Reply to Making it work when the wife is the one with the "big job"

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Reply to "Making it work when the wife is the one with the "big job" - s/o today's NY Times article"

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[quote=Anonymous]I really feel for you. There are so many things moms do that take up time. All you listed, plus buying them new everything each year (clothing, seasonal items such as sandals swimsuits), stuff for school, arrange play dates, the family social stuff, the paperwork for everything kid related, finding good activities for the kids, volunteering or participating at preschool or school events, the birthday party invites/present shopping, so many little errands. These are just off the top of my head.

I think you need a highly paid person doing all this for you. He’s not. When your burden is lighter, resentment will lessen.

It did for me. 
We both work FT and I was up 2-4 times breastfeeding. For 2 years I had shitty sleep and not enough of it, tired all the time. He said he couldn’t help because I was breastfeeding, which was understandable. But my second child refused the Brest from day one, and even with the second child, my DH woke up what, a handful of times compared to the more than a thousand times I woke up to feed the infant/toddler. Then I was doing all the mental Mommy tasks and I got resentful. He would tell me to do less, but he wasn’t going to do more so I could do less. Our HHI was not even $200k combined so each outsourcing decision was painfully made and I felt guilty about it (cleaning every 3 weeks, hire someone to do drop offs 2-3 times a week to save me time, hire someone to mow the grass so it frees up DH’s time to do other chores). I finally accepted that my sanity now was more important than saving for college or saving more for retirement. We outsourced until I reached a balance that was more tolerable for me, plus after the child was about 2.5 years old, I finally started being able to sleep through the night, which enabled me to be better rested. I can’t believe how many years of sleep sacrifice it took to get here. I get mad all over again once in a while when I read these NYT articles that remind me of it.

Back to your situation, I think you’ll just have to let all the miscellaneous mommy tasks slide. See how he feels about things once you stop doing the misc stuff. Quite possibly he still won’t lean in more, but at least hopefully he’ll be more appreciative of you or stop telling you infuriating comments such as you have a terrible work life balance.

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