Currently I stay at home and look after our 3 month old whilst my boyfriend works. Maintaining the house, laundry and cooking are my job and I’m ok with this, pulling my weight is important to me and I’ve always happily done these things in the relationship. However, since our baby was born it’s been SO much harder to keep up with it all and I feel completely burnt out mentally and physically.
In the first 2 weeks of my daughter’s life, he cooked for me a few times and helped out with house stuff and I felt so lucky and relieved, but it all abruptly ended after that. I remember then doing the laundry and cleaning whilst the baby slept, trying to keep my legs together as my stitches were hurting and my back was in agony. It was all just immediately down to me again and that was really hard whilst navigating having a new baby and very limited sleep.
I accept my role at the moment and am just about ok to balance all actual cleaning, laundry and cooking duties with caring for our newborn, but he doesn’t appreciate what I’m doing and the mess he makes everywhere he goes is ridiculous and sets me back constantly. I find it disrespectful. He won’t even put his plate in the dishwasher after dinner or put his rubbish in the bin rather than on the floor or table, and acts like he’s done me a huge favour if he does on a rare occasion because I’ve plucked up the courage to ask him. Every single day he comes in and puts his coat and bag on the floor, and every day I point it out, ask him to hang it up. He laughs, thinking im ‘nagging’ but to me it’s a simple and bare-minimum request. He also won’t do it, he makes up strange excuses and we’re in a standoff about it. I find it really rude because often I very clearly have cleaned the house top to bottom, and personally I just couldn’t imagine coming in and dumping my coat on the floor even if the house wasn’t spotless.
I’ve tried to communicate to him that I am burnt out and that I need little bits of help here and there such as taking the bin out, putting his dirty clothes in the basket and not on the floor, but he dismisses it, laughs as if I’m joking, and just takes no action. He will not take me seriously or listen to me and thinks I’m just moaning and being ‘a classic mum’ I feel.
It’s actually getting to the point it’s making me seriously resent him. As I’ve mentioned I happily accept the role of keeping the house, but I guess I want to know if people think it’s fair to want him to just pick up after himself a bit more?