Coming to grips with gender/class implications of SAH

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here. We both currently work long hours. There is little household work to be done. I cook occasionally and do the dishes when I do. DH is in charge of trash and putting away dishes (I nag him to do it, and then he eventually does). We each do our own laundry. We have every-other-week housecleaning service. I do all occasional household management issues (booking travel, shopping, etc.), but I work slightly fewer hours and enjoy these tasks. So it's not 50/50, but it's workable. DH never asks me to do more; it's all self-imposed.

DH is South Asian.

I had a long conversation with DH last night based on helpful posts here. Again, I totally get everyone's point that this whole conversation is theoretical until we have children and see how we feel. But I absolutely would feel remiss to not lay ground rules and get on the same general page before we get pregnant. We discussed a few key principles:

1) He needs to be home before the children go to bed if at all possible. He should spend that time with the children. If the children are throwing a temper tantrum, or breaking lamps, or spilling milk while he is with them, he is "on" for that time to deal with it or help deal with it. I will do whatever evening tasks need to be done away from the children so that his priority is being with them (dishes, last-minute laundry, etc.), but he won't be just handing the kids off when they make a mess or are difficult. He agrees 100% about spending time with the children -- doesn't totally understand what kind of messes it will involve, but gets the idea. He wants to do bath and bedtime.

2) We'll hire as much help as I want during the week to ensure that there's not too much household "menial" (sorry, lack of a better word) work to be done in the evenings and weekends so that is quality time with the children/down time. This is the key for him. He does not want to be cooking and vacuuming and similar.

3) When the children are young, I am fine taking primary responsibility for cooking (which I enjoy) and diaper changing (eh, I'm not winning that fight), but he must do it often enough to be competent and comfortable at feeding and cleaning the children so that they are okay when I need a day off or travel or etc. He's never going to be able to handle much more than microwaving baby food or toasting a bagel, but I'm okay with that.

4) When the children aren't sleeping through the night, he will take night duty a couple times a week (one weekend and once during the week?) to ensure that I get quality sleep.

5) He prefers I stay home, but understands I may not want to. If I keep working, my field allows me to make enough money that we can increase the amount of household help to try to preserve the quality time aspects for both of us.

6) He says he totally thinks I would get "the short end of the stick" in this arrangement, but that he loves his job and it just doesn't allow him to take primary caregiver responsibility (he does love his job, he's great at it, and I love that he loves it). The "reward for me", he says, is that when the children are in school, or grown, and I there is free time to be had, if I want to not go back to work and just relax and volunteer and take classes while he keeps working, I can. I told him I had no idea how I felt about that kind of arrangement (makes me uncomfortable), and he says it's totally up to me whether I want to go back to contributing financially to the household or not (assuming our financial picture stays stable). All he "requires" is that I continue to do the cooking and cleaning. Gr, but yes, I knew that going in.

So, again, I know this is all theoretical, and I know things will adapt and he'll push back at various points, but do these sound like good ground rules for getting my old-fashioned husband to be a reasonable father and husband?

OP, this all sounds good. But if you have 2-3 kids and wait to go back to work until they all start school, you and your DH need to realize, and think about, what your job options might be. It's a competitive world, and things are changing. I don't want to be all doom and gloom and imply you will never work again, but taking years off will likely affect the kind of job you can get when you want to go back in. It's tough out there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP - I think it is fine to discuss this ahead of time to some degree, but you are not yet even pregnant. You have NO IDEA what it will feel like when you have a baby or babies. You may want to stay home, you may not. You may want to outsource, you may not. You may LOVE ebing the diaper wiping, food cooking, playdate mommy or you may not. If you love and respect each other, you will find a way to work it out.

I disagree. I think it's pretty easy to predict how you will feel, even before you get pg. I knew I wanted childcare and financial equality when I agreed to get married. Having two children did nothing to change our firm resolve as a couple that we need to contribute as equally as is practical to the money making, childcare and housework.

[Anonymous]

OP, I had a feeling your husband was South Asian. Was he born here?

That may seem like an irrelevant question, but my husband is South Asian. He was born here, his brother came from India when he was five. Both highly educated professionals, both in demanding careers, both endured the same sexist, racist, classist, bully of a BPD dad. My husband is the most selfless, respectful, giving, gentle, committed father...my BIL treats his wife (who is also an MD) with the same contempt his dad treated his mom.

His cousins who were born in India are the same way.

My SIL has asked me when my husband broke the mold created by his family. He certainly presented himself as an enlightened man when he married her. For my husband, it was when he found his faith. But for his male relatives, no amount of public school or private college or graduate education or decades of living in America was enough to uproot their ingrained prejudices.

Those culturally disconnected marriages are all messy and sad. Your husband sounds like a decent guy. But please, take it from someone who learned these cultural lessons the hard way, change his HEART, instead of focusing on his head. He might intellectually hear you, but the cultural forces you are facing are not rational.

Best wishes.

[Anonymous]

OP, I've posted a couple times in this thread, and I think that you guys will be fine. Those of us responding to your posts are reacting from our various perspectives and you have received a lot of great, thoughtful advice, but when it comes down to it, we don't know you. I can tell you what worked for me (going back to work, baby in daycare, cleaning service 2x a month), but that might not work for you. I also cannot really accurately say whether your husband is, as some posters thing, an insensitive demanding asshole or a guy who genuinely does not know what his life is going to look like post-baby. We all have ideas about what we want our lives to look like after a major change. It is very common for that ideal to be "just like my life now, but with added awesomeness of a cute baby who I love" - that's definitely what I wanted, and as a result, that is more or less what I have. Yes, there were months when I barely slept, when I spent hours attached to the @#$#%@% pump, nights when I got puked on 3x in an hour, hundreds of loads of laundry, etc. But those are things that you guys will learn to deal with in stride.

I think that what really matters is how YOU feel about all these wishes your DH is expressing. Other posters think you are being disrespected - do you feel respected and loved? Do you feel like you have a good partnership with your DH? My experience has taught me that if there is an aspect of your relationship that you feel resentment towards now, that resentment will become magnified and eventually start to fester when you add the complicating factor of children. It is best to address things NOW, rather than wait until you have a 3 month old baby who will not stop crying and you haven't slept more than 2 hours in a row since it was born. To that end, I think it is great that you guys are talking about things now, and great that your husband is starting to get a better understanding of the realities of parenting.

For what this is worth, I think that it will be valuable for your husband to learn to do things like cook and clean, because at least for me (as parent of toddler now), teaching DD how to help with those things has been another area for us to bond. Small children love the "menial" tasks, let me tell you. Nothing pleases DD more than to help me put away groceries or load dishes into the dishwasher or laundry into the washing machine. She loves helping with the cooking and I truly believe that she is an adventurous eater in part because she participates in the making of the food. If your husband is incapable of doing those things, he will be missing out on a really cool part of childhood, imo. I would strongly encourage him to view at the very least the cooking as a fun process, rather than simply as a means to an end. By all means, outsource the toilet scrubbing - there is NOTHING fun about that - but it's important that kids know how to clean up after themselves and take care of their basic needs, so I would encourage you guys to think about that.

[Anonymous]

OP, you will be like a single parent with a boyfriend hanging around the house if you have a baby with him. He wants to live in a hotel
If you have kids with him then you know what you are in for and it will not help to complain later.
Being a single parent is tough. The theory has been is that the man is for the sake of the woman, to help her. So that she will not be like a sigle parent

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP - I think it is fine to discuss this ahead of time to some degree, but you are not yet even pregnant. You have NO IDEA what it will feel like when you have a baby or babies. You may want to stay home, you may not. You may want to outsource, you may not. You may LOVE ebing the diaper wiping, food cooking, playdate mommy or you may not. If you love and respect each other, you will find a way to work it out.

I disagree. I think it's pretty easy to predict how you will feel, even before you get pg. I knew I wanted childcare and financial equality when I agreed to get married. Having two children did nothing to change our firm resolve as a couple that we need to contribute as equally as is practical to the money making, childcare and housework.

PP from above - I guess I was speaking from my own personal experience. If you had said to me (before I had children) that I would leave my career - which was my WHOLE life - to be home with my kids(for 1-2 years) I would have said no way. If you had said that I would be OK doing all the cooking as well as being in charge of the household once I went back full time, I would have said no way as well. My husband contributes in many other ways and I do feel we have a great partnership.

[Anonymous]

This is not a cultural thing necessarily--men who have no interest in raising their children are in all cultural/ethnic/socio-economic strongholds. So, let's not bash South/Asian men.

I am married to one, and funnily enough, I had a feeling that OP's husband was South Asian. But, my husband is as hands-on as it gets. We are equal partners (though I out earn him). On most days, he does more than his share of parenting, because his job, although extremely demanding, is more flexible than mine. He is also "into" being a parent. As PPs above said, bonding is not just parks and ice cream, but the sleepless/vomitorium nights you spend with your kid.

I think PP above at 10:31 nailed it. Your DH could be a really good guy, who just needs a chance to shine as a parent. Only you know.

One question--how do you guys handle finances? My DH and I, even when we were broke grad students, never had "Mine/yours" mentality about money, even when we had separate accounts (we joined them when we got married). One thing you might think about doing, if you decide to SAH, is to create a retirement account that gets regularly funded.

[Anonymous]

OP here again.

I don't know any of you, but I want to thank you for your advice and concern. I feel like you really care about me. (Aw!) So I want to reassure you all who are still reading that my husband is an affectionate, loving man who fully and completely respects me and supports my currently very demanding career. I would not have married him given his ridiculously old-fashioned views if I had any concerns to the contrary.

With respect to the off-ramping versus PT versus FT work issue: I just don't know what I want to do about this yet. I worked my butt off through college and grad school and now have a well-paying but extraordinarily time-consuming career. I just don't like it that much.

I have definitely thought about the problems with starting work up again after an absence and am very seriously exploring these issues and networking around them. I'm not naive about this by any means! My current expectation is that I will have to change careers pretty drastically in order to spend the time with my family that I would like to. DH is totally fine with my going back to work at whatever stage I want or feel I need to -- just so long as we use the increased family income to outsource more work, which is where I keep getting hung up because it feels so wrong to this formerly-poor girl.

We share our finances completely and currently earn roughly equivalent salaries. I expect that the next step in our conversations will be about how to financially protect me. We're big planners, as you can see.

This whole post seems a little silly now that it is 100 posts long, given that I may not yet be pregnant, but I just needed some real world perspective on how to think through these issues -- including the guilt of hiring household help at all and thinking through what my husband is really trying to accomplish. I know being a parent can't be understood in advance, but I just don't want either of us to be blindsided.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I SAH without any nanny, helper, etc. BUT my DH does a ton. He doesn't work long hours, and most days when he gets home he takes DD so I can get dinner and maybe some cleaning done and get a bit of alone time to break up the day. Then we do bedtime together.

If I were in the situation you are contemplating, I would resent my DH greatly. In fact, I would be concerned that he is not going to be involved enough in his kids' life as I want the father of my child(ren) to be. There are really two issues here - how involved do you want your kids' dad to be in their lives, and how are you going to get some time to yourself. It concerns me that he views caring for his (future) children as menial. I think that unless you get these issues straightened out, you are going to have a long and lonely road ahead of you once you have kids, whether you SAH or WOH.

To build on that, I'd have to say that there sometimes is something menial about raising children but it's about making a sacrifice because you are a parent and you want to be there for your kids. It would worry me if my husband weren't willing to make a commitment to share that sacrifice.

Good luck with this, OP. Good thing you are thinking about it now and trying to sort out what is important for you.