DH not making dinner when I was out until 6 pm..

[meorhimU]

yesterday I had a sports event to attend that ran from 1 pm until 6ish. My DH knew about it and was at home with our kids, 4 and 6.

the kids ate at around 12-12:30, I made lunch before I left.

when I got back, he’d made no dinner and complained about being hungry and @ what are we going to eat. I hurt myself doing sports and was limping quite badly.

I defrosted some steaks and made dinner, limping around in pain. While he did some admin on his laptop. He then complained I hadn’t take the bins out all week ( not true, they’d just filled up again over the weekend ).

I said, I thought it was really not great that he didn’t even think to make dinner- waited for me to get home and knew I was in pain, limiting, yet still didn’t help me or offer to make dinner. He said he didn’t realise I was in so much pain..

my DD who is 6 perked up and heard me and later called him lazy for not helping mummy when he knew I was in pain. All I wanted to do is just sit down and put my feet up, my body was sore wrecked after all the exercise and the injury. He could see I wasn’t walking well at all.

he was annoyed that my daughter pulled him up on it too and essentially blamed me for telling him off about it. It’s just common decency he should have made dinner and also even if he hadn’t made it yet by the time I got home, he should have taken care of it- seeing I was in pain.

I didn’t tell him to do it because I felt guilty that I left him alone with the kids all afternoon and felt like I had to do it. But I also know if I had asked him to do it, he would have been annoyed.

'because I felt guilty that I left him alone with the kids all afternoon '

whose children ?

yours, his, the next door neighbours ? the local pre school children ?

do you mean the children that he fathered and you gave birth to ?
( or you jointly adopted )

i.e. OUR children

of course feed the kids, it's not their fault.

You are however ridiculous to be a martyr and make a big deal of "limping miserably". If you can practice your sport competition on your own, you should be able to ask him what's for diner, grab a snack for you from the kitchen or order yourself a takeaway.

You lose the right to complain when you become a self-made martyr.

What stuff? 'Sorting out insurance' is not even a thing - even if he does actually shop around yearly, it's about 10 min once per year. What do you 'sort' with mortgage constantly? kids admin is about 100 times more than all other life admin combined.

Oh FFS you big baby.

If you normally empty the bins but you were away for a week do you think she’d not be thinking about the bins or focused on something else. She’d just bloody well do it.

I’ve written on here many times before about him

Well your choices are to continue to be stuck with a shit husband and moan on MN, or do something about it.

I suspect the former.

I must admit that one of my main bugbears on MN are the "martyrs" - the women who name change to endlessly complain about their shit husbands yet do nothing at all about it.

I know it isn't as simple as kicking him out today. I get that there are kids involved and financial constraints and a whole host of reasons you can't just LTB but you only get one life and you really need to assess if this is the way you want that life to be.

Op you are defending him now. He sat there as a lazy twat knowing that you would cook when you got in your on eggshells because of his moods. Op imagine how the kids feel when he is around. He watched you suffer he doesn’t respect you one bit. As for the bins I would have said you know how to do the job so why not do it instead of moaning about it. He really is a lazy sod. Why make excuses for him so what he works hard he’s still the father of his kids he still needs to feed them they must have been hungry and too scared to tell him.

10 minutes a year disturbing his rest time to 'sort out' the admin, and some summer weekends pottering around in the garden while OP has to keep the children out of his way 😂

good grief, it's not that deep.

You are home, you are hungry, you make diner - who needs to have a "conversation" about diner. If whoever was out had plans, what's the big deal? you make that the following day.

If you are busy or are happier with a snack, you don't make diner.

When you have kids, you do make diner at a regular time for them at least.
But between adults, who the heck needs to "assign" things around the house 😂

Yes, you share, but when you see something that needs done.. you just do? You don't have a discussion about laundry, filling up the car, cleaning the loo or the kitchen or making diner? You just.. do?

Do couples not communicate any more?

I know if i was going out for the afternoon we would speak about what time was i going to be home, what time would we are eat, what will the kids have etc. etc. it's just general chit chat.

I don't understand why people complain when they don't communicate.

You shouldn't have made dinner when you got in! Being a martyr to doing the work he clearly should have done just enables the behaviour further!
I would have ordered takeout for you and your daughter and taught him a bloody lesson!

This is no way for any of you to live. Surely this job he has can't be the only option available to him?

But surely all meals are planned in advance? As in what food will be eaten and when? (And who is sorting it out is naturally part of that conversation.) And the person who usually does the cooking will be the person who's on top of what food is actually in the house.

Getting to a mealtime without any idea what it will be is a ridiculous way to live life. Plan things in advance! Makes life a lot easier.

I would agree with you because I don't know anyone who has a regular "diner" schedule, and surely not at 6pm.

BUT with kids in the house, it's not on. They need to be fed, at regular time, and not doing it is just being lazy.

We would have communicated before. So when I finished the sport I would have dropped him a text saying ‘Just finished, will be home in 35mins, if you haven’t already got something planned, there are steaks in freezer, whack them on and we can have them with the XYZ’.

I genuinely can't understand not having this conversation.

And to be clear the failure to communicate is as much OP's husband's fault. He knew she'd be out late so the obvious thing to have said was "do you want me to sort out dinner then" or "I can sort out dinner then" or "do you have anything earmarked for dinner in the fridge/freezer" or, I don't know, any actual words.

Nope all meals aren't planned in advance. We don't plan any meals... we have a rough idea of what meals we will eat throughout the week but we don't say on Monday it will be x, Tuesday will be y and so on. I absolutely couldn't live like that...

A significant amount of posters on this thread seem to think no one should ever lower themselves to actually communicating with their partners because They Should Just Know, and the ideal form of communication in a marriage is telepathy.

does anyone actually live such a regimented life?😂

what food will be eaten and when? you have a rough idea, but come on, things happen, friends stay for a last-minute play date, you are late from a club, you have a neighbour popping by for a quick coffee... just life? Or simply you are just not in the mood for whatever meal?

What a ridiculous way to live. You have kids at home, you ask them what they had for lunch, and possibly the day after, you open the fridge and you make something with whatever you have. If something was planned and you miss it, it just gets made the next day.

I don't even know what I fancy for lunch, how would you even know what and what time you are cooking for adults later tonight?

i would have just had beans on toast with the kids or ordered in and told him to sort himself out

how can he not give the kids their dinner ffs

or more accurately, no one needs a detailed scheduled and instruction list, and are able to use a tiny bit of initiative and get things done as they go.

I never imagined it was necessary for people to have a daily discussion at breakfast when they last see each other about what must be cooked for diner that night 😂

The idea of not knowing what I'm going to have for dinner until I open the cupboard at my actual mealtime is unbelievably stressful. It was unbelievably stressful when I lived alone! Surprise, no ingredients or the wrong ingredients or the thing I feel like will take an hour to make. I do not possess the ability to throw a meal together from whatever's in the cupboard. I do not want to make last-minute trips to disappointing supermarkets at 7pm.

I know what all my dinners AND lunches will be this week and that means I can relax and think about other things.

Maybe DP and I are just more food-focused than most but talking about what we're going to eat this coming week is an enjoyable conversation, full of anticipation! (Probably wouldn't be if I was the cook, mind.)

A father knowing his children need dinner when his wife has communicated to him she’s at an activity that ends at 6pm, therefore coming home a good amount after their normal dinner time, is nothing like expecting telepathy.

What kind of human doesn’t grasp he needs to make dinner when spouse is out if the house 1-6?

No, I'm not misunderstanding deliberately. I have read what you say their conversation means and I don't agree. You are finding that very hard to accept.