Wife is not a good sham

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OPs wife is a pampered princess. Lives in a 2.7m home, gets weekly massages, and has childcare for most of the week. I see posters saying she needs time to herself, but when does OP get time to himself? He works all day and maybe gets a couple of measly hours to himself if he isn’t working or with his wife. He gives her time off on the weekends but it doesn’t sound like he ever gets any personal time to himself. I stand by that she’s lazy, entitled, and a bad mother/wife.

ok well, OP can divorce her and give her 50% of the assets and alimony. win win!

This is such a crazy way to look at marriage; it is possible the wife isn’t trying to screw her husband over and would like to feel like she is contributing to the household…right?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OPs wife is a pampered princess. Lives in a 2.7m home, gets weekly massages, and has childcare for most of the week. I see posters saying she needs time to herself, but when does OP get time to himself? He works all day and maybe gets a couple of measly hours to himself if he isn’t working or with his wife. He gives her time off on the weekends but it doesn’t sound like he ever gets any personal time to himself. I stand by that she’s lazy, entitled, and a bad mother/wife.

ok well, OP can divorce her and give her 50% of the assets and alimony. win win!

This is such a crazy way to look at marriage; it is possible the wife isn’t trying to screw her husband over and would like to feel like she is contributing to the household…right?

This is why men don't want to get married. You end up with a lazy do nothing wife and lose half your stuff for the pleasure while she sat at home binging Netflix. Yeah...sounds great.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OPs wife is a pampered princess. Lives in a 2.7m home, gets weekly massages, and has childcare for most of the week. I see posters saying she needs time to herself, but when does OP get time to himself? He works all day and maybe gets a couple of measly hours to himself if he isn’t working or with his wife. He gives her time off on the weekends but it doesn’t sound like he ever gets any personal time to himself. I stand by that she’s lazy, entitled, and a bad mother/wife.

ok well, OP can divorce her and give her 50% of the assets and alimony. win win!

This is such a crazy way to look at marriage; it is possible the wife isn’t trying to screw her husband over and would like to feel like she is contributing to the household…right?

yes it’s crazy. but the craziness stems from OP being obsessed with the idea that is wife “doesn’t do as much as my friend’s sahw.” by OP’s own account she does a ton of work - just not to his specifications - and her baby is still an infant.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I took what people said on here and decided to talk to my wife. Not because I'm in the wrong, but because I needed to see if there was a deeper issue going on. We went out to breakfast solo and talked about it. My wife opened up that she doesn't enjoy being a SAHM as much as she thought she would. She misses working and interacting with adults. She said she feels jealous when going out with friends and hearing their work stories and having nothing to share. She told me she feels like she has lost part of herself and her identity. She said her not cooking is because she feels like she is always in " mom mode" and that she just doesn't have the mental capacity to cook meals. She is unhappy and feels like going back to work PT will give her that balance she needs. She said she feels like she isn't a contributing member of society and needs to feel like she has more purpose than just being a mother and wife.

She also said she has been feeling inadequate with the nanny there. She feels like the nanny can handle our two kids but she can't manage it. She had been feeling like this since for months but didn't want to feel like she was a failure by verbalizing it to anyone.

She is going to look for a new job that's PT. We will keep our nanny until our youngest is old enough for daycare. We will be looking for a housekeeper who will work weekly and help out more with meals, etc. to make life easier.

I hope you don’t mind if I share my personal experience with you, since it fortunately sounds like you and your wife have found a solution.

I became a SAHM somewhat reluctantly due to family and life circumstances, since I was also like your wife and had always been very ambitious and career focused. I hope you can somehow relay to your wife that my biggest mistake when becoming a SAHM was that I did not see, approach, or understand that being a SAHM was “a job”. Since my day as a SAHM didn’t look like any of my jobs in my previous career, and because society has a tendency to sometimes treat the SAHM role as either utterly natural for all women or as a form of permanent non-work/vacation, I went in with wrong mindset. In retrospect I had also internalized an anti-SAHM perspective that did not value the position as a job that was equivalent to a traditional employer based position.

I should have approached the SAHM role in the same way that I had always approached my previous jobs: there is a lot of stuff that I’ll need to learn, the first six months to a year may be a steep learning curve in which I may mistakes, some days will just be garbage but that doesn’t mean I’m in the wrong job, and I won’t know if the job is for me until enough time has passed that I can assess the job based upon the job itself as opposed to the often unpleasant feeling of still being in the learning curve phase. If I had become a SAHM in the same way and with the same mindset that I had started new professional positions, I think I would have had a less muddy and unpleasant first year or two of being a SAHM.

Additionally, I suspect that maybe your wife thinks the nanny is better with the kids because she probably is better with the kids. But this is the case only because your nanny has mastered the learning curve of staying home with small children. She’s not magically better than your wife, she’s just practiced the job skills for much longer than your wife. I too thought our children’s daycare employees were much better than me to the point in which I was convinced that I would never come close to their level of performance. Now that I’ve been a SAHM and mastered the learning curve, I can see that the women I thought were “more natural” than me really just had more experience and practice. Perhaps some of them were in fact natural caretakers too, which made their learning curve shorter and more pleasant than mine. But undoubtedly they were objectively better than me then. However now that I have “done enough reps” and learned the skills required, that is no longer the case. Not that I’m some perfect SAHM, but I now have everything under control and I feel generally confident about my performance (despite having more kids since I’ve become a SAHM). I also still miss my career and the societal respect that came from it, but it’s no longer a sharp feeling and I’m at peace with where I’m at currently.

So even if your wife does find part time work, please tell her that there is hope for her as a SAHM if it comes up again in the future! And I beg both your wife and anyone reading this to ask their doctor to test their TSH levels postpartum. I’ve had postpartum thyroiditis after each child, but it hits after the 6 week OBGYN postpartum appointment so it wasn’t always caught in time to prevent the effects. I have had it begin at 3 months and 6 months, and I believe that it can begin as late as 9 months. Your wife's energy levels and sleep needs sound similar to how mine were when I had postpartum thyroiditis. Everything immediately improves with a prescription for synthroid, so there is hope there too!

OP's "not because I'm wrong" tells me everything and all about what I need to know about him. What a prick.

lol I missed that. one of many tells. I hope his wife is going back to work in preparation to leave him.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:She does sound pathetically low energy and like it's not a benefit for anyone to have her home doing so little with so much expensive help. She may be a good enough mom (though kinda lazy) but she's a shitty housewife so send her back to work I guess, the current arrangement isn't working. It's a personality type, nothing truly wrong with it but it's just low capacity. I was in her spot with young kids and it felt like a vacation.

You thought being home with a baby and toddler was a vacation???

I’m suddenly feeling very grateful for DH. I can’t believe the people calling a tired SAHM lazy. DH earns a lot, helps with our kids and lets me outsource as much as I want.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:it shocks me as a full time working mom that op is being called a troll. are there really people out here deciding to stay home with help who don't think they have a hustle of their own to do? wtf? marriage you are a team where you both do annoying stuff. not where one person does annoying stuff. jfc.

it shocks you because you cannot read. she’s doind a ton. she’s just not the stepford wife to which OP believes he is entitled.

OP here. I don’t want a stepford wife and I never said I was entitled to one. I do, however, expect my spouse to pull their weight. We have a nanny come 5 days a week, one kid in daycare 3 days a week, and a housekeeper that comes twice a month. On the weekends, I let her sleep in and Saturday is her to go get a massage ( she’s gets them weekly), get a mani/pedi, see friends, etc. She has ample time to get things done.

I feel like I provide my wife with a very nice lifestyle. She has a very involved husband/father, a very nice expensive home, and she gets anything she wants from me.

You still seem to think your wife works for you. How much do you think you owe her for giving birth to and breastfeeding your two children? It will take you a while to work off that debt.

OP doesn’t think she owes him anything. Her choice was to stay at home and she assume those responsibilities that come with it. If OP decided to stop supporting his wife, wouldn’t she leave him? I doubt she would decide to pick up the slack and support her entire family.

OP was quite clear - bearing the children, nursing them, taking care of them, cleaning, was not enough. She needed to also be keeping the house tidy at all times and serving a homemade dinner every night at 6. After all she gets 3 hours off on Saturdays!

OP said she doesn’t clean or cook. His wife gets 3 days a week from 8-2pm to herself, the evenings, and Saturdays. That’s more time off than most parents get. His wife is lazy.

Oh yeah you didn't read the thread. Op has changed his story several times.

She does cook and clean.

Op resents that he has to clean up after bedtime when he's at home and he wants a home cooked meal by her every night by 6 pm

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OPs wife is a pampered princess. Lives in a 2.7m home, gets weekly massages, and has childcare for most of the week. I see posters saying she needs time to herself, but when does OP get time to himself? He works all day and maybe gets a couple of measly hours to himself if he isn’t working or with his wife. He gives her time off on the weekends but it doesn’t sound like he ever gets any personal time to himself. I stand by that she’s lazy, entitled, and a bad mother/wife.

ok well, OP can divorce her and give her 50% of the assets and alimony. win win!

This is such a crazy way to look at marriage; it is possible the wife isn’t trying to screw her husband over and would like to feel like she is contributing to the household…right?

This is why men don't want to get married. You end up with a lazy do nothing wife and lose half your stuff for the pleasure while she sat at home binging Netflix. Yeah...sounds great.

The vast majority of sahms that I know do work really hard and contribute a lot. But I’m also not wealthy and my circle doesn’t use housekeepers, nannys etc if there is a sah parent. Not sure how this works in households where the stay at home parent has a lot of paid help. Honestly, it sounds cushy but I imagine the working spouse could become resentful if they don’t like the dynamic.

I think OP should have a talk with his wife to see how she is feeling, she may not like being a sahm but feel social pressure to do it or even be experiencing some ppd or anxiety. Assuming both partners are acting in good faith I think an open conversation would be helpful and prevent resentment from growing

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:She does sound pathetically low energy and like it's not a benefit for anyone to have her home doing so little with so much expensive help. She may be a good enough mom (though kinda lazy) but she's a shitty housewife so send her back to work I guess, the current arrangement isn't working. It's a personality type, nothing truly wrong with it but it's just low capacity. I was in her spot with young kids and it felt like a vacation.

You thought being home with a baby and toddler was a vacation???

I’m suddenly feeling very grateful for DH. I can’t believe the people calling a tired SAHM lazy. DH earns a lot, helps with our kids and lets me outsource as much as I want.

Yeah that’s what a good guy does. I cannot get over how unsympathetic, petty and controlling OP is, towards the woman who gave birth to his baby 6 months ago.

[Anonymous]

lol OP.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:it shocks me as a full time working mom that op is being called a troll. are there really people out here deciding to stay home with help who don't think they have a hustle of their own to do? wtf? marriage you are a team where you both do annoying stuff. not where one person does annoying stuff. jfc.

it shocks you because you cannot read. she’s doind a ton. she’s just not the stepford wife to which OP believes he is entitled.

OP here. I don’t want a stepford wife and I never said I was entitled to one. I do, however, expect my spouse to pull their weight. We have a nanny come 5 days a week, one kid in daycare 3 days a week, and a housekeeper that comes twice a month. On the weekends, I let her sleep in and Saturday is her to go get a massage ( she’s gets them weekly), get a mani/pedi, see friends, etc. She has ample time to get things done.

I feel like I provide my wife with a very nice lifestyle. She has a very involved husband/father, a very nice expensive home, and she gets anything she wants from me.

You still seem to think your wife works for you. How much do you think you owe her for giving birth to and breastfeeding your two children? It will take you a while to work off that debt.

oh come ON. i am a woman and this is ridic. just get a job and stop violently defending your do nothingness.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OPs wife is a pampered princess. Lives in a 2.7m home, gets weekly massages, and has childcare for most of the week. I see posters saying she needs time to herself, but when does OP get time to himself? He works all day and maybe gets a couple of measly hours to himself if he isn’t working or with his wife. He gives her time off on the weekends but it doesn’t sound like he ever gets any personal time to himself. I stand by that she’s lazy, entitled, and a bad mother/wife.

ok well, OP can divorce her and give her 50% of the assets and alimony. win win!

This is such a crazy way to look at marriage; it is possible the wife isn’t trying to screw her husband over and would like to feel like she is contributing to the household…right?

This is why men don't want to get married. You end up with a lazy do nothing wife and lose half your stuff for the pleasure while she sat at home binging Netflix. Yeah...sounds great.

+1. i am so shocked at the women on here who think having a kid is like something your dh owes you for. and i'm a woman!
so you had a kid, so did i. it was mildly inconvenient and sort of painful that day and postpartum wasn't great and for those things, sure, you should get more time off and rest. But after the kid is 6 mos, you are equals. it's ridic to expect one person to shoulder all the work and you do bare minimum and they like it. i mean you can try, but they wont.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wonder if OP realizes how hard it is to just take care of a baby and toddler. Forget the cooking and cleaning, just keeping the kids alive and not crying. Add to that playing and feeding them.

I remember snapping at DH when he came home and commented about the house being messy. I used to work 60 hours per week and didn’t cook. You don’t all of a sudden become an amazing cook and housekeeper because you give birth to two kids.

OP here. I’m aware it’s challenging and not easy. I have had them on my own for extended periods many times before. I care for them in the evenings and on the weekends as much as I can.

My kids are older now and Dh earns a seven figure income. I actually enjoy the kids. I don’t enjoy cooking and cleaning.

I was a terrible SAHM in the beginning.

I wanted to add that DH probably still thinks he does more cooking and cleaning than I do. I’m well educated and attractive and our kids are beautiful and smart. DH accepts cooking and cleaning are not my forte. I still get annoyed when he comes home and asks me what’s for dinner. I’m annoyed that I have to feed the kids for all meals.

this is a very narcissistic comment.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:She does sound pathetically low energy and like it's not a benefit for anyone to have her home doing so little with so much expensive help. She may be a good enough mom (though kinda lazy) but she's a shitty housewife so send her back to work I guess, the current arrangement isn't working. It's a personality type, nothing truly wrong with it but it's just low capacity. I was in her spot with young kids and it felt like a vacation.

You thought being home with a baby and toddler was a vacation???

I’m suddenly feeling very grateful for DH. I can’t believe the people calling a tired SAHM lazy. DH earns a lot, helps with our kids and lets me outsource as much as I want.

Yeah that’s what a good guy does. I cannot get over how unsympathetic, petty and controlling OP is, towards the woman who gave birth to his baby 6 months ago.

Nobody is falling for the manipulative "good guy" shaming tactic anymore. Shall I tell you what a "good woman" does? I'm sure you'd love that...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OPs wife is a pampered princess. Lives in a 2.7m home, gets weekly massages, and has childcare for most of the week. I see posters saying she needs time to herself, but when does OP get time to himself? He works all day and maybe gets a couple of measly hours to himself if he isn’t working or with his wife. He gives her time off on the weekends but it doesn’t sound like he ever gets any personal time to himself. I stand by that she’s lazy, entitled, and a bad mother/wife.

ok well, OP can divorce her and give her 50% of the assets and alimony. win win!

This is such a crazy way to look at marriage; it is possible the wife isn’t trying to screw her husband over and would like to feel like she is contributing to the household…right?

This is why men don't want to get married. You end up with a lazy do nothing wife and lose half your stuff for the pleasure while she sat at home binging Netflix. Yeah...sounds great.

+1. i am so shocked at the women on here who think having a kid is like something your dh owes you for. and i'm a woman!
so you had a kid, so did i. it was mildly inconvenient and sort of painful that day and postpartum wasn't great and for those things, sure, you should get more time off and rest. But after the kid is 6 mos, you are equals. it's ridic to expect one person to shoulder all the work and you do bare minimum and they like it. i mean you can try, but they wont.

Well the OP believes he is entitled to his wife working for him 24/7 except when he deems it acceptable to rest (oh, she gets to take a shower, sleep all night, and go out on Saturdays.) If he is going to control her work then he also needs to take into account ALL her work, including the very hard physical labor of bearing and breastfeeding his children.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OPs wife is a pampered princess. Lives in a 2.7m home, gets weekly massages, and has childcare for most of the week. I see posters saying she needs time to herself, but when does OP get time to himself? He works all day and maybe gets a couple of measly hours to himself if he isn’t working or with his wife. He gives her time off on the weekends but it doesn’t sound like he ever gets any personal time to himself. I stand by that she’s lazy, entitled, and a bad mother/wife.

ok well, OP can divorce her and give her 50% of the assets and alimony. win win!

This is such a crazy way to look at marriage; it is possible the wife isn’t trying to screw her husband over and would like to feel like she is contributing to the household…right?

This is why men don't want to get married. You end up with a lazy do nothing wife and lose half your stuff for the pleasure while she sat at home binging Netflix. Yeah...sounds great.

+1. i am so shocked at the women on here who think having a kid is like something your dh owes you for. and i'm a woman!
so you had a kid, so did i. it was mildly inconvenient and sort of painful that day and postpartum wasn't great and for those things, sure, you should get more time off and rest. But after the kid is 6 mos, you are equals. it's ridic to expect one person to shoulder all the work and you do bare minimum and they like it. i mean you can try, but they wont.

put simply, OP believes that because he pays for his wife to stay home, she’s on the clock for him and should be working every minute of the day (except for the rest periods that he has determined). So it’s only fair to put the whole thing into a labor law context. with 18 months of pregnancy, the pain of childbirth, and 8 months of breastfeeding, I’d say OP has earned a LOT of compensatory time off. At 6 month post partum she still has a lot of hours to cash in. We aren’t all so lucky as to have childcare 3 mornings/week but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t earned it!

If this seems petty remember that OP started it with his beancounting and jealous comparison to other wives.