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[quote=Anonymous]Oh man. My husband is very smart, mostly very good at his job and not diagnosed but after our child was diagnosed he was like wait……

But same, he thinks he’s managing fine because he has a good job and I do nearly everything else. It’s a constant struggle to decide how to handle because he will *sometimes * do things if prompted, but he really struggles to do more than one thing at a time so if work (which he enjoys) is busy, everything else falls to the side indefinitely.

I don’t have good advice besides cut out what you can and make your own systems incredibly strong. I feel like I do the executive function of multiple people so even though I do not have ADHD, I rely on automation, reminders, prompts on my phone, anything to make things easier. If I have to do something during the work day myself and I learn of that task in the evening, I stop and email myself a task to my work account and don’t mark as read until it’s done. Literally everything is erased down in at least one place. I review each day’s to-do list carefully and transfer over anything that didn’t get done to the next day. I try to rely on my memory as little as possible. I don’t have the safety net of a second person so I’m the safety net. I do worry I’m going to burn out so I watch out for that. I think we are going to take the summer off from almost all activities aside from camp so that helps.

I also try to give myself some grace. And when my husband is *interested* in a task he will do a great job. Basically anything for the house that is $$ or has a contract he is very into so I give those to him with just a couple reminders on my calendar to ensure they are taken care of. It’s very frustrating because he does like 1 percent of the tasks and puts a ton of effort into them and sometimes gives me a hard time about my “good enough” approach to almost everything (and teasing me about being way over informed and involved in things I think are important, like our kids medical care and therapy) when his approach is not something that works when you have to do more than one or two things. So it’s a balance of giving him tasks that align with his skill set and making sure no other really important balls are dropped. I outsource a few things: all lawn maintenance, groceries are delivered, deep cleaning is done by a housekeeper once a month. I struggle with managing people and few people we have tried to hire have met my husband’s standards so it’s hard to outsource more. I think I’ve found a handyman that seems good to do some of the small tasks around the house.

So far we are mostly managing. To be honest, I would mind way less if my efforts were acknowledged or if he pursued help. But I feel like he buys into the cultural narrative that a man really just needs to have a good job and everything else he does is bonus points (even though I work and earn a significant fraction of our income). [/quote]

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