Imbalance of childcare. Are my feelings valid or am I being unreasonable?

[Clueless0107]

Hi, I’m brand new to mumsnet so I’m sorry if I’m starting this thread all wrong… I’m just looking to talk to other parents about things I’m struggling with because I’m feeling like I’m going a bit crazy at the moment! So please be gentle with me :)

to give context I’m a new mum, I have a 14 month old and I’ve just finished mat leave and I'm adjusting to returning to work. I work 3 days in the nhs and my husband is a head teacher, he is full time and I appreciate his job is very demanding. I’ve struggled with the inflexibility of his role for quite some time, but having a child has exacerbated it. I have a large caseload myself, my role is also pretty full on and I’m also doing all drop offs/pick ups because husband has morning and after school meetings.

This week has triggered strong feelings of anger/resentment for me that I’m struggling to swallow down and I’m feeling like maybe I’m also being unreasonable but I just can figure it out… I really needed some extra support due to taking on some difficult cases, I asked hubby if he could be 5 mins late for a morning meeting and drop off little guy just on one day. This would afford me an extra hours work to get myself in a good place and relieve some stress, but he was adament that he could not even adjust his meeting time for 5 mins because ‘all the teachers will have to wait for me’. I asked him whether he could just give them a heads up and tell them it starts at 8.20 instead of 8.15am? It was just a flat no. He told me I was being unreasonable and over the top when I expressed that I felt frustrated and stuck in the rigidity of his job.

for context, he is a great dad when he is home and helps loads with the cleaning and house chores. He adores our son and has been very good with him since he was born, helping in the night where possible. So this makes me feel super guilty when I feel so angry. He has always just worked such long hours so the mental, physical and emotional load of parenthood feels so primarily on my shoulders, and without even a little bit of flexibility I feel trapped in the dynamic. During the school holidays of course it all calms down and he is also in a much better place and things feel easier. But during term time - which can be long and of course for most of the year, it doesn’t feel balanced at all. I also feel like he just can’t or chooses not to understand the intensity that can create, often becoming instantly defensive and then I feel even more misunderstood. I think if he could even just acknowledge it I’d feel better, but he doesn’t.

I feel like I should be able to just accept this as I am the mother, but I’m really struggling in the aloneness. We don’t have any grandparents living nearby to help either.

She doesn’t say it would be last minute though.

YANBU to want a more even split of caring responsibilities - his job can’t always be prioritised above yours.

But… him missing a scheduled meeting because you want an extra hour to catch up… I don’t think that’s fair. I wouldn’t expect to do that.

It is hard to comment because teaching has rigid time schedule. Five minutes may not sound like a lot because it might make the difference. In my job I have set appointment slots - changing them would cause issues.

In an ideal world, I think things like this should be taken in to account and discussed before people decide to have children.
my partner has left for work between 7-7:15 every morning since we met. I went in to parenthood with him knowing that morning drop offs were my role.

YABU everyone saying he sets the time of the meetings are forgetting that school starts at a specific time. Is he meant to email all the kids and tell them school will be starting 5 mins late because the staff briefing ran over because he had to drop his kid off?
get another member of staff to do it. Potential if it was an emergency but not for a drop off. Childcare issues are not an excuse for me to be late so shouldn’t be for a head either.
sort childcare that allows early drop off. This is a childcare issue not a dh one.

He’s prioritising his career because he can. Unfortunately that means you don’t get to prioritise yours or your mental health.

You need different childcare so you can prioritise yourself too.

I can assure you that a headteacher does not work short hours! More like 12 hour / 14 hour days.

It is really hard. I’d say make a rota, so everyone knows in advance which are their days to drop off or pick up.

I know my partner had to push back on a team meeting every week that started much earlier than work hours as he couldn’t do the drop off (coincided with a client meeting for me). A few of the (all male) team breathed a sigh of relief and backed him, as they had childcare responsibilities too. But no one had spoken up as they were all too scared. I wonder if on your husbands team are a few teachers who’d welcome a five minute later start for the same reasons as him

Ah yes that old adage.

Anyone who works in a school only works 9am - 3pm.

Nothing happens around that.

And certainly a HT can wipe their hands and dissolve themselves of all safeguarding responsibilities in the holidays. Because you know, holidays.

Of course. Silly me.

Short hours indeed.

Whilst I'd disagree it should be a 50/50 split one hundred percent of the time - what they should do IMO is split 50/50 when they are both not working, e.g. at home in the evenings/weekends etc. When one has holiday or is not working - they do the lions share to enable the other to work, whether that be on the 2/5 days on is a SAHP or when one has annual leave and the other doesn't. This is not 50/50 but a fairer balance for both.

Could you ask if he could delegate to the Deputy Head that day and be five minutes late?

Question for teachers. Are there really meetings every morning before school? It seems really unnecessary.

I have never worked in a school where there has been a morning briefing every day, it's usually once a week.

What's the case here, OP?

I think it's too late to move a meeting for a whole staff on a briefing day because of a non-emergency situation of the head'a wife wanting more time to get ahead at work. That affects everyone's directed time.

It would be reasonable to look at childcare hours and drop offs for the new academic year between you and ask him to find a better solution. Can he drop off x days a week but earlier?

What hours do you work and what hours does your dh work?
It is a difficult one because yes, he is the head teacher but this also means leading by example. If all his staff asked for allowances to turn up late for meetings, it could soon cause issues. Schools are on a pretty tight schedule. Can the nursery drop off be done earlier?

You're definitely not being unreasonable — it’s totally valid to feel overwhelmed when the mental and logistical load is falling mostly on you. Even small gestures of flexibility from your partner could make a big difference emotionally. It sounds like you’re both doing a lot, but that doesn’t mean your frustration isn’t real or fair. You’re not alone in feeling this way — so many of us have been there. Don’t feel guilty for needing support — it doesn’t make you less strong, just human.

One of those threads on Mumsnet where the first post absolutely nails it.

It’s not the job, it’s the man

This always. A million times over.

Is your child in nursery 5 days per week OP? Or are you doing childcare on the two days you’re not in paid work? If you’re doing childcare then you’re also working 5 days per week therefore the 50/50 share of chores is valid.

If you’ve got 2 whole days to yourself that’s different but I strongly suspect that won’t be the case.

My husbands a director of a company and he helps and does most of the drop offs and I work less… have a min wage retail job. But we take our fair share. its the man

This. My DH is the same. He once went to work after coming down in the morning and seeing water pouring through our kitchen ceiling. Didn’t occur to him to call into work to say he had a home emergency to deal with and would be in late as I had to do when I got up slightly later and found it (he didn’t even wake me up to get me to deal wit it!). Just left it and went to work. I think he would have done the sake thing had he lived alone, and probably come home to a fallen in ceiling! It’s such a weird mindset that as the pp said must be socialised. We don’t have kids together but suspect that if we did, all the flexibility would have to be in my job rather than his too and would have caused numerous rows.

It shows up in other ways too. When he needs a phone doctors appt they obviously don’t give you a time and he’s in constant meetings in his job. He would just not pick up if the doctor called and he was in a teams meeting! I’m not talking about in “big” meetings, just in meetings with one colleague! I had to say to him that you just need to warn them at the beginning of the meeting you might need to pause for a doctors call. People understand that’s how doctors appts work now, you can’t pick a time, and that he wouldn’t mind or think someone was unprofessional for doing the same. Plus it’s a massive waste of NHS time and resources!! I wouldn’t have thought twice about doing this at work! It’s like a belief that nothing comes before work, perhaps it’s part of the socialisation that men seem to have that they have to “provide” and that’s the most important thing?

And I knew a female surgeon for a while who did all the nights with the kids and all the household stuff.

Her husband does something mathsy. Not surgery.

It always amazes me that everyone’s DH needs unbroken sleep for their important jobs and every woman with kids I know is achieving tonnes on 4 hours of sleep and a red bull.

What are you talking about? I’m not facilitating anything. I’m also not responsible for my DHs behaviour. Stop making it the woman’s fault!

Also neither of the examples I gave are anything to do with competence. They are to do with mindset. Of prioritising work over everything else. And it’s not ok, as I’ve told him. But I wasn’t going to leave water pouring through my ceiling to make some sort of point! He heard about it, don’t you worry!

That sounds tough. It's still early days since you've been back from mat leave so you're in a good position to address this together before resentment continues to build.

My biggest advice would be to sit down over several evenings with your DH once you've made it to the summer holidays and are both less frazzled, and have a BIG conversation about fair distribution of all household labour starting from September.

Not very romantic but me and DH (who both work FT) have a lengthy Word document that lists out the details of ALL childcare, physical load and mental load tasks and which we've allocated out as mine, DH's or shared responsibility. We revisit and tweak it every now and again to make sure we both still feel it is fair.

To give an idea, it currently looks something like this:

Me:

• All laundry including changing the beds/towels
• Keeping living areas and bedrooms tidy
• Recycling
• Calendar management (including making plans with joint friends, planning family outings)
• Main point of contact for nursery
• Packing nursery bag, sorting DSs clothes
• Playdates, cards/presents for DSs friends
• Medical appts for DS

DH:

• Meal planning and online grocery shopping
• Bins
• Checking and topping up household supplies (shower gel, nappies, dishwasher tablets etc)
• Keeping kitchen clean and tidy between visits from our cleaner
• Washing up non-dishwasher items
• Non-medical appts for DS (e.g. haircuts)
• Budgeting spreadsheet, sorting insurances / breakdown cover etc

Shared:

• Cooking (we always batch cook 2 nights at a time, so it works out that we each only need to cook roughly 3 times a fortnight which we try to do at weekends)
• Nursery drop off and pick up (I do more days as DH has a longer commute)
• Bedtime routine with DS (DH does more days as he usually does weekends too)
• Looking after DS on the weekend while the other person can exercise / see friends etc
• Loading/unloading dishwasher

Shared (ad hoc):

• Cards/presents for our own side of the family
• Holiday planning and packing (each time we're away overnight we take it in turns to pack DS' stuff)
• Ad hoc tasks e.g. 'de-scale shower heads', 'take items to charity shop', 'organise medical cabinet' - all of these are spread out through the year and allocated equally between us on a rota we created which removes the mental load
• Car service / MOT / repairs
• Looking after DS if he's poorly

Outsourced:

• HelloFresh/Gousto (meal planning)
• Cleaner (hoovering, mopping, dusting, kitchen and bathrooms)
• Handyman for DIY jobs
• M&S pizza meal deal on a Friday night 🍕

Eve Rodsky's book/website 'Fair Play' is an amazing resource for this. I listened to it as an audiobook before DS was born and it has probably changed my life haha. It's all about playing to your strengths, sharing the load and making sure you and your partner both have equal amounts of free time. It's also about avoiding the build up of resentment / avoiding becoming the 'she-fault' parent without that being an agreed upon choice.