To be angry with DH for not coming home?

[Coffeeoftheworld]

DH is on a 3 week work trip in Australia, he’s been out there for a week and has 2 more weeks to go. Our DD was admitted to hospital on Friday and DH is refusing to come home to see DD in hospital. He is just saying he “can’t abandon work” and that his boss will be “unhappy” with him if he comes home early. AIBU to he angry with DH for not coming home? DD is asking for him in hospital too and is really ill. I travel for work too sometimes but I would absolutely come home immediately if DD had been taken in to hospital whilst I was away, no matter how unhappy my boss would be with me for coming home. The most that DH has said is to send him “updates” on how DD gets on in hospital. I feel like he doesn’t care about her, he’s always been such a good husband and such a good dad but this makes me feel like he doesn’t care. He also won’t FaceTime her because of “the time difference” between the UK and Australia!

Don’t bloody warn him if you are going to serve him papers, btw. He will fuck you over financially. In the meantime, start transferring money over, buy extra supermarket vouchers and gift cards for yourself and get birth/marriage certs, passports, mortgage docs/credit cards/loans/pensions/subscriptions/bills docs out of the house and store them at a trusted friend’s place.

The fact he won’t FaceTime his own sick child is horrifying tbh.

Also your other child is with your best friend now that’s lovely of her, but she should be with her dad. Her mum and sister are in hospital and her dads on the other side of the world and cnba to come look after her either.

So cnba to talk to sick child.
cnba to take turns with wife looking after sick child
cnba to be there and comfort his other child who will be worried that basically her whole family has disappeared.

At best his a fucking idiot who’s so selfish he doesn’t deserve a wife and children

or his living some double life / affair.

So many places in Australia offer free WiFi, mc Donald's used to and there's no shortage of maccas over there

There is something very strange about the refusal to FaceTime with a child who is asking for him. One day/night being unavailable due to all day meetings and maybe a compulsory social event etc but not a total refusal due to ‘tiredness’. Personally I’d struggle to be able to relax or sleep if I knew I had a child in hospital wanting to speak to me. It’s very difficult to understand his position on this.

At the very least, he should offer to cover half of the time off needed.
Because needing to be with your dd2 won’t stop when she is back home. She is unlikely to be able to go to nursery/CM in a week…..

As for being unable to do FaceTime… bollocks sorry. (I’ve grown up overseas - similar time difference - and then moved back to Europe for Uni. I can tell you when you want to, you can ring agd talk to people, even with 12 hours dufference)

You know you can do WhatsApp video, don't you?

@CanSeeClearlyNowTheRainHasGone when your young chikd is unwell in hospital, you just swallow tge cost of the roaming charges.
Thats assuming he doesn’t have wifi in his hotel or at work (yes even if it means arriving earlier than he ‘should’). Which is EXTREMELY unlikely

I'm afraid if he were married to me the divorce petition would be waiting when he gets back.

But he hasn’t said he can’t do it because of roaming charges or Wi-Fi or anything like that.

He simply said because of the time difference (which isn’t much) and he’s tired.

Edited - Australia is between 7 and 9 hours ahead of the UK. There is plenty of crossover there.

The not FaceTiming a sick kid in hospital as he’s resting is bullshit. He should be up in the middle of the night to talk to her. Work would understand. Maybe he’s feeling seeing her will make him feel useless, but not FaceTiming her is just beyond understanding as a parent.

Can't understand (and wouldn't really want to understand) the mindset of a parent who does not want to facetime their unwell child. Selfish and thoughtless not to set aside 20/30 bloody minutes before he goes to bed.

Your poor DD.

Not jumping on a plane, I can see.

But there is something completely unhinged about not being willing to FaceTime.

Is he direly afraid of health problems?

Is he actually in a place so different from Australia that he can't even find a plausible plain room that looks like a hotel room, to FaceTime from? Like, is he camping or sailing? Because even if he was on a jolly with a lover, he'd be able to find a white wall to sit in front of to FaceTime.

Another family entirely so he really cannot get away for even 5 minutes?
It's bizarre, op. Wishing you and your DD well.

I have kids who are regularly in hospital for serious but non life threatening conditions. Think multiple operations and in-patient admissions. My partner and I have a
high bar for both dropping everything, as long as one of us is with them the other tends to work/ do other stuff as normal (although a lot does revolve around the other kids). If we both dropped everything every time one child was admitted our lives would grind to a halt and, rightly or wrongly, I do think we’d go into performance management at work which would leave us with no money. We do keep in constant touch though, and for longer stays we swap over half way.

If you depend on his salary, I’d agree it sounds disproportionate for him to dash straight home. He’s got to keep his job. That said not FaceTiming because he’s resting is unforgivable and I’d be giving him
both barrels about that.

Of course - but video, whether on FT or WhatsApp, or Skype, or Teams still consumes vastly more data usage than voice only.

I'm not wedded to the idea that he's so constrained but I have no idea what he's doing over there, what his company policies are, etc.

Somebody said they could see no reason why he'd accept voice calls but not video. I'm just pointing out one reason why it could be legitimate - not defending the chap.

It seems so strange that DH wouldn't want to talk to DC and it seems even stranger that some PP are convinced he's up to no good. After all, even if he was up to something nefarious, it would be the easiest thing in the world to create some small space to video and avoid suspicions.

Hence why I speculated on a practical reason that may (or not) have some validity.

Since OP is not that forthcoming about DD's illness I can't formulate any judgement about whether a video call is even appropriate (e.g. tubes, etc)

Your marriage is in the bin. Start getting those ducks in a row.

I can't understand it's not going to be easy to come home from Australia. It's rubbish that he won't Facebook though!

But he hasn’t said he can’t do it because of roaming charges or Wi-Fi or anything like that....

The truth is he hasn't said anything. Only OP has. And I've learned that OP's are not renowned for getting everything on the table in the first post, and that aggrieved people don't always report their partner's conversation verbatim.

For instance, we don't know if he's there for a conference and skiing, or 18 hour days wrestling kangaroos so genuinely tired. Or whether it's his first trip with a new company and he's terrified of screwing up his prospects but doesn't want to admit that to OP. Or even if this has happened 25 times before and he's zoomed back to find DD pretty much fine - as some PP have said, life has to go on.

On the face of it, it's very irrational behaviour and so I think we don't have the full story.

I probably shouldn't have speculated at all - just throwing in my $0.02 on a wet Sunday

is there a chance that his job is on the line on this trip - ie the project is really important and there are upcoming redundancies that he is hoping to avoid being one of? He may be between a rock and a hard place if there is a chance that his company is going through an employee purge? If this were the case, my DH would probably not come home either, but he would tell me so that I’d understand.

I sort of understand him not coming home, as long as your arrangement for other DD is working well. It sounds as if the medical problem is not a sudden accident or similar, but something connected to an ongoing issue (even if it’s more serious than usual). Perhaps his work commitments have been set up for a long time, meetings planned with others etc. that would be difficult to reschedule.

The refusal to FaceTime is disgraceful though, especially if DD is asking for him, and I would not hold back from telling him what I thought of him.

Coming back is unnecessary but 100% no reason why he can’t face time. He’s a prick.

This. I was very asthmatic as a child and remember clearly my grandmother and mother sitting with me, but my dad was rarely there. We lived ten minutes away and he might pop in to give us something we needed, but his presence wasn’t required. My grandmother, however, was my rock. She was perfectly firm but kind. She didn’t pander to me, but she didn’t ever get hysterical.

of course, I’ve had seriously stays where my dad would come by more often, but it was mostly my grandmother/ mother who nursed me

This too. Send a teddy bear, FaceTime once a day, even a phone call.

Not even speaking to your daughter is very cold and really concerning and not a normal parental reaction at all (unless her condition means she is hospitalised every other week, which it doesn't sound like).

And the reason he has given - because he is 'working or resting' is absolutely pathetic. No colleague / customer / trainer is going to take it badly if someone says 'I'm going to finish half an hour early/ pop out for half an hour to call my child who is sick in hospital'...and 'need to rest' wtaf, nobody normal is too tired to speak to their sick child, and going to bed half an hour later is surely the least he could do to make up for it.

To not even ask to come back early but expect you to be completely off work as well is massively hypocritical. And who is looking after you? He has let you all down massively by not even speaking to you when you need support.

There’s something very off here @Coffeeoftheworld.

Not FaceTiming because he’s resting?!

WTF!!

I would seriously question what he’s doing that he can’t call his sick daughter.

I can see that coming back is not practical when he is working in Australia. By the time he’s flown back she could be out and sounds like she goes in semi regular due to her medical condition

saying all that I would fly home asap if my dd was in hospital

And, to be fair, if there is talk about her being discharged then it doesn’t sound life or death so he prob feels no real rush to get home

However he is totally unreasonable in that he says he can’t FaceTime because he needs his rest. WTF

THATS SO SELFISH OF HIM