Financial worries and wondering if I’m going insane

[Thetireddoctormum]

Sorry if this is not the right thread… but here goes. My husband has been made redundant. He has a fairly good job and is pretty hard working, the company just struggled to get further investment as a start up and as such, has folded. We knew this was coming for a while as it’s been struggling for a couple of years. I am currently on mat leave with baby number 2. I am a junior doctor and (contrary to what the DM tells you) our pay is not great. We have rainy day funds to tide us over for a bit, but my training contract will finish about 5 months after I return to work. I need to apply for my next round of training (highly competitive) and need to sit an exam , otherwise I will be out of a job too. Now my husband , while a good man, struggles to manage things. He made excuses to job hunt for the last year (while being aware that things weren’t looking good for his company) blaming a house move, our new baby etc all valid reasons , but saying he couldn’t do both. He has now said he needs the entire day to job hunt… leaving me to look after our two small children (2.5 years and 5 months). He has said he can’t afford me the time to study.. I should keep fighting but I am SO sleep deprived with my daughter up every hour to hour and half. She is EBF and refuses a bottle, but my husband is also absolutely sh’*t at getting up and even trying to settle her. He basically doesn’t try, so I do nights alone. It has been like this since she was born. I am my wits end with exhaustion and now effectively being the sole breadwinner, looking after our kids, worry of his job hunt and trying to get a decent exam scored to keep myself employed. I wanted a better life for our children and feel like I am barely holding it together.

Is your husband claiming job seekers with a job coach or are you all claiming everything you are entitled to. Loss of work can impact in all different ways the Christians Against Poverty offer debt advice and their job club if any near you is good to build confidence for your DH. Yes you are a team but many men see themselves as a breadwinner and once they lose it, they can react differently.

That sounds absolutely rubbish @Thetireddoctormumit’s probably not what you want to hear but I suspect things would be easier if you were a single Mum.

Relying on someone else to step up and being repeatedly failed is exhausting in itself before you add on breastfeeding, broken nights and exams.

I think there are two separate issues here. Your DHs redundancy and job hunting and his attitude and behaviour more generally.

Job hunting is hard work - it takes time to look through adverts, tailor your application and cv for the particular job, prepare for interviews etc. He basically needs to treat that like a job, so his day should be actively spent doing just that. Not fanning about vaguely scrolling job pages but being very intentional and focussed on looking. And in the meantime he takes anything that will help full the financial gap. It’s not the time for flights of fancy or retraining - he needs to bring in money by whatever means.

The rest is his attitude. It would be wonderful if we all could just focus on one thing at a time. As an adult, married with two children he doesn’t have that luxury. He has two children who need him to be an active, engaged parent. He has adult responsibilities that don’t disappear because he’s having a hard time (as you well know). If you weren’t there, he’d need to manage kids and the house and job hunt because no one would be filling in the gaps. He needs to be able to settle your daughter, it’s a skill to be learned. He needs to give you space to study, because you both being unemployed would be disastrous. He needs to give you time to rest, because he presumably loves you.

If he approaches his job search as a full time job that leaves mornings before he starts, and evenings and night time to pull his weight with the kids. He has weekends to learn how to care for the kids overnight and to let you study and rest. If he’s refusing to do that he’s not your partner, he’s another child to manage.

That would be my starting point for any discussion with him. You don’t have the luxury of single focus, neither does he.

He's being very unfair to you. I would insist he gets 4 hours a day to job search uninterrupted and you get the same time to study. It sounds like he just doesn't want to pull his weight with the kids.