Reply to "I do a lot more than most guys I know!"

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[quote=Anonymous]Dad of twins here.  I've noticed that households with multiples tend to be more balanced perforce because they have to.  It isn't universal.  In our multiples club, there are many mothers who are there complaining about the same thing that the mothers on this thread are complaining about because they have partners who just don't get it.  But fathers of multiples tend to be more involved because you just need more hands around for a lot of the work, especially at the infant stage.

I have always been the default homemaker partly because I was very good friends with my mom and she was so good at teacher us life skills.  For the first 10 years (pre-kids) of our lives, I was the default home-maker.  What made a difference was when we had twins, and we each took parental leave.  I had 3 weeks of vacation, she had 6 weeks.  We took all our vacation and then we both went on FMLA leave part-time until the twins were 15 weeks old (I took the full 12 weeks, she took 9 weeks).  We each worked part-time.  I worked M/W/F and she worked T/Th for the FMLA because we had very understanding and supportive work places.  This allowed us both to keep up with work while still taking leave.  The 3 weeks after I first returned to work, when she had her first taste of a full day at home with 2 infants and no help, made a big difference.  After that, over the next 2 years, she began doing more and more work, especially when I was clearly exhausted.  By the time the kids were 2, the home workload was much more balanced.

We both have had some family issues over the last several years and have had to take a week to go and take care of aging parents, she had two business trips, etc.  We are both perfectly capable now of running the household, taking care of the kids, the scheduling, and so on.  We sometimes get a family member come and help the week one of us is out of town, but we can't always swing it, so there are times that we have each had to be solo parent for a week.  And we're fine.

I recommend that some of you with the uneven workloads, need to take a week to go and take care of something out of town and leave a schedule and a list of chores that need to get done while you're away and then go and let your husband manage the household for a week without you.  He can get the kids to and from daycare/school/whatever.  He can be responsible for meals, making sure the kids have clean clothes and getting them to activities.  He can handle shopping with the kids (don't stock more than a day or two of food for them) or paying for them to eat out when the prepped food runs out.  It's an eye opening experience and should make him a lot more understanding of what your regular weeks look like.  Solo parenting for a week helped us a lot with balance.[/quote]

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