Reply to husband as "junior partner" in childrearing

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm so confused by posts like these. Was there really no inkling that your husband was going to be like this?   [/quote]

I am too-- I vetted young men very hard for this when dating. Any trouble with motivation, executive functioning, desire to be an active parent, laziness about chores, irresponsibility or unreliability or entitlement to women's caregiving and they were dropped like a stone.[/quote]

This. I mean yes of course there are guys who probably did a complete 180 but I find it hard to believe there weren't glaring red flags for most of these guys. Like the guy who let his kid stay in the same clothes for 5 days straight. [/quote]

[b]The 180 is rare unless they're cheating. It does sometimes happen that they have depression or some other health problem and refuse to do anything about it. Or that they are punishing their wife for some real or perceived injustice by treating the kids badly. Or that they have more kids than they wanted or can handle, or they agreed to just one more kid and it turns out to be really high maintenance or twins.[/quote][/b]

Yes, but in real life it’s rare for any of these things to happen. The ‘young man’ that you properly vetted while dating, will turn into the equal partner DH and split parenting duties 50-50.[/quote]

I hope to god the extreme examples of shitty dads on here are rare. My husband would not forget to feed the kids or have them wear the same clothes for 5 days. No way. But when we were dating he was really excellent at most things he did - excelling in grad school and early career, very good with money and budget when we didn’t have a lot. He did not know how to cook a single thing or do any basic chores (his mom did absolutely everything) but seemed willing to learn to do basic laundry and learn to cook a few simple things. We did get married relatively young but all early signs were of some one who would do a great job on the things that were important to him.

It’s been the surprise and disappointment of my life that he doesn’t bring that energy to parenting 90 percent of the time. He loves our kids but he uses himself up at work keeping everybody happy and chasing awards and making sure his work product is flawless and he has nothing left. So he does bare minimum and sometimes it’s really better to do it myself. Our youngest  needed an appointment and he promised to be in charge of it and just didn’t. I didn’t nag but eventually I just dealt with it myself. And guess what- the delay caused a lot of problems and a lot of remedial efforts. There are enough examples like this that I just handle the stuff that is important and we have more than some others because of our kids special needs. Things that we might agree as parents are important but then he calls me a worrier and assumes things will magically happen. And I guess they do (to him) because I don’t play chicken with things that affect my kids. I don’t regret having a second even though I knew this was going to be mostly on me- I would do it again. I’m not going to get divorced either. It’s just a really disappointing thing I wish were different. 
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