Honestly, how do you manage dual income marriage with kids?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m probably a decade ahead of OP’s family timeline. DH and I earned around the same, had demanding jobs and had two kids. I was drowning. I was the default parent. DH helped with household chores but I was alone with all the invisible kid duties whether it was buying diapers, sippy cups, car seats, clothing, shoes, making appointments, going to appointments, making play date plans, RSVPing to birthday parties, buying gifts for birthday parties, buying age appropriate books, puzzles, toys, etc etc etc. DH just did none of this planning or researching. He would help with dishes and bath and would take kids to sports practice or game if he was home. If he wasn’t home, it was on me. If he had a work event, he just went to the work event. It didn’t matter if it strained me.

Eventually I cut down and stopped working when I had the third child. The third child tipped us over. I originally planned to take a break and go back to work but then Covid happened. Now my kids are older but they seem to need me more than ever. Instead of an annual dentist appointment, we have to go to the orthodontist every month. My kid had braces, then a retainer and then Invisalign. My kids used to have one practice and one game for sports per week. Now that they are older, they have sports 5x per week. And now that my baby is no longer a baby, that third child is starting to have afternoon activities.

OP keeps mentioning her husband’s highly intellectual job. At some point, no one cares, especially the wife. My DH now earns seven figures, gets asked to chair conferences, join boards, constantly asked to do random crap for companies. What used to be prestigious now is just a nuisance to me and feels selfish to me as I want to go back to work. It is hard not to be resentful.

Have you ever actually TRIED to reset with your spouse? Have you bothered at all to say "this isn't working for me"? Do you ever make your needs known?

I am sort of appalled by the lack of self-esteem amongst highly motivated, intellectual, high-earning women in this thread.

I do not lack self esteem. I put my kids first above my career and spouse. I used to miss my kid’s bedtime almost daily because I could not get home early enough. When I got a less demanding job when I had two kids, I felt like I was not putting my all at work and felt like I was outsourcing my parenting life out. I am sure DH thought he was doing his part. When he is home, he is helpful. He is will play with kids while I make dinner or he will do dishes while I get kids to bed. He has always been and still is a hands on dad. The problem is he has an unpredictable demanding job. I know most people will not sympathize since Dh earns a few million per year. They will say I should be the default parent. When we first started, we had a similar dynamic as OP. This post brings back a lot of bad memories for me!

You can make choices (particularly with that income level) but instead act like all of these things just happened to you and you had no choice. You made choices and now don't like them. Learn to like them or change the situation. The low self-esteem is that you can't seem to think that you can make this happen.

I made the choice to stay home with my three children. I loved those years with them. I got to spend time with my baby and do many of the things I could not with my older two. When Covid hit, I was able to assist my older kids with virtual school and enrich them and play with my toddler. I am sure it would have been a nightmare for me if I was working then.

I think women get the short end of the stick. This is not just my situation. If I were not career oriented and an “intellectual”, I should be satisfied with my current situation. I have successful female friends who are unhappy in other ways with their marriage. The worse situation seems to be the female breadwinner who is often still stuck being the default parent with a husband who doesn’t pull his weight. The parents who have flexible not so demanding jobs that earn a few hundred grand per year seems like a nice sweet spot. OP and her husband could achieve this easily.

This. Somehow we hit the jackpot - we each make around $250K (sometimes one of us out-earns the other but we have flip flopped back and forth), we both work from home most of the time (me almost always, him probably 75% of the time), we're both pretty senior and have a ton of flexibility to leave and do stuff during the day and get work done whenever, we rarely work weekends, and our kids are now in upper elementary so they are much easier. I would highly recommend that my kids marry someone who is their equal in all ways. Our kids were all formula fed for reasons I'm not going to defend on here so other than actually being pregnant, my husband has done everything I have done since the day they were born. I was pretty intentional in picking a spouse that I wanted someone like that (my parents also both worked, were also both very involved in our lives), so I guess I'm lucky that he turned out to be who I thought he was.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think you're both too impressed with your jobs where no one will remember you a week after you're gone.

+1000, especially since at around 200k per job, most of the prestige of their job is simply being able to say something like "I'm a professor of economics at GW" or "I'm the director at XYZ nonprofit." It's the kind of thing that will impress a certain population of people in DC and maybe some family and friends outside the area, but ultimately is not that big a deal. They aren't surgeons or entrepreneurs or some job where other people's lives or livelihoods depend on them showing up to work.

OP, many of us who had jobs like this ultimately realized this and adjusted our careers and lives to focus more on family. My DH shifted to a government job where he still does work he finds meaningful but only travels a couple times a year and has very standard hours. I moved to a 30 hour a week schedule where I don't travel at all, and rather than owning a few projects where I am the ultimate person responsible for them, I consult on a larger number of projects and am more of a specialist. We both still find our careers fulfilling, but making these shifts cost us about 50k a year in income but gained us a huge amount of flexibility and time. We now take real family vacations, we have regular date nights, we are both more relaxed and sleep better and eat better. Also, as our kids have gotten older we've come to see this transition as a kind of obvious precursor to retirement -- we see our lives more expansively and recognize work is one component of a fulfilling life but far from the only one.

I think one day you are going to wake up and look at your career and wonder why you gave up so much for so little.

+10,000. A lot of these prestige jobs are meaningless to 99.9% of the world. And, you come to the realization that what you are doing really doesn't make a difference in whatever problem you are trying to influence. The sooner OP and her husband get over themselves the better.

NP but you're missing the point. OP's job is important TO HER. She's not saying the world is impressed with her, but she likes what she does. If you don't get it, you don't get it, and that's ok, but at least try to understand that other people's perspectives aren't the same as yours.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m grateful for dcurbanmoms for making this all clear to me early on. I’m purposely picking a field within medicine with tons of flexibility despite lower pay based on what I’ve seen here. We also set up our lives to accommodate this lower income. I wish more women had this guidance before setting up their lives in a non sustainable way.

I did this as a doctor and sometimes regret it. The income differences that do not seem big at the beginning will massively amplify by middle age and you may regret leaving so much money and lifestyle on the table when it was all right in front of you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Meant the more likely scenario is that I would still have to handle everything I do now after I go back to work and Dh will continue to work and only help out when he can when he is home.

Problem is this was hard enough when I had 2 kids. Now I have 3 kids with many more activities.

It's almost like the more kids you have the busier your life will be...

[jsteele]

The original poster has sock puppeted throughout this thread and likely has been trolling all along. So I am going to lock this thread.