I really need some advice on our current childcare arrangement as it's beginning to cause my partner and I a huge amount of stress. This is a really sensitive topic so please no judgement.
I'm a FTM with a beautiful 19 month old DS. I am also 3 months pregnant with our second (and really feeling the first trimester fatigue big time). I took 12 months of maternity leave and alongside annual leave, I did the full-time care of my son until he was 15 months old. I appreciate that this makes me incredibly lucky and I cherished the time with him. Even though this was a massive financial hit for us we worked out that paying for childcare would have been more expensive and so to make ends meet I worked privately on the evenings and weekends whilst my partner worked full-time during the day. It was tough, but we survived....just!
When I had to go back to work part-time a few months ago we made an agreement that my son would go to one of his grandmas every other week. So my mum and my MIL are effectively doing 1 day each every 2 weeks. (My partner and I both work condensed hours to cover the other days). My mother lives 5 hours away from us, and my MIL lives a 10 mins drive away. I was worried that it was a lot of effort for my mother to take on but both grandmas were happy with the arrangement and keen to be involved so we're trying to make it work. We arranged to reimburse my mother for her train travel. My son loves both of his grandmas and they're great with him. We've worked really hard to build positive relationships with the family which is why this situation is so hard.
Here comes the difficult part, in the past 4 months I've had to ask my mother to cover my MIL's day with my son 4 TIMES!!!! Roughly, once a month, even though she's only supposed to have him twice a month. This isn't because of any family emergency or sudden change in schedule, but because she has been on holiday abroad.... 4 times in 4 months. She has just informed us that she has another 2 booked before Christmas as well as weddings abroad that will need covering. I'm really struggling to not feel resentful about this, and please believe me when I say I don't begrudge her the breaks or her social life at all. This is her decision and she is entitled to enjoy herself, however, I feel extremely protective of my mother. My mother is a widow who's travelling extremely long distances in her late 60s and is also a full-time carer for my sibling with special needs. I can't help but feel like she's being taken advantage of. When we've spoken to my MIL about this, she expresses how much she loves looking after my son, doesn't want my mother having to do more than her share, and wants the arrangement to continue however I'm feeling sceptical about how motivated she really is given the holidays always seem to fall on weeks she's agreed to look after my son. It's left me in a really awkward position as I have to work but I have no one else I can ask to help apart from my mother who lives so far away. I've even started staying down with my mum for a week (when I can work from home) with my son so that I can ease the travelling my mother has to do. My partner is feeling increasingly frustrated with his family and it's starting to effect their relationship which is so upsetting. It's also effecting ours because we've got no choice but to spend so much time apart. The best case scenario would be that we could get my son into childcare and not have to rely on family but unfortunately, we can't afford childcare in our area and I can't afford to give up my job, especially now that I'm pregnant again and need the maternity pay.
We're now considering moving closer to my mother (which is a significantly cheaper area) and putting my son into nursery there before the new baby comes. However, my partner is worried that his mother will see this as us being ungrateful (which we're certainly not) and choosing one grandma over another even though the point of the move would be so be don't have to rely on either on them for childcare. I'm really concerned that we need to resolve something before our second comes along. Has anyone been in a similar situation and it worked out? Im struggling to think of what other options we have at this point.