kickassangel - we are in very similar circumstances. And I know you relocated to the US for your DH's job too. Lack of community support makes the pangs of SAHM-hood even more acute. I don't get to go to the gym or meet friends for lunch or go out for coffees without the kids (and therefore being On Duty), because I would have to pay for childcare to do those things, and though in the mental-health realm it may not be, it feels reather silly to pay a babysitter so that I can go to starbucks.
DH told me very early on the he wanted a partner, an equal, and he is particularly fond of ambitious women - he wanted a woman who wasn't interested in the stepford setup. I just don't think he really understood what that meant for him (I find men rarely think ahead to what life will be like after kids, not that women are over imaginative about it, but I think that pregnancy especially gets them invested in and planning it early).
Here's how it went for us:
-DH is older than I am, so further in his career, and when we met I was just starting mine.
-DH gets a good job offer in another town offering to nearly double his salary. I'm doing a crappy entry-level job so I quit and we move. I get another crappy entry-level job.
-DH gets a really good job offer in another town. I quit, move, get another crappy job.
-Suddenly six years and four international moves down the line, DH has a career that progresses and he makes lots and lots of money and I am still getting that same crappy job over and over again. My career and earning potential is stalled.
At each snapshot moment the decision makes sense and is not a sexist one per se. The salaries offered are fantastic and I am excited about the opportunities because the situations we will be coming to are genuinely better for both of us. I am not particularly attached to my career as I am planning to retrain for a different one (as soon as we fecking sit still long enough to attend a school 
). We keep all of our money joint and DH never makes me feel guilty for spending it. Of course, we are on such a tight budget right now that neither of us indulges for ourselves, so it is easily done 
Unfortunately the end result of the series of decisions that weren't individually sexist is that my earning potential is so ridiculously dwarfed by DH's and I want to retrain, so it is not worth it for me to expend the money and energy to get the crappy job this time. I very much like the term SAHM by stealth.
The other, less personal and more universal, side of the problem is that housework with small children (pre-school age) at home is that it absolutely IS invisible, and I don't just mean in terms of society/paychecks/etc. I mean when DH leaves the house for his work in the morning the table is wiped, the dishes are cleared, and the carpet is vacuumed. When he returns in the evening they are [mostly] the same. What is invisible is the box of cheerios strewn across the room and the chalk pictures drawn on the wall and the water scooped out of the toilet. A WOH partner simply cannot appreciate the true extent of the WAH partner's labor because they never see it - it all takes place out of their view. It's the nature of being at home, in our single-family homes. Other than communal living I really don't see a way to change that.
The final prong, and the one I choose to fisticuffs with DH about is that as creatures of habit we don't tend to notice things in our routine. It's a rare day when someone perks up and says, "hang on... my sock drawer is never without socks! someone is going to great effort to wash my socks!" if they never see the work being done. I've started to make folding clean laundry something that is done in the evening when watching tv, even though I could sort it myself quicker and easier because DH needs to see how often it's being done.
I do have hope for DH though. I complained to his sister once and she told me she was the same and it took her husband eight years to get her to really see mess the way others do. They were raised with a maid and seem to have a fundamental disconnect that if they don't clean up after themselves someone else has to clean it up. It helped a lot when I told him that not tidying up after himself was a fundamental disrespect of my time because it sends the message that he considers the time he would spend picking up his socks to be worth more than the time I would have to spend doing the same - because someone has to do it.
Having me at home during this moment in time helps us with our long-term goals as a couple (one of which is that DH wants to enable me to retrain and progress my career to the point where HE can be the SAH partner, and often talks longingly of being a SAHD), but boy do I look forward to kids in school age :)