Reply to This is really bothering me- always being "on" as the parent

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[quote=Anonymous]My DH would do this if I never said anything, but he has been responsive to change when I bring it up, which I do when it bothers me.

For instance: he works in the office three days a week and from home two days a week. I work from home every day, something I arranged when we had kids because I wanted that flexibility and also I just prefer WFH.

On days he goes to the office, I handle the full morning routine with kids from wakeup to drop off. He has to leave somewhat early for his commute, and I don't mind this -- like I said, I wanted the flexibility of work from home and this is one of the reasons why. It keeps us from needing before care and it means we don't have to wake the kids up at the crack of dawn to get them out the door before we both commute to work.

But on the days he works from home, he does drop off. He wants to, he values that time with the kids. However, for a while, I was still doing the entire morning routine with the kids on my own even though DH is home and is not yet working during that time. DH will sleep in and then go open his work computer, but not work (he just looks at Twitter or plays a game on his phone) until the kids are ready to go, and then he'll go deliver them to school. Literally he would wait until they were standing at the door with jackets, shoes, and backpacks on before doing anything child related.

I obviously noticed this immediately and started asking for help. Can you go wake up the kids while I get breakfast ready? Or the youngest needs help getting dressed, can you go help her while I'm packing lunches? Or can you check backpacks for their take-home folders, I can't remember if we looked last night? That kind of thing. And immediately DH started trying to get out of or shirk this stuff. He'd say he had to check email first, and then look at his email for 5 second before turning to Twitter on his phone for 20 minutes. He'd disappear into the bathroom for 15 minutes just as the kids were getting up so that by the time he emerged, everything was underway and he could be like "oh, looks like you got this." He really seemed to think his contribution was walking them to school and the rest was up to me, even though on other days I do the routine and the drop off by myself and still come home to start work at the same time he usually does.

So finally I just sat him down and explained that this was unfair to me, and also that the way the dynamic read to me was that he thought it was my job to prepare the kids for him, like he didn't need to get involved in part of the morning where our 5 year old refuses to put on pants or the 7 year old touches a toothbrush to his teeth gently for two seconds and calls it a day. He doesn't want to deal with the fact that we ran out of milk for cereal and need an alternative or that the picky eater won't eat sandwiches in her lunch anymore so we need an alternative with similar nutritional value. He just gets to stare at his phone and fart around for 30-40 minutes (he's not even getting ready for the day since he doesn't shower on WFH days). And when I put it starkly that way, he saw that he was being unfair and he has stopped shirking morning duties on his WFH days. This morning he put out breakfast and made lunches while I oversaw backpacks and helped our kindergartener get ready.

But if I hadn't said anything then he would have stuck with the original set up forever and it never would have occurred to him that this was unfair to me. He thinks of his commute on his in-office days as burdensome (and I can see that it is in someways) and he had though that his lazy mornings on WFH days were his reward for that. And it just never occurred to him that while he's commuting I am crazy busy. That I never get to shower until lunch on his in-office days because he's showering before he leaves and then after he leaves I'm helping the kids get ready, and then since I do drop-off, by the time I get home I have to start work. He just didn't think about what my days were like on his in-office days and that maybe I also needed a break, too. I had to explain it to him.

But at least he listened.[/quote]

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