My husband, a 38-year-old man, makes it impossible for me to have help in the house. I’m a 35-year-old, first-time mom after IVF and have a nearly 2-year-old. I stay at home, and for the last few years before we conceived our daughter, my job history was spotty as we were moving around a ton for his work, finalizing his fellowship and education. He makes really great money and I’m grateful that I can stay home, but I can’t do it all by myself.
I feel like I’m drowning because I barely get any time to myself; he will sometimes do dinner dishes and he takes the trash out, but that’s it. He props our daughter in front of the TV if I’m lucky. The last time I took a shower and left them together, I found them in his super unchildproofed garage; he was drilling something noisily as she was toddling around heaps of power tools and random pieces of half-finished projects. Why can’t he just relax in the garage if we have a sitter, or just not come home on Thursdays or whatever? How can I get through to him that this is breaking me? It’s like he thinks his comfort and my sanity are at odds. 
My daughter is in a Mother’s Day Out program from 10–2, three days a week, which is when I get a lot of errands and noisy housework done. I have tried to have a housekeeping service come to help sometimes because we have two large dogs and the toddler, but my husband hates having people in the house. His schedule can be unpredictable since he does a lot of emergency surgery, and if he comes home and the cleaners are there, he’s furious and says he can’t relax. He also really doesn’t mind our daughter well when he’s home, but doesn’t want a sitter or even his mom or sister to come watch her because he “can’t relax.”
The best advice we saw:
“You are single parenting already. Tell him he either makes your life easier by getting you help around the house, or YOU make your life easier by divorcing him and going 50/50 on custody so that half the time he has to watch his own kid, and 100% of the time he has to clean his own house and make his own meals.”
“Ask yourself why he’s okay leaving all the housework and physical burdens of raising a child to you? Ask yourself why he doesn’t care how this affects you at all? Would you perhaps be better off alone if caring for him, cleaning up after him, and working around his needs and wants wasn’t part of the equation?”
“THEN HE DOESN’T NEED TO RELAX. You don’t get to lose your sanity at the expense of his comfort. Stand up for yourself. Advocate for yourself. And please, for the love of God, have some of your own money in an account that he can’t touch.”
Editor’s note: House chores and taking care of the children are a full-time job. If it can be outsourced, they don’t even need a live-in nanny. The man is certainly being insensitive to her feelings. What do you think she should do?
Culled the streets of Reddit.
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