my dh resents me for not working

[thestarryskiesabove]

we have 2 Dc's, 4 & 5, both in full time education, it was always agreed that one of us would stay at home and look after the kids until they were older, whilst the other worked - I am now looking to get a job but have so far been unsuccessful. The fall out is that dh is being really resentful towards me and pretty much treats me like a home help/employee, ie with disdain and contempt. I get that my role is perceived as the easier one, but in reality our hours are pretty much similar in that I am a house wife 7 days a week, I do everything to do with the house and kids from sunrise to sun down - whereas he does a 40 hour week mon to fri. How do i deal with his deep, brooding resentment?, obviously apart from getting a job - thats for the future, i am talking about right now.

"I even take the bins out". Best statement I've read in a while.

blue

Yes, i saw that delusion too. Something about it not being a military operation, and then a mention of a cleaner.

BlueSky reading theses sorts of thread is changing my behaviour too. Time for an MN break for me!

I'm a single parent, with a 9-year-old whose school day is 8.35-2.35pm. While his father is involved, sees him regularly etc, he lives on the other side of London and has a demanding job with irregular hours. I have worked since DS was a baby, but it is very hard, and if it weren't for tax credits we would have starved. I have specialised skills that are pretty much obsolete now and, at nearly 50 with little or no 'ordinary' office experience, I'm not a tempting prospect to employers. So I have a ragbag of freelance jobs and zero-contract part-time work, and a lot of problems with clients who don't pay on time, or disappear and don't pay at all.

I suppose if you have a moderately well-paid, moderately secure job in an industry that's unlikely to collapse altogether, you might find it difficut to understand quite how tough it is for people in other circumstances. But the difficulties of combining wage-earning and parenthood need looking at. The old solution of designating women as the domestic-service class and men as the money-earning class was never that good and it now doesn't work at all.

Nice to see the usual competition and some competitors here... I do more / No you don't you liar! I do!!!

Half thread misses point entirely. This isn't about YOU. Or what works for you. If you want to help how about questioning the op on the set up and giving advice there?

Sheesh.

darkesteyes - yep, I know.

Some of us married folk who turned out to be, amongst other things, a bit of a fuckwit.

Hey ho... if I knew then what I know now.

I like the suggestion recently (R4) that we adopt a four day working week so that couples can manage childcare better and it becomes normal to work part time.

The only reason we are in this mess is because women started working in the 70s and 80s (waged as opposed to cash jobs on the side), two wages per family meant higher mortgage affordability and increased house prices (pushed up by demand and ability to pay). And now in order to maintain the high house prices we need two full time wage earners and to pay for childcare so we can work to maintain those high house prices...

That's my theory anyway.

OP, is he resentful because you tell him you work harder than him?

enlighten did you mean to be so rude?

I was responding to those pp who said that the only way to wOrk was to be an obsessive and a martyr, with military precision and then scrubbing the floor till midnight. I was just pointing out that you can pay for someone to clean while you are at work, and actually most of us just muddle along being pretty normal.

I don't have the luxury of calling on friends to bale me out, because when you have a profoundly disabled child, and he is 18, oddly enough your mates with 18 year olds at Uni are doing something else now. I never asked anyway, as its not like having a NT child. So don't worry, none of my friends were harmed in the making of my delusion.

I feel your pain OP. I sort of have this issue but the resentment from my H is for me having 1 day off and still working a very full on 4 d wk ( more than 40hrs all told)

I do it because I like to spend time with my second preschool child and take/ collect my older once from school once a wk. We have a nanny on the other days.

He thinks that it's unnecessary for me to do this and neither child benefits from me being there . He thinks that Its all about me having a day off.

It's a constant silent pressure to go ft and I fucking hate it. Incidentally I've contributed more to the household over the years than him sue to my higher income

Anyway. OP I get your Hs resentment totally but he should give you some slack.

Why not suggest a trial run of a month of pretending you are working ft. Get him to do his share eg take kits to school whilst you collect or something and see how it goes.

You should work in some capacity IMO but he needs to get what that means for everyone. He needs a few calls from the school to say he has to collect a sick child to give him a sense of reality. !

Good luck

BoB Did you mean to be so superior/smug?

I must be doing something wrong. I manage to work fulltime without any of this military organisation, up at dawn stuff. I fall out of bed at 7, chivvy the kids off to school- used to walk them there but don't need to any more- and get to my desk between 8.30 and 9. I work till 5.30 then go home at 6 to take over from my carer.

Foxyharlow

It was meant in a tongue in cheek way, as in, he doesn't even manage the one man job.

But I'm glad i'm the best at statements. Yeah me.

No, I got that, it just made me chuckle :-)

My DH is wonderful as regards this.
I've always worked part time,used to work weekends and nights years ago (nurse)
Have had 4 DCs with big gaps,only one left at primary school now.
Currently am lucky enough to work one day a week,use before school club and grandparents kindly collect as neither of us finish until 7/8 o'clock.
No way would I work more though,I love having coffee/lunch,going for walks or to the gym,reading,shopping,sleeping
Do about an hours housework a day,big 5 bed 2bath house,plus washer on twice a day most days.
I like being able to attend things on in school in day times occasionally .
Working one day gives me best of both worlds,bit of money,social stimulation,etc.
The crux of the matter is financial,I think.
We have good standard of living as DH earns very well,obviously if he didn't then I would work more.
As has been said,finding jobs that are flexible enough to accommodate short school days,long holidays,illness,teachers strikes plus pay enough to outsource child care etc are few and far between.

enligtenme I am sorry it came across as smug. It was meant to be lighthearted/ showing that in fact some of us are not superwoman and don't try to be. Perhaps, if that's how you took it, that's why you were so rude. Just shows its not easy to be lighthearted on the Internet.

Phew! Glad the thread turned around to people supporting op, I thought you were getting a hard time too. I agree with slapperati et al

Is it fortunate? As I said upthread, most children going to state schools, certainly those in towns or cities must live pretty close to other children going to the same school. My neighbours and I all did the school run in the infants. After a year or so of all walking the same way at the same time we hatched a cunning plan to share the job. I think a lot of parents do have the same choice but choose not to take it.

DC's school has a similar rule about not dropping off before x time. Can't say I've noticed any correlation between the children who are dropped off and whether their parents work or not. Actually I suspect they are more likely to not have working parents - as they tend to have their wraparound childcare carefully choreographed.

I sometimes do favours for parents and other parents sometimes to favours for me. Some of them work and some of them don't. Again, I think this is healthy, unless it becomes onesided. I tend to find the people asking for most favours are those with 2 or more children who inevitably end up having to be in 2 places at the same time or not wanting to drag the youngest out to something the eldest is doing. And that's a problem whether you are a WOHP or a SAHP - in fact it's actually easier if you have 2 parents who are about, even if they both work - rather than 1 SAHP and 1 parent who works away/long hours.

Actually beast it was me who originally mentioned delusion. I wasnt actually referring to you (your situation is obviously slightly different) but mulling that I have been fairly regularly asked to help out by having children when their highly paid professional parents have found themselves unavailable to get their children/get them to school. I wonder if they have conversations about how easy it is and why can't everyone do it?

Also with regard to the cleaner - in my wealthy area house cleaners earn as much as, if not more than, office staff - so not cost effective for a reasonable proportion of the workforce!

I have three school aged children and haven't worked since I was expecting our first. My husband has never once moaned about me not having a job as he realises he couldn't do his job if I wasn't doing mine. And he is a nice person.

Your H sounds like a twat.

hi, i am back, was having trouble settling the kids down, one had lost a stuffed rabbit that we had made earlier and was distraught! DH is away on business, so unfortunately stuffed rabbit rescue mission was down to me only, a mission that failed miserably by the way. So tough evening of sorts but very happy now, house to myself and no glowering DH!

But yes, i have opened a big writhing can of worms here haven't I? well not opened exactly, because this issue has been around for years, but i have shaken up a big open can of worms.

There are no absolute rights and wrongs to this, but some of your posts have been very nice and supportive and some not so!?

I think I have been very fortunate to be able to be a SAHM all these years and I wouldn't give it up for anything, I've been there for all the big milestones in their lives - but it has affected my career. Thats a choice i decided to make.

For the record I have been trying to get a job - for real! and also for the record I have in the past been a full - time working single mum - I have a grown up daughter. So I've kind of done it all - and I feel like this is the first time I've been able breathe in years. And if we are talking purely about hours at the coal face, then not only have I done my time with the early baby rearing days of these latest 2 DC's, I am also putting in the hours now, when DH is not working, ie - the weekends, the mornings, the evenings, the holidays - it all adds up.

DH is working no harder now than when he was a single man, only now he gets to come home to a lovely family - so I do have trouble understanding his resentment.

What reasons has he given for wanting you to get a job, though, OP? Is it that you as a family need more money, is he actually worried about your personal development and going about it in the wrong way - or is he just looking for a reason to be unpleasant?

"DH is working no harder now than when he was a single man, only now he gets to come home to a lovely family - so I do have trouble understanding his resentment"

Presumably as a single man, he had only himself to support not another non working adult and children. Thats a huge difference

He didnt have a choice in being their for their milestones and now expects that you return to work given you are home all day with no children. He is not asking for much is he. You dont sound like you value his financial contribution in the slightest rather just expect it.

Would you have swapped and been the only earner and let him be a SAHD to school aged children where his days were his own. Somehow i doubt it.

I don't understand his resentment either OP.

I'm a SAHM with teens now, and my DH is so lovely about everything and loves the way we work as a partnership, I can only imagine how stressful it must be for you to live with this pressure.

Looking at it from his pov, is he very stressed at work, or does he hate his job and is jealous of you, or are you hard up? (Sorry if you've said this elsewhere)

But really I echo FabBakerGirl - he sounds like a twat. You have my sympathies.

I know, blue, you went rude at all, and you didn't make it about me. That was enlighten. But she read my post as smug and patronising, which it wasn't meant to be, so I can see how it happened.

All I was trying to say was, some posters were feeling that the only way to work is to be hideously self disciplined and to work all hours. It doesn't have to be like that.

OP, has his attitude been like this throughout? Or is it recent that he has become so resentful? As I said up thread, your posts suggested that you both agreed it was time to go back to work, so it isn't as if you two disagree on that. So is it about him being impatient? D you think it's worth agreeing a plan with him about how you will get back to work, in terms of retraining, and the fact that actually, it does take a bit of time?