I am hoping that people can give me some advice about conflict I am having with my DW over sharing housework.
Married just over 10 years. Two children 8 and 7. I work in City of London. Wife worked in City but gave up work after first child was born (was contracting so just did not go back - her choice). Live in decent-sized family house in Zone 3 since older child was six months. Last year wife retrained as a teacher and started full time job last September.
We have a lot of conflict over housework. During the time I was working and my wife was a SAHW she did not do so much housework. I would end up doing quite a bit on the weekend. We always had a cleaner for 3 hours a week and eventually I ended up paying for her to come for another 2 hours on a Friday so the place would be clean and tidy for the weekend. For context I was and am working 70-75 hour weeks in a City job with a lot of responsibility and have been the sole breadwinner and still earn 85-90% of our aggregate take home pay.
Before September we agreed that we would share housework equally. After giving our cleaner three months' notice we reduced her hours back to 3 hours a week. We have an after school nanny four days a week until 6.30 p.m. Because of Covid I have been working exclusively from home except for a couple of weeks in September when I was in the office for part of the week. My wife leaves for work before the children get up in the morning and gets home about 7 p.m.
The first issue is that I feel I am picking up all the housework and when I try to address this with my wife she just shouts at me.
- I do 90% of the clothes washing This is not so difficult when I'm working from home but it does involve time running around and in winter the kids get muddy and stuff needs to get scrubbed before it can go in the wash. And stuff needs to be hung up to dry, taken down, folded, etc. Every week my wife says she will do some of the clothes washing at the weekend and every week she does nothing and I end up having do deal with it.
- I deal with the children in the morning, making sure they get dressed, eat breakfast, brush teeth, get them to do Kumon and piano practice before school, make them packed lunch, bring them to school (keyworker children even though only one keyworker parent - please don't judge). I then come home and tidy up the kitchen a bit. Every three days or so I stop at the supermarket on the way home and pick up food.
- In the evening I cook the dinner for everyone (unless leftovers from the previous day). This can take more or less time depending on what it is. I also make sure everything is washed up afterwards. Most days I get the girls to have a bath and get dressed for bed. Sometimes my wife will do that if she is home but not always even if she is.
- I deal with the majority of the household bills and childrens' activities - booking them, paying for them, etc., although my wife also deals with some. Other stuff that comes up is always what I deal with, e.g. unblocking drain when it flooded at the weekend, changing lightbulbs, changing sheets, etc.
My wife has never mopped a floor in our house or dust anything. She vaccums very rarely. For example, when our cleaner is not coming during lockdown (I am still paying her so please don't judge) my wife vacuums maybe once for every ten times that I do.
Despite all that it is my wife who complains that I do not do more rather than me complaining that she does not. She will say that I clean but I do not tidy. She will say that whatever I am doing is not the priority and I should be doing something else. She will tell me not to do some chore because she is going to do it but then she does not and I end up doing it later that day or the next day. She shouts at me that the children have messed up the house and it is my fault. Honestly, I am one of these people who just tidy as I go - I go into the childrens' bedroom and pick up clothes, sort them out, pick up hangers, books, etc. I am also pretty good at getting them to tidy up after themselves. Before Christmas the two children spent half a day tidying up boxes of lego and one of them spent several hours sorting out and fitting into a cupboard all of their boardgames. My wife will shout at me or at the children that they have made a mess but she cannot work with them to get them to help clean it up and when I suggest that she does she says that they do it for me but they don't do it for her because she is the mother.
At any point over the weekend when my wife does any housework at all she will often start shouting at me, particularly if I am not also doing some sort of housework at the same time. It's like she resents having to do anything.
She will also blow up at me out of nowhere over things that are not done. In particular she shouts at me about the fact that most of our house is still unrenovated (but habitable). When we moved in we renovated about half of it. She was at home with a nine month old at the time and the original intention was that she would mostly deal with it. However, I ended up doing 90% of the work dealing with it - we were not doing anything structural and were engaging all the contractors directly - electrician, heating engineer, decorators, floorer, and buying all the fittings ourselves. I was up for a promotion that year and ended up not getting it because for months I was barely able to keep up at work while dealing with all of this at home.
Renovating the rest of the house involves quite a bit of structural work (we will have to move out for at least several months) and I simply don't have the bandwidth to deal with it on my own. After several years we got planning permission last autumn. Even for the planning permission I had to deal with everything. My wife would just say "we're paying for the architect, let him deal with it" but those of you who have done this sort of thing will know that it does not work like that, unless you have deep pockets and are happy to empty them. We are doing a kitchen extension and one obvious issue is that we want it to extend as much as, but no more than, we need it to, and that involves planning the kitchen - what will be in it, how big it will be etc. How far out the extension would be was one of the very few things that we needed to settle in advance of getting planning permission. I had to do it all myself. I remember one night asking my wife if she would measure up one of the existing rooms so that we could factor that in and she refused to do so. She would complain about us doing it late at night but she was a full time SAHM at the time and I was working 12-14 hour days.
When I would confront her and say "You are getting 8 hours of sleep, I am getting 4 hours of sleep. Why are you shouting at me about planning the work on the house?" she would say things like she needs more sleep than me and she cannot plan the work on the house as I am the one who earns the money (I see plenty of families in our neighbourhood where the wife is a SAHM who single-handedly deals with their home renovations). She's completely passive about the whole thing.
I am at my wits end with this because she's now f me out of it every couple of days and in front of the children. I would rather she was just honest with me and herself and say that she does not like doing housework and doesn't want to do housework. It's not that she is not hardworking - she works very hard at her current job and worked hard at previous jobs too. However, in my opinion from seeing with her own family she takes for granted those close to her. I cannot keep doing what I am doing now, never mind deal with a house renovation on my own. I'm getting more and more resentful of her and bitter towards her and how she treats me.
Do any of you have any thoughts on what I can do to deal with this? I have thought about separating and divorcing but I don't see how that would make things any better. I feel that the children are happier now than when my wife was a SAHM and they barely saw me Monday to Friday.