Reply to Is my wife being unrealistic about her expectations of my work life balance?

Forum Index » Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)

Reply to "Is my wife being unrealistic about her expectations of my work life balance?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I struggled with work life balance early in my career, but things have improved since I started working 100% remote for a company based on the west coast.There’s a flexible culture around time off, which has been great to spend more time with our two kids (4yrs, 3 months). As a result, I never work/take my laptop with me on vacations or work on weekends. Sometimes I’ll work in the evenings to catch up on stuff, but I’ll do that when wife/kids have gone to sleep. I have to travel to our home office once a quarter for 4 days at a time for planning meetings, but I usually schedule my flights to minimize impact to family life (leave late Sunday afternoon, return Thursday night or Friday am on red eye). Another plus is that I’m able to attend daytime events at our 4 yr olds school, which is really meaningful to me.

DW is still on maternity leave for another month with the 3 month old, while our four year olds preschool is a 5 min drive.

Due to most of my coworkers being west coast based, mornings are slow, so I’ll take the 4 year old to preschool. At 5 PM,  DW leaves to pick 4 yo up, and I take over with 3 mo old. However, it’s not uncommon to have lots of requests and meeting in the afternoon, so sometimes I won’t sign off until like 5:05 or 5:10, which bothers DW because she likes to pick up 4 yo at a consistent time.

I recently moved into a management role, which has me much busier during the day, in and out of lots of meetings, and doing admin work in my downtime. As a result, a lot of days, I’ll only have time for a quick lunch, which means I don’t have the time to do the household tasks I was able to do before (folding laundry, dishes, etc) When I come down and eat quickly, DW always remarks something like “you want to spend some time with your kid?”

However, things came to a head this week with DW and I regrading work life balance. Our quarterly planning meeting was this past week. Due to my new role, I was told that I only needed to be involved in one days worth of meetings. It didn’t make sense to travel cross country for one day, so fortunately I could join remotely. Unfortunately, the one day would involve two presentations that I’d be giving to different csuite members, so I felt it necessary to spend a great deal of time preparing these presentations.

Of course, the day I was scheduled to give these presentations, the shit hit the fan on the home and work front. Our 4 year olds school had a snow day so she was home, which is always a challenge. ILs are local and they’d normally help in this situation, but they were out of town. I helped out with the kids for about an hour in the morning, but then lots of work related fires had to be put out, which resulted being called into meeting, which then dovetailed into my presentations for the csuite. I basically didn’t leave my desk for 5 straight hours, which, I can’t stress enough, is incredibly rare, even in my new position. Along the way in this madness, DW texted me “we’re all doing great down here, thanks for checking in!”

A day later, DW tells me that she feels that I have an unhealthily work life balance, and I’m not prioritizing our family’s needs over work. She pointed out that she would drop everything at work if it was a snow day, so why shouldn’t I do the same. I see her point, but at the same time, this was an impossibly unusual circumstance, and I can’t just not attend a meeting where I’m presenting to the csuite.

I guess I just don’t know what she is expecting of me. Yes, I can work harder to ensure that I log off by 5, but at the end of the day, I think my situation is really great. I know many other people in much worse situations (having to go into an office, lots of travel, regularly working on vacations). I’m truly trying to understand my wife here, but I just don’t understand how one very bad day, along with signing off 5-10 minutes after 5 pm equates to not prioritizing my family over work. Am I totally off base here?

[/quote]

Your wife is a selfish, spoiled brat.  [/quote]

This. She actually expected that because it was a snow day, you should drop your presentation? Does she want you to quit? You need to ask her this. Honestly, this crap makes me just shocked at the younger generations’ work ethic. Like this is insane. You have a JOB that you presumably need, yes? It’s not just a minor inconvenience or a vanity hobby? Insane gen x women are like this, so hellbent on getting full equality for even the most banal happenings and then are surprised when their partner ends up being underemployed and they are broke. Ask her if she wants to be broke and what the plan is. She’s a nut, though and an incompetent one, and I’d be terrified about her return to work.
[/quote]

My read on that was that she wanted him to shoot her a text that said, “Just checking in.  How are things going?”

Just implying that he thought or cared about her at all.

[/quote]

That’s clearly not what she was fishing for at all.

Regardless, why would she need a check in during the work day? Conversely, why wasn’t the dh checking in on OP on his big day of presenting for the c suite? Seems like his day was a bigger day than hers. Long story short is she needs to grow up [/quote]

Really? It's much easier to present to the C-suite than deal with 2 small children. I'd choose that every time. [/quote]

Yes, I'm sure that's why you're about to get promoted to the C suite. Because it's that easy.  [/quote]

I have no desire to get promoted to the C-suite. That's not the comparison. He wasn't interviewing for a C-suite job, just giving a presentation. If this is a very stressful and difficult task for you, you must not be very C-suite adjacent. [/quote]

You sound like an uneducated fool who hasn’t worked in eons. Nobody cares about your dusty perspective.

Look, if OP’s wife doesn’t care if he gets paid or promoted, by all means he should pack backsl packs all day be on call do all the laundry and not work on snow days. Or ever if she has both kids. Employers love this. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics