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[quote=Anonymous]I am sort of at my wit's ends. We have two kids and when the kids were small, my wife decided to be a SAHM. It was a complete shit-show. She basically unraveled, ended up with PPD with our second.

I massively changed career tracks (where I was making more money but less available to making less and now the default parent. It came at a cost, namely, career progression. My job pays decently well and is stable, but I'm probably never getting to the senior levels of an organization because I don't travel much since traveling basically requires us to hire a sitter or have family to come down to handle drop offs in the morning.

My wife went back to work at a job that's stable (not terribly time-intensive, but rigid in terms of hours and taking off), but she views as boring and unfulfilling. And we sort of chugged along until now with our kids in early elementary school.

It's started coming up slowly when my wife would realize that I had time to volunteer and could work remotely when the kids are sick or handle teacher work days, etc. I have a lot of time with the kids, sure. But she's basically in the door at 4 until bedtime, so it's not like she's missing much beyond daytime things. But I do have flexibility which has allowed me to be more involved during the day.

Lately, my wife has started floating the idea that I try to move up more aggressively and she stay home (since we're past the hard years...I couldn't handle the baby and toddler drama..." her words, not mine). I'm not sure if this is possible and I'm resentful that she basically wants to pop in now, when it's easy, and for me to turn back into a working machine.

We did a dry run last summer (my wife's in education and has summers off). I took a challenging project that required me to travel 2-3 days a week for six weeks. And it didn't work. I still did everything as the default parent, things were dropped, my wife was resentful that she's stuck dealing with everything, cleaning, endless laundry, kid fighting (note -- this is all normal stuff I handle on the daily). We ended up hiring a weekly cleaner, my wife hired a part-time sitter so she could run errands (something I have strangely managed to do since they were toddlers).

The topic came up again and I'm trying to find a way to basically say this is a bad idea, I don't think you'll really like, I don't think it's the best for our family, and I really think this whole thing is a way to dodge the idea that you're unhappy at work, probably need a change, and don't know what to do.

I know I can't say that, but any thoughts?

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