everything else that is the lie

Are there millions? I don’t know any.
Admittedly I am older than the op, but in my experience most men have lower standards than most women, so would be quite happy living in a pigsty.
My mil never did much around the home mainly because she was lazy and fil never picked up the slack. As a result I used to grimace when I visited their house, there’s a difference between a bit untidy/dusty and dirty.

In my own experience, working in a full time professional role with kids is a lot easier when you’re divorced and have a 50/50 custody split! Not that I’m advocating the OP get divorced, of course 😁 But I was in exactly that position of being married, working, doing everything at home (or certainly more than half of most things) and feeling completely shattered all the time. Take the DH out of the equation and I have autonomy, time and peace. I am so less stressed without the constant mental load of the ‘wife work’ and all the things that it was assumed I’d just ‘naturally’ pick up. My ex now has to run his own home and life and has to do 50% of the parenting. Shame he couldn’t step up and do that before or we might still be married!

Because I don't want women to be miserable, and clearly in a lot of cases we can't. I'm not willing to sacrifice women's lives for an ideology.

I also added "if they want to", so no one has to, but if they do their husband should step up and make it possible for her if he's not pulling his weight at home.

You’ve gotta stick up for yourself op as if you carry on this way, when your dc grow up and have issues
guess who’s gonna get the blame

it won’t be society
it won’t be your dh
it will be you that’s blamed

the mothers always get the blame
you need to make some big big changes

They did not forget. Men agreed. It was all going to be so different in the 90s, men were going to step up - as they did in the Nordic countries to at least some extent. This is Britain, and they lied. Violence against women is growing, and the trends around the world are similar.

Let us not forget, ever ever again, that men will always stab women in the back, lie and betray us, as a group, at the least opportunity. They’ve done it before - Philippa Gregory’s ‘Ordinary Women’ is a very good read - and how many now remember that women were more equal before the early modern state??

But surely the answer to that is that women have to raise their standards when choosing partners, rather than reducing their expectations with regard to what they can achieve in their own lives?

I don't ask my husband for "help" at home - neither of us would view him doing domestic labour as "helping" because we both see that stuff as a shared responsibility. I don't need to ask him to do stuff because he is a grown adult and he is capable of seeing what needs doing as well as I can.

If I hadn't been confident that he would pull his weight, then I wouldn't have married him or had dc with him. Ensuring that we had shared views on this stuff was a fundamental part of assessing whether or not we were going to be compatible. I would never have been willing to commit to spending my life with a sexist man who thought he was marrying a nanny and a housemaid.

I don’t just think it’s daughters, it’s sons too. I really want my sons growing up to be men who share the mental and physical load equally but that’s not something I can do if I am carrying the load and hiding it. Husbands have a huge role to play here but like you it’s hard to change a habit of a lifetime. Mine is better than many including his northern and dad but it still by no means equal. Sorry no solution just share your thoughts.

I'm not convinced about the whole mental load thing tbh. It seems heavily bound up with some sort of psychic martyrdom and largely created by a certain class of woman to shackle themselves even tighter to their misery. It's just something we've created to oppress ourselves. I felt worse once I had read about it and saw it everywhere and felt ground down by it. But now I have seen the light and fully know it to be a psyop the load has magically lifted. There is enough unfairness and oppression in the world without making up more of it and sticking it on ourselves.

Well first off you are not married to a good man.
Good men share the load.
He doesn't want to because he is selfish and puts himself first.

So first stop lying to yourself about what a good man is.

Stop doing anything for him.
No laundry, cooking, shopping.
Give him a loo to use and tell him you will no longer clean it.
Same with a shower.

Stop accepting his calculated laziness.
Stop calling him a good man when he clearly is not.

I certainly believe marriage and having children is hugely overated due to the load women carry.

My single childless friends are consistently the happiest people i know as I age, and they wouldn't change their situation for anyone.

“I chose my DH on the fact that I could clearly see he could run a home…”

This is a good point and made me recall my own experience with my now DH. He was a bit younger than me and the first time I went to his flat I was expecting it to be a bit of a hastily tidied poo-hole, but I was actually quite shocked to find it was clean, tidy and very tastefully furnished. It completely changed my opinion of him (he was 22).