DH and I have just had another one of our never ending arguments about cleaning.
The usual routine at night is that he walks DD to sleep and then one of us stays with her at night, she doesn’t sleep alone we have tried everything and are waiting until she is ready. Then whoever isn’t sleeping with her goes downstairs and cleans the kitchen and the living room. Last night she fell asleep on the boob earlier than usual. He had a bit of a strange reaction and he wanted me to move her into the room he normally sleeps in, I said I wasn’t risking waking her up he argued with me for a while so I said once she unlatched from me he could take over. She normally takes a few hours to finally unlatch and so he went downstairs to ‘clean’.
We have a really small house so closing doors is really important, when he left he didn’t close the door and I could hear crashing dishes, the front door being slammed so I text him repeatedly asking him to shut the door. He didn’t respond to any texts. He came back upstairs 30 minutes ago, I repeated that once she unlatches we can swap. I managed to wriggle free and we swapped places. I went downstairs and he hadn’t cleaned anything and had left dishes to do in the 90 minutes I had been with DD. He also spilt half a bottle of thyme by the microwave a week ago that I had asked him to clean up, I refuse to do it because he always does stuff like this and leaves it for me to clean like I am his maid. The thyme was still there. I texted him asking why he had left all that stuff for me to clean. He ignored me. I cleaned the kitchen and the living room and went to bed.
This morning I asked him why he couldn’t clean up the thyme and he just said that he’ll do it today. I kept saying that I had asked him to clean it when he split it and he just said that he would do it today and I was being unreasonable. He really believes that having to ask him multiple times to do something he has agreed to do is normal.
We also don't have very much and I have a rug that I desperately try to keep nice. When DD was smaller and I did all the nights with her for about two weeks everytime I came down in the morning the baby's playmat would be out, this was odd . I finally saw that he had spilt a glass of wine on my cream rug (bought pre-baby) and didn't bother to try to clean it, he just put the mat on it. When I asked him why he didn't say anything he just said that he forgot.
Cleaning has been a huge issue our relationship. He is supposed to clean the bathroom once a week and I do the three bedrooms and hallways every Saturday. For four months I had to beg him to clean the bathroom, I asked, I reminded, I suggested, I cried, I finally wrote out how to clean the bathroom in a step by step because he claimed not to know how to (he then lost the step by step). He still didn’t do it. After four months I did it and he stood in the hallway with DD who was calling for me and he taunted me saying ‘DD wants you, why are you ignoring her’.
I think his reasoning is that he does 90% of the dishes so that’s all he should do. He also has awful hygiene to the point where I recently thought he was holding a bin bag but it was just the stench coming from a certain part of his body (I'm trying to be delicate). He doesn't shower for weeks and smells so badly we can't have sex but he's not bothered. He just laughed in my face when I told him that smell was unacceptable and went through my phone (this is fine we both have access to each other's phones) to find messages I'd sent to friends asking for advice about his smell and read them out to me laughing. I don't think he particularly cares about having sex with me which doesn't make me feel great. We are also supposed to be ttc baby number 2 but since DD was born two years ago we've had sex five times. Before DD I used to take him to the shower and shower with him. We can’t afford a cleaner and we’re Catholic so no divorce but what can I do? I’ve just cried in my bedroom from the frustration.