Easier without DH, I'm livid

[SuperMonkey889]

First time mum to an extremely active 12 month old. No family nearby at all, just me and DH. He had to take a 2 week work trip recently, I cannot tell you how much I was dreading it. I was genuinely scared how I'd cope alone with DS, on top of working full time.

Well....DH is back and....I've just realised it was easier without him. Not physically, physically it was harder (especially as DS was teething for half the time so was waking 5x night for a few days).

Mentally, so much easier. No negotiations, no having to give instructions, no expectations unmet, no moaning from DS because DH is meant to watch him but he's looking at his phone, wasn't stuck in the house because DH NEVER wants to go out in the morning.

On paper, DH does a lot. But it's all under my "supervision" (I can't find a better word, management maybe?). It's fucking exhausting.

Anyway, I can barely look at DH now. I'm so angry with him. It's like a mask has fallen off or something and I've realized just how much I do and how useless he is. Where do I go from here?

Oh, tricky! My sympathies.

I guess you can try and improve the domestic power imbalance by Having Talks, mapping things out on paper, agreeing some sort of system. A couple of my friends have succeeded with this, though I should add that they ended up having to credibly threaten divorce before their lovely but oblivious husbands took them seriously.

Or perhaps encourage him to be away more often?

This would, in fact, give me an insurmountable case of the ick and I'd be considering my marriage effectively over. I managed to stall for several years with XH#1 by informing him we'd be buying in help. The help was brilliant, but he carried on being a lead weight at home and the relationship died because of it.

Some more optimistic and forgiving wives may come along to support a husband improvement programme. Good luck.

Sounds like you have two kids op.

You can't unsee what you've seen.

When you have some time together, bring up the issues and make it plain that you expect him to take you seriously and to come up with solutions to the problem of him not engaging his brain/ pulling his weight.

Don't accept "You're so demanding that I'm afraid of getting it wrong". Don't accept any excuses or attempts to accuse you of any contribution to this.

Unacceptable behaviour. He's expecting you to parent him in addition to parenting his own child.
Oblivious to your needs to boot.

Read Wifework - or ask him to read it. Or pick one or two chapters that really resonate with you if you don't think he can manage the whole book. Although this in itself is, ironically, wifework.

You need to go out sans child and leave him to it more often.

Have a proper discussion and get some agreements on the table, eg one of you gets a sleep in each weekend day.

Fair play website is great. Looks at the emotional and cognitive load, not just the physical part and you divide it out. For example, if you take on swimming with child, you also need to book it, have the swim bag ready, wash out the clothes after etc. too often women do all the planning and tidy up, but the man feels they did the task and don’t notice the hidden labour. It also frees up your mind, because if it’s not your task you completely forget it. There are minimum standards etc to be agreed upon.

Your post reminds me that DH ( working from home in the attic while I worked from home in the kitchen) once sent me a text: Shall we have a date night tomorrow? Cinema? I texted back Yes, thinking, bit lazy not to come down and ask me. Then he replied, ' Great. Could you just book some tickets and a babysitter?' And I just said, 'No. Your date. You do it.' He thought I was being stroppy but I pointed out if it was no big deal for me to do it, it was no big deal for him to. Then watched him ring about six people from our baby sitting group who weren't free but could do Saturday instead etc. He ended up agreeing to babysit for one of them in exchange. And it took him half an hour to get a sitter. Then he realised what 'Could you just?' translates to. And I got him to do the babysitting, not me.

Sadly this is the case for many women. Part of it is you have to let go, will you do it better? Yes, but just let him do things his way. Also, you need to leave him alone with the baby, so he needs to figure things out on his own. I get you though, it's annoying and very, very unsexy.

What website is this? Thanks

Parenting classes…?

I think there’s probably issues in your marriage around him being useless / man child, but I will say I HATED my husband when baby was about 12m. I was very very tired and very very angry generally. I don’t know if that was also due to DH being a bit useless but I definitely was also in a rage and well and truly ‘in the midst’ of baby routine. I found this subsided about 18m and I started to feel less stressed. Anyway that was me - it sounds like he isn’t very competent or has learned to be helpless.. you need to tell him all this and look at dividing up the tasks. You need to to give him baby and go out; he needs to learn and see what it’s like. If all else fails you could try counseling.. the killler in all this is the Ick which is very very hard to reverse…

The thing is, these men aren't as useless in other areas of life. Presumably he holds down a job in which he needs to be competent without someone spoonfeeding him. But at home you've got into this dynamic where you manage everything and he lets himself be crap.

My relationship was definitely like this and it ended soon after DC2 was born. I really could not be in the same room as him, I had lost all respect because of how he always let me do all the difficult things and he didn't want to be an active, involved parent. No amount of talks helped. They descended into him being defensive and me "nagging" and nothing changed. He genuinely thought he was doing loads for the family by cooking tea once a week and seemed to think i should provide him with detailed instructions every time i left the house. After he moved out he magically stepped up. When the DC were with him, he had to do everything that I had previously done, and he did. He took them out for activities, he cooked, cleaned, made packed lunches, helped with homework, got up in the night with them, potty trained. He is genuinely a very good parent now.

But he's only like this now because no one else is there to do these things or to tell him what to do when.

www.fairplaylife.com/

I had the same @KickHimInTheCrotch. My EX did nothing when we were together. He’d never even put the DC to bed as “it took too long and he had things to do”.

Now, 4 years post split DC stay with him very regularly and he does everything he should have done with them when we were together. If he’d have stepped up back then, we may not have ended up splitting.

My sympathies OP, I have no useful advice assuming you want to stay with your DH, as the only action that caused mine to step up was me leaving for good. Life is so much less stressful now.

This is why we need a better parental leave system, because at the moment what often happens is that the woman becomes the “expert” in the baby and shit, lazy men retreat into learned helplessness. My friend had one of these and she did manage, through sheer bloody mindedness, to make him less shit, but as above she did have to credibly threaten divorce and I think they had a whole tedious period of therapy/book reading to do it. There’s a graphic novel called the mental load that might be worth having a look at/showing to him.

If you love him and value your relationship, go away for two weeks and leave him at home with DS.

Don’t do any more before you go than he did on his trip, and don’t arrange any help for him. Have the conversation when you get back so that what you mean is fresh I’m his mind.

My marriage is ending after years of issues, including this. I tried everything to keep us together, but ultimately he was too obstinate and didn’t believe I meant my desperate divorce threats until the point it was finally 100% over. Now he’s desperately trying to win me back saying he’ll do anything. But I know for a fact with years of supporting evidence that what that means is he’ll SAY anything, but he'll DO nothing. It’s really sad, it seems really common, and it’s really really annoying that so many men are so wilfully persistently lazy.
You could try explaining that the more he does nothing to help, the more he makes it clear that he is surplus to requirements, the more he reduces his input to just an income. Does he really want to be nothing more than a friendly paycheck to his wife and child? Doesn’t he want to be a pillar of the family that you can depend on, admire, and as a result deeply fancy? The ick of a selfish lazy man is so strong, he needs to realise his sex life is at stake. Not to mention his sense of self worth surely- I’d be so ashamed to not be a helpful parent and wife, it would really affect me. It amazes me that so many men can opt out and expect no repercussions.
Look up Walkaway Wife syndrome- where after years of putting up with crap, the wife is broken and the husband suddenly realises he’s fucked it all up.
Your DH needs a massive wake up call before it’s too late - I hope it works out for you x

Unfortunately this scenario is not uncommon. One common example in our household is DH would put washing in the washing machine but never hang it up. He would say he did the washing, but all he really did was put it in and switch it on, leaving the hanging up to dry and folding/putting away undone. I just stopped doing his washing completely. If he left it in I took it out and left it in a basket to get smelly. Eventually he got the message.

I think that’s the experience of most people though and I even suspect that’s the experience of my DH when I’m away as he can just make all the decisions without having to think about what might work for me, not dissimilar to before you have DC when a few nights with a partner away is nice.
(Or possibly this is not normal and my own relationship is screwed)

The thing is, if you ask/instruct him to do things, one day he will turn around and call you a nag. This level of resentment isn’t tolerable long term, you need to do something about your situation before it all goes pear shaped.

Go straight to counselling as it will also help with the listening side since these men don't "hear" when you have a heart to heart chat. If he refuses (or doesn't change within 4 to 6 months of counselling) then you will need to face the thought of splitting up for good. However most women can't get past the resentment that they were forced into this position in the first place, sorry OP.

Oh OP this is very familiar. I wish I had a solution but I’m another who felt like this after the first baby and ended up divorced. Stupidly it took me almost another decade and two more kids before I finally threw in the towel. If I’d listened to myself back then after DC1 and left when I first wanted to, my life would probably have been a lot easier tbh. But on the plus side, post split he did eventually learn to parent, although it took years - he has them every other weekend, which is far more involved than he ever was when we were together (which says it all).
And I upgraded to a man that actually pulls his weight and does his fair share without needing me to hold his hand or throw him a cheerleading party every time he washes a dish. It’s been a revelation - they do exist!

I hear you Op. Use your anger as a positive, you've now seen what isn't working which is a good place to start and you have the energy to change it.
What do you want to happen, what do you need? Do you still want to live with your DH? Let the questions sit in your mind until you feel calmer and see a way forward.