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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The list was definitely illuminating. There's a lot of things that don't apply to my family (I would say my husband is honestly better at solo parenting and solo bedtimes than I am)

I do remember one time I asked my husband to do the birthday party invites and boy did he whine and moan about having to copy and paste some some emails from the preschool directory. [/quote]

This is the behavior that gets me. There's all this stuff I do that DH doesn't do -- arrange childcare, deal with school (registration, supply lists, teacher communication, knowing it's "crazy sock day," telling the school why a kid is staying home, etc.), deal with clothes and shoes, summer camp, etc. I'll try to delegate some of it to DH and he will just be a child about it, complaining about every single step, throwing up his hands in frustration, procrastinating until the very last minute, etc.

So I'm never actually free of these tasks because he makes such a drama out of it if he does it. Often he'll make a huge stink and STILL not actually do it, until the deadline is tonight and I wind up having to help him with it or do it myself in order to ensure the kids get enrolled in camp or they have swim goggles for class or whatever.

The experience is stressful and it makes me think twice before trying to delegate the next time-- do I want to deal with that again? He also just refuses to ever actually own a task. Like I can make him do camp signups with a lot of handholding and moaning one year, but this does not turn into him initiating that process himself the next year, now that in theory he understands the process. I still have to bring it up and ask him to handle it, and if he dies he will need the same amount of help and will complain just as much. He just clearly does not view it as his problem. And the frustrating thing is if I truly dropped the rope and he didn't do it, he also wouldn't view our lack of summer childcare as his problem-- he'd look at me and say "what are we going to do" and wait for me to come up with a solution while taking no initiative.

When I read people in this thread saying "men are better at delegating" I just think about how delegating is a lot easier if you have a competent person with a good attitude to delegate to. It's a lot harder when your "team" is just one guy who acts like spending 5 minutes researching something online or dealing with any paperwork at all is some horrible imposition.[/quote]

So did none of this behavior show itself before you had kids? My husband and I each had a dog when we started dating, so I was aware of how much effort he would put into taking care of an animal. We went on trips together, so I saw how much time he would be willing to spend researching trips with me. We hosted parties, so I could tell how much help he would provide if we did something like that, including if it was for "my" friends. We spent time with family, so I knew how much he would be responsible for in terms of responsibility for things related to gifts/planning/hosting/etc. What exactly did you do when you were dating? [/quote]

Two things. First, to be perfectly honest, we didn't have to allocate a ton of stuff between us before kids. We lived together for 5 years and for the most part we both just did the stuff we preferred and it worked out. We had a pet together, but it was a cat, so low maintenance. If I look back on it now, I can see the ways things were unequal then, but because it was never more than I personally could handle, I just didn't notice. Did I put more effort in around the house? Sure, but I was a DINK and it wasn't that big of a deal. It was easy back then to think "oh, well, having a clean house is more important to me so it makes sense I do more." My DH did do some stuff so it's not like he expected me to wait on him hand and foot.

This changed when we had a kid. A lot. We had more to do, period, and things didn't allocate themselves easily. More and more stuff became my job whether I wanted that job or not. I'd try to push back but he'd push back just as far. He definitely engaged in some of the avoidance behavior people have mentioned, like suddenly needing to work longer hours, hiding in the bathroom, and claiming he didn't know how to do stuff.

So second, I really did not anticipate how much of parenting he would deem "my job" because I was the mom. I read the baby books, he didn't. I went to the pediatric appointments, he did. When this would result in my saying "we need to do XYZ," he'd be like "well sounds like you know more about this than me, so have at it." When I'd insist he do more of it, he just... wouldn't. I remember trying to delegate baby food to him, since I'd been "in charge" of nursing (ie doing it entirely on my own). He was reluctant from he start, did not research, did not listen to the doctor when I dragged him to a doctor's appointment and asked her for guidance, and then just refused to take the lead on it. It was like it was someone else's child. And it was -- mine. I turns out my DH has a lot of very gendered ideas about childcare that he never expressed before we had kids and took me by surprise. And then on top this, things were still kind of uneven with non-child-related tasks. But now I have no time. Ever.

If my DH had told me before we got married, "look, I want kids but I don't intend to do most of the childcare, especially during the infant/toddler years. You're going to have to do that on your own with minimal support from me, and if you try to force me to do more, it's just going to cause conflict," I would, uh, not have married him. I mean for sure not have had a kid with him.

So we stopped at one. It's gotten mildly better as that kid has gotten older, but it's still unequal. Once you have a kid with someone, though, that's it. You're in it. We could divorce but I'd still have to co-parent with him. Plus we lose all the financial efficiencies of a shared household -- it would be a dumb financial choice, even if it might resolve some other issues. So here I am.[/quote]

So before deciding to have a child together you didn't discuss who was going to do what?

I remember sitting down and walking through my leave and his leave and who would be staying home when. Then we discussed what childcare would look like. How we would handle travel. What if the kid was sick? How would we handle holidays with our families once we had a child and were no longer the carefree childless people whose siblings always got their way because they had kids?

Then life threw us a curveball and we ended up with spontaneous twins so we had to re-work some of what we had discussed. And life has continued to throw us curveballs, but at least I know that my husband doesn't view any of them as "my" problem versus his.[/quote]

GOOD. FOR. YOU.

The point is that not everyone's husband is like this. Why is that so hard for you to get?

Do you want a prize? You win. You have a better husband than I do. Probably you are more attractive, accomplished, and overall a better person, and that's why your husband is a true partner and mine is not. It's probably entirely my fault. Are you happy now?

With that out of the way, I would like to have a conversation about how my extremely not perfect husband consistently exercises dad privilege to get out of doing stuff, and how it makes me tire and cranky and resentful, and whether there is any way to make him stop doing this so that our marriage can be more equal, even though obviously, as I already said, I probably wound up with him because I am a bad and ugly woman, unlike the PP who did everything right and therefore doesn't have this problem.[/quote]

Um, ok. You want to know how to solve the problem? How about by teaching your kids to have conversations about these kinds of things before they get married? That's one thing you could take away from that post if you were able to actually read it.

There are other solutions mentioned in this thread as well, but you probably missed them because you were too busy being angry at people whose lives aren't as hard as yours. [/quote]

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