Dealing with a spouse who's gotten very competitive with me about parenting

[Anonymous]

When you have a new child sometimes the father feels he is not getting enough attention and is basically jealous. So he criticises, upsets his partner.

[Anonymous]

My husband did this as well. It got better and worse. My favorite thing to say when this happens is: “You cannot be doing exactly the same thing I’m doing at exactly the same time I’m doing it. You need to find your own, useful, thing to do.” It’s become a little bit of a joke.

[Anonymous]

It's important that both Mom and Dad have a role in child rearing. It's not a competition but a team effort. Have you tried to divide the tasks for example: Mom does bath time, Dad does breakfast etc. Also, encouraging our spouse in the tasks they are helping with and refraining from criticism. Praying for cooperation and peace in the home.

[Anonymous]

Sounds like maybe he’s not feeling appreciated and is lashing out in a bad way. Like a child.

[Anonymous]

Wish I had that problem. My spouse is so lazy at parenting, she's more like my kid's friend or big sister than her mom. I always have to be the strict one, bad cop, etc. It's tiring and very frustrating.

[Anonymous]

I have this on steroids with my wife presently. We had a wonderful experience with our first baby. Everything was great and it solidified our marriage and love, companionship and experience in life together so wonderfully.

The next child came with more complications. As a consequence of several things I had to go into business for myself, which I can admit puts a bit of extra strain on things. However, it was unavoidable. But, it is not beyond me dropping everything and coming home at a moments notice and I made it clear my priority was the family. Further complicating things, my wife kept from me that she was going through some post natal depression; she's very stubborn and thinks that it's some kind of weakness to ask for support or talk about her feelings. In fact one of the issues that has caused us all kinds of problems in our relationship is that she is a very poor communicator, she won't share her feelings, finds it very difficult to share spaces with others as "they don't do things logically" to the manner or order in which she wants them done, and can't amiably maintain civil communication without getting agitated and passive-aggressive in common spaces around others, esp those she's known for a long time. Lookout if someone stacks the dishes in the wrong order, or places a cheese grater on the wrong hook. Sheesh. Anyway, she expects me to mind-read and try to understand what she wants instead of verbally communicating. Some things are obvious, like setting the table for dinner, but various other preparations and tasks or dates are a real doozy if I can't imagine or anticipate her needs as she absolutely refuses to ask for help or communicate what she wants. If I try to assist, then i'm not doing it correctly so I end up just walking out and leaving her to her frustrations as she passive-aggressively slams and slaps things about if I haven't placed the items on the table in the right way.

Not knowing that she was suffering with the post-natal depression, she obviously began to resent me - I'd stopped trying to mind-read by this point, and she was refusing to come to me for help. I caught her wailing and rocking back and forth on the chair in despair that the baby wouldn't stop crying. Instead of calmly coming to me for help, she just started wailing irrationally in some kind of unhinged psychosis. I was aghast, especially when I'm offering my help to her hourly at this point.

I'm a happy-go-lucky, extremely patient and tolerant, fun person, quick to joke and tease in a fun-loving way, adores my family and our home and of course my wife despite her personality change. I have a the best little relationship with our 2 year old child, we're great mates. But the wife, who was somewhat of an anxious person at the best of times began to show cracks in her personality even further along the lines of a mild postpartum psychosis. It did not help that during this time the mother-in-law comes out of nowhere while I am dressing my 2-year-old and vehemently attacks me verbally about how i'm neglecting my wife and not disciplining my children, attacking my job, my car, my this my that etc etc. And this mother-in-law has been rubbishing me my whole relationship to my wife, has tried to break us up several times. So I let her have it finally and maybe went a little overboard in telling her to back off from trying to tell me how to raise our kids, who were absolutely fine. It seems like instead of helping us and her daughter, she's used this opportunity to go in for the kill to our relationship feeding the wife's psychosis further. So I come home from work a day or two later after the in-laws left to demands of separation.

I was like, what the!?

From this point, the extreme competitiveness with me for the affections of the children and the way things should be done with regard to how the children are raised has gone from happy, relaxed, 90% positive communication and happy-shared responsibility, to her trying to hide the children away from me lest we have more fun together than she does with them... things like this. It is batshit crazy at the moment and if I push her to talk about it and press her on what is going on she goes ballistic and screams the house down swearing in front of everyone "f*ck off out of my life", and breaks the house slamming doors or putting holes in the walls in her frustration. I've caught her frustrations around my daughter a few times who has a cute boisterous nature and sometimes kicks about during getting dressed times where the wife will hurt her and twist her little legs up in torturous angles, or slam her into a wall. The wife lashes out and punches me also over simple conversations like me asking polite delicate probing questions about her behaviour and possibly going to see someone about the post-natal depression, which now she is in complete denial about. I find out later the mother in law is filling her head with ideas that I am a narcissist and an emotional abuser, I am a junk keeper, I come from a family of farm animals etc etc. None of which is true, nor have I ever been anything more than a loving husband and daddy who works hard and tries to do everything I can for my little family. I don't understand how a marriage can go from loving, excited about the future, to a ghastly nightmare of an abusive wife scapegoating me for all her problems, flying off into rages and trying to steal away the beautiful relationship I've developed with my daughter and is bent on hogging my little son from me.
My wife and her mother are now currently seeking to get a court order to get me removed from our marital home.
It is absolutely crazy, this kind of extreme punishment on me is the kind of stuff you see in the movies and the news with abusive husbands and men who scream corrosive abuse at their wives. Not family men who love their family and home dearly and who work hard to keep them healthy happy and safe in sacrifice of themselves and their time all the while trying to have great fun and race home just to see them all as it always was before the incident with the mother-in-law and the postnatal depression/psychosis.

I am at a complete loss. Honestly I cannot understand this horrible luck in life.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Is your wife a stay at home mom?

Sometimes, especially with the first, raising the baby the "right" way takes over everything. As a SAHM myself, I think that this can happen when a woman is no longer working and only has her parenting as validation of her success.

I think a lot of husbands suffer as a result, and feel pushed away as parents.

Your wife seems a bit like she has crossed into the dark side, and I am sure if she posted she would be complaining about how you do everything wrong.

I wish I had some advice to give, other than it will get better, especially once she has other things to focus on, such as more kids or a new job.

Hang in there dad!

I read the OP twice and didn’t see anything that tipped it is a dad posting. I thought it was a mom and that is possibly because my husband did this with our first. It’s new territory and we had to have several talks about it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here. My gender-neutral experiment failed. Everyone assumed the competitive spouse was female and the advice is slanted accordingly. In fact, I'm the mom (SAH temporarily). I'm not into tit-for-tat and keeping score (he is). He's a great dad, though like me, he has his blind spots. This oneupmanship/criticism came out of nowhere about 3 months ago and has steadily increased. I now get some little dig or attempt to beat me to some child-related task (then accompanied by sighing/clenched jaw/attitude) every day. It's getting old. As I said, I'm at home, so it's not like I don't do my share of childrearing. I cook often and well, I like a tidy house so that's what we have, and DC is happy and healthy. And my husband's current job and hours are nondemanding (even he will say this, often). Our lives are low-pressure right now. Seems to me like picking fights and manufacturing drama where none really needs to exist. I know you're all used to thinking of the opposite genders in these roles, but I don't actually think competitive husbands are all that rare (esp around DC).

So within that context...

Sorry, OP. I posted before reading the whole thread and you confirming you are the mom.

[Anonymous]

My husband and I did this for a long time. We both grew up in environments where one parent was the villain and the other was the martyr. His dad was an alcoholic. My dad just worked a lot.
I think that at some point, I started being the martyr about him working all of the time, me not being able to peruse the career I wanted, basically parroting my parents marriage, and he saw that he was the villain in this scenario. He quickly flipped things to make himself the martyr and me the villain, which, of course, caused a lot of fighting. Neither of us wanted that role.
Eventually, we had to realize that in a healthy relationship, there is no villain and no victim.
It’s not easy since we have no role models, but we work on it.