Reply to How do you drop the rope when you have SN kids?

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[quote=Anonymous]You may need to think about what your priorities are here.  Do you want acknowledgment of the work you do, or do you need to do less work?  Or something else?

Until our child's diagnosis, I definitely had the 'big career' in our family.  We earned about the same amount, but I was in the high-prestige job that had required us to move to DC in the first place, required regular travel, etc.  My husband is in a well-compensated industry, but had prioritized work-life balance over chasing fancy jobs.  We'd definitely prioritized my career in our family choices.

Now, several years after diagnosis, I am in the same job, but have leaned way out.  I won't get fired, but I'm not going to get promoted anytime soon either.  I've scaled my career ambitions way, way down.  Meanwhile, my husband did a job search and increased his comp by 50%.  We've used that money to hire a full time nanny who also functions as a house manager while my kid is in school.  This means that, even though I'm definitely doing more of the household & childcare stuff (for example, I am the one who attends all the medical appointments), it's manageable because I can delegate a fair amount of stuff to our nanny (for example, she takes our kid to therapy appointments that don't require parental involvement).

Frankly, this is not the life that either of us would have picked.  If it worked financial, we'd both have preferred for my husband to scale back instead.  But given our career paths, I was never going to earn enough money to be able to afford the help we need.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying that I think you just have to be very pragmatic about what options are available to you, and what your priorities are.  If it's acknowledgment, then maybe couples counseling could help.  If you need help, then you may need to let the acknowledgment go and focus on pragmatic steps to lessen the workload, which may not look like your husband actually stepping up.  [/quote]

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