ok, this will be long so i will apologize in advance. if i'm going to get reasonable opinions, i feel like i have to put everything on the table. here goes.
my wife and i have been married for over ten years. we have four wonderful kids ranging from 8 to 4. the kids are all happy, well adjusted and well liked and intelligent. they all succeed in school and other arenas. all indications are that we are succeeding in our primary jobs as parents as i see it – to make successfully, appropriate and kinds young adults.
first, let me start with this: i am imperfect. i know that. i won't pretend that i am. i want to make myself better and make my children better than i am – more kind, more successful, more generous, better marriages. i get lazy, make mistakes – no doubt about it. but i also bust my rear to make up for those mistakes. point being, i acknowledge that i'm not the best at housekeeping, controlling my temper all the time (though i'm pretty good at it, i think), planning or scheduling.
when we first got together, i was finishing up college – a taxing five year program that didnt leave much time for anything beyond school work. i paid my way through school by working, so i ate like crap and was a little heavy (190 lbs, 5'10). nothing bad, just not what i wanted. after we were married, i got into running and did quite well. ran a few marathons, really found something that let me blow off steam. when the kids came along, it obviously got difficult to fit that in. so i cut way back and made adjustments. now i belong to 24 hr gym so i can run after everyone is asleep, sometimes finishing at 1 or 2 am. that is my choice and it only hurts my sleep. that being said, i get uptight now if i don't run for days at a time. i would think that i could somehow carve out an hour or two in every second or third day to run, especially if i'm willing to do it at midnight. i know this is silly and not the biggest problem. i tell you this because i want to own that i have my own issues. i get it.
my problems are with my wife (little surprise, i'm sure). i just don't feel that she's holding up her end of the bargain in quite a few ways. as this continues, i feel myself becoming a worse person as well too. my anger and frustration toward her manifests itself not only toward her, but sometimes towards the kids as well. i do very well at remembering to avoid letting them feel the brunt of my frustration, but it would be a lie to say that it doesn't happen at all. no sense in kidding myself.
she used to have a successful career, but after our second child, we realized that the money she made barely covered the cost of day care for two children and we mutually decided that it was better for her to stay at home and raise our children the way we wanted. we thought (and still both do) that this is for the best for our kids.
the problems as from my perspective are:
1. cleaning/use of time
in exchange for her staying home full time, i would continue to work full time to support everyone. i would have stayed home and been a stay at home father, but we talked it through and we decided together that this was the route we would take. the theory was that she would take care of the house (cooking, laundry) and kids; i would work during the day, do the dishes and take care of the outside of the house. simple division of labor. this has long since gone by the wayside. while neither of us were much for housekeeping, when we had kids, we agreed that this had to change.
at this point, all of our kids are in school and our house is still a complete wreck. i'm not exaggerating when i say that people don't come in our house. when my wife is gone (she works during the holidays one night a week and maybe a weekend day at a retail store) and i have the kids, i make massive strides alone. i get entire rooms cleaned, get loads of laundry done. but when she's at home, it seems that she gets next to nothing done. i understand that she picks up the kids after school. two days a week, she also teaches a fitness class for special needs kids which takes about 2 hours of her time at most.
i feel that it's a reasonable question to ask/wonder what she does with her time and important to the discussion. i'll admit to prejudice when answering this question. that being said, she goes to the grocery a lot, which seems to take extraordinary amounts of time when she does. the grocery is less than three miles away. a single trip can take four hours. she also has volunteered and is very active at the PTO for the kids school and is a room mother for at least one of our kids every year. that also takes up a lot of time during certain parts of the year when they have fundraisers or other things. i get that.
but it's the other times where i see a massive void of getting anything done. she is a voracious reader and if i had to guess, i'd suggest that she read between 50-75 books last year. when we got to bed at night, she sits with her e reader and will sometimes read into the early morning because she can't put the book down. i'll come home from work and the kids are watching tv and she's sitting in the kitchen reading. if she asks to sleep in for an extra half hour on a saturday and i roll with it, that half hour turns into one or sometimes more and she isn't sleeping at all – she's reading. meanwhile, i'm manaaging the kids and trying to make up for time she didn't appear to use during the week.
an honest example from this weekend: after our daughter had a recital on saturday morning, she went with her sister to look for baby clothes. they were gone from 10 am until after 5 that night. in that time, i did seven loads of laundry (wash, dry, fold and put away), all the dishes in the house and made the kids lunch. this is quite literally more than she did the entire week.
and it's like this all the time. every day, there is an excuse. on saturday, she was too tired to do anything after shopping all day. sunday, we were definitive busy all day (i agree with this one). last night, she had a headache and couldn't work at all. i'm actually considering starting a log of excuse because im frankly incredulous.
our childrens rooms are atrocious. hangers all over the floor, clothes all over the place. you can't even walk through my older daughter's room and walk on the floor. you're walking on paper and clothes and any number of things. i've cleaned them all numbers and numbers of times, but only to have her come behind and let it get bad within a matter of weeks.
am i bitter? you bet. do i bust my ass in an attempt to show her that it can be done? you bet. she complains that she feels like i stand in judgement of her all the time and she's right. but i don't see how a person couldn't stand in judgement of someone when they constantly fail you. how else should that work?
ok, on with other issues beyond cleaning:
2. she is a screamer. her mother (who has passed away) was as well, to the point of abuse. no doubt, this is an environmentally inherited trait. this is also one that i'm not interested in passing on to our children. i want our children to be better people, better spouses, better in general than we are. but my wife loses it, sometimes over the smallest things. my oldest daughter and now the second are both turning into screamers and it breaks my heart – both to see my kids weather the battery of constant screaming and to see them turning into ones themselves.
3. manipulation:
i watched my MIL manipulate her children when i first met them. it was devious and horrid and now i fear that my wife doing the same to us. sometimes it's benign, other times it's not. my memory isn't as sharp as i'd like, so a lot of times she'll rely on that to make her case on an issue, assuming that i won't remember. an example: we were having a discussion over something where she asked me a question which i answered completely and thought that the discussion was over and turned to my daughter to talk about a song that came on the radio. my wife blew up over this. i asked what was wrong and she said that i had interrupted her to move on to something else. in a rare instance of clarity, i told her exactly what her question had been, exactly what my response had been and then asked how precisely i had interrupted her. her response: 'your definition of interrupt is different than mine.' had i not asked the question, she would have gone on a rampage about how i had interrupted her knowing damn well that she was just crafting reality to her own best devices.
4. paring down of her duties, increase in mine:
remember when i said that the breakdown of duties was that she cooked and did laundry and i did the dishes? that's totally gone now. every night that she's cooking, she needs help somehow. that's ok, but if i'm helping out in her arenas, shouldn't she help out in mine? that seems fair. but i do 95% of the dishes (no, not an exaggeration and we don't have a dishwasher) and constantly have to pick up behind her after she cooks. spices, milk, various ingredients are all mine in addition to doing the dishes afterward. this is after i put the kids to bed (she doesn't like to brush their teeth because i do a better job?!). this usually means that while i'm putting them in pajamas, she is downstairs, usually cycling through channelsto see what she is going to watch. when the kids are finally in bed, she'll rush upstairs to give them a quick kiss on a commercial before zipping back downstairs before the commercial break is over. i'm left to put them into bed, make sure they stay there, get them water, retuck them in after they go to the bathroom and then, when they're done, go back downstairs and do dishes while she watches television or reads.
i'm probably doing half the laundry now, not just mine. i'm cleaning 90% of the house. to be perfectly honest, i have a hard time figuring out what she does during the day. i know from experience in business that things always take longer than you would think, looking at it from the outside. that being said, zero progress from month to month, year to year isn't getting anything solved. i'm carrying more of the load all the time and i fear that eventually i'll be carrying all of it.
5. lack of appreciation/respect for what i do:
when i say this, i mean that there is a general level of disrespect. if i get the living room clean, she will walk through and drop her coats on the coach three days in a row until i hang them up myself. it's like she can assume that i'll get tired of it and take care of it, so why bother? she could easily take ten minutes and do some dishes during the day, but that almost never happens. ever. but those ten minutes at least buys me that same amount that evening to do something else.
she leaves her bathrobe soaking wet on our bed and, instead of walking the 10-15 step to hang it up, will pile it at the foot of our bed. this is an example, not the sole issue. there are many similar issues where she just doesn't do anything and assumes that it will get done, either by me or sometime in the nebulous future (when there is always a reason not to). i'll clean her car and, within a week, it's so bad that you can't sit in the passenger's seat without having your feet in a sea of juice boxes and trash. she knows that i'll eventually clean that up.
6. i don't even know how to describe this, but it seems like if she's doing something, she wants me to drop everything and do it. i was talking with my daughter the other day about school and she called me down to help her make dinner. she needed a fork from the drawer and afterward, needed nothing else but still wanted me to stay in case she needed me. this is common.
7. with regards to cleaning, when she decides that she wants to, it has to be on her own terms – room by room. this means that she first wants to deal with the living room which people would see first if they came over. so she wants to deep clean and purge. i agreed four months ago to do it her way and we still aren't there. how can it take four months to clean a single room? if while she is gone, i clean the kids rooms, she gets mad because i'm not cleaning her way, working on that singular room. she says it deflates and demotivates her to have me take a different route.
there is more, but these would seem to be the bulk of it. if we dealt with these issues, we'd have most of it licked, so i will stop here with my recitation of grievances.
how does this affect me? i'm bitter. i'm constantly stressed. there is never enough time and i'm fighting an endless battle against forces that are supposed to be my ally but in reality i feel like is at best neutral in the fight and more likely than not, working against me. every time i walk home into a messy house, it's like someone punches me in the stomach. so i try to fight back the tide of mess again that night, just hoping to go to bed with the house somewhat better that night than it was the night before. i feel like if i can chip away, maybe eventually/slowly, i will get there. i have waning motiviation – why work toward something if you're never guaranteed to get there, no matter how hard you try? our room is an embarrassing wreck so romance is stifled to say the least. would you want to have amorous relations with the lights on if there were clothes piled all over every available surface and the floor was littered with papers and books? maybe i'm being petty? i'm actually at the point where i'm starting to wonder if the issue is me, but then i pull back and (try to) look at it objectively and i can't see that this is my issue (generally speaking).
how does this affect my kids? i'm worried that they will grow up to live in completely dirty conditions, as screamers and manipulators. they live in an environment that is dirty and embarassing. what is shocking to others is become normal to them and that doesn't bode well for the future. how can you expect a child to grow up right if you can't provide them with the proper role modeling?
i'll reiterate, i'm not perfect. i know it. i do judge her a lot. but i feel like that's an excuse to deflect the fact that she's failing a lot. if a person fails constantly, doesn't logic dictate they subject themselves to judgment by doing so? i can always do better and, despite my misgivings, i try every day. i don't feel like i can say the same for her.
help. please. i really have no idea what to do.
my wife and i have been married for over ten years. we have four wonderful kids ranging from 8 to 4. the kids are all happy, well adjusted and well liked and intelligent. they all succeed in school and other arenas. all indications are that we are succeeding in our primary jobs as parents as i see it – to make successfully, appropriate and kinds young adults.
first, let me start with this: i am imperfect. i know that. i won't pretend that i am. i want to make myself better and make my children better than i am – more kind, more successful, more generous, better marriages. i get lazy, make mistakes – no doubt about it. but i also bust my rear to make up for those mistakes. point being, i acknowledge that i'm not the best at housekeeping, controlling my temper all the time (though i'm pretty good at it, i think), planning or scheduling.
when we first got together, i was finishing up college – a taxing five year program that didnt leave much time for anything beyond school work. i paid my way through school by working, so i ate like crap and was a little heavy (190 lbs, 5'10). nothing bad, just not what i wanted. after we were married, i got into running and did quite well. ran a few marathons, really found something that let me blow off steam. when the kids came along, it obviously got difficult to fit that in. so i cut way back and made adjustments. now i belong to 24 hr gym so i can run after everyone is asleep, sometimes finishing at 1 or 2 am. that is my choice and it only hurts my sleep. that being said, i get uptight now if i don't run for days at a time. i would think that i could somehow carve out an hour or two in every second or third day to run, especially if i'm willing to do it at midnight. i know this is silly and not the biggest problem. i tell you this because i want to own that i have my own issues. i get it.
my problems are with my wife (little surprise, i'm sure). i just don't feel that she's holding up her end of the bargain in quite a few ways. as this continues, i feel myself becoming a worse person as well too. my anger and frustration toward her manifests itself not only toward her, but sometimes towards the kids as well. i do very well at remembering to avoid letting them feel the brunt of my frustration, but it would be a lie to say that it doesn't happen at all. no sense in kidding myself.
she used to have a successful career, but after our second child, we realized that the money she made barely covered the cost of day care for two children and we mutually decided that it was better for her to stay at home and raise our children the way we wanted. we thought (and still both do) that this is for the best for our kids.
the problems as from my perspective are:
1. cleaning/use of time
in exchange for her staying home full time, i would continue to work full time to support everyone. i would have stayed home and been a stay at home father, but we talked it through and we decided together that this was the route we would take. the theory was that she would take care of the house (cooking, laundry) and kids; i would work during the day, do the dishes and take care of the outside of the house. simple division of labor. this has long since gone by the wayside. while neither of us were much for housekeeping, when we had kids, we agreed that this had to change.
at this point, all of our kids are in school and our house is still a complete wreck. i'm not exaggerating when i say that people don't come in our house. when my wife is gone (she works during the holidays one night a week and maybe a weekend day at a retail store) and i have the kids, i make massive strides alone. i get entire rooms cleaned, get loads of laundry done. but when she's at home, it seems that she gets next to nothing done. i understand that she picks up the kids after school. two days a week, she also teaches a fitness class for special needs kids which takes about 2 hours of her time at most.
i feel that it's a reasonable question to ask/wonder what she does with her time and important to the discussion. i'll admit to prejudice when answering this question. that being said, she goes to the grocery a lot, which seems to take extraordinary amounts of time when she does. the grocery is less than three miles away. a single trip can take four hours. she also has volunteered and is very active at the PTO for the kids school and is a room mother for at least one of our kids every year. that also takes up a lot of time during certain parts of the year when they have fundraisers or other things. i get that.
but it's the other times where i see a massive void of getting anything done. she is a voracious reader and if i had to guess, i'd suggest that she read between 50-75 books last year. when we got to bed at night, she sits with her e reader and will sometimes read into the early morning because she can't put the book down. i'll come home from work and the kids are watching tv and she's sitting in the kitchen reading. if she asks to sleep in for an extra half hour on a saturday and i roll with it, that half hour turns into one or sometimes more and she isn't sleeping at all – she's reading. meanwhile, i'm manaaging the kids and trying to make up for time she didn't appear to use during the week.
an honest example from this weekend: after our daughter had a recital on saturday morning, she went with her sister to look for baby clothes. they were gone from 10 am until after 5 that night. in that time, i did seven loads of laundry (wash, dry, fold and put away), all the dishes in the house and made the kids lunch. this is quite literally more than she did the entire week.
and it's like this all the time. every day, there is an excuse. on saturday, she was too tired to do anything after shopping all day. sunday, we were definitive busy all day (i agree with this one). last night, she had a headache and couldn't work at all. i'm actually considering starting a log of excuse because im frankly incredulous.
our childrens rooms are atrocious. hangers all over the floor, clothes all over the place. you can't even walk through my older daughter's room and walk on the floor. you're walking on paper and clothes and any number of things. i've cleaned them all numbers and numbers of times, but only to have her come behind and let it get bad within a matter of weeks.
am i bitter? you bet. do i bust my ass in an attempt to show her that it can be done? you bet. she complains that she feels like i stand in judgement of her all the time and she's right. but i don't see how a person couldn't stand in judgement of someone when they constantly fail you. how else should that work?
ok, on with other issues beyond cleaning:
2. she is a screamer. her mother (who has passed away) was as well, to the point of abuse. no doubt, this is an environmentally inherited trait. this is also one that i'm not interested in passing on to our children. i want our children to be better people, better spouses, better in general than we are. but my wife loses it, sometimes over the smallest things. my oldest daughter and now the second are both turning into screamers and it breaks my heart – both to see my kids weather the battery of constant screaming and to see them turning into ones themselves.
3. manipulation:
i watched my MIL manipulate her children when i first met them. it was devious and horrid and now i fear that my wife doing the same to us. sometimes it's benign, other times it's not. my memory isn't as sharp as i'd like, so a lot of times she'll rely on that to make her case on an issue, assuming that i won't remember. an example: we were having a discussion over something where she asked me a question which i answered completely and thought that the discussion was over and turned to my daughter to talk about a song that came on the radio. my wife blew up over this. i asked what was wrong and she said that i had interrupted her to move on to something else. in a rare instance of clarity, i told her exactly what her question had been, exactly what my response had been and then asked how precisely i had interrupted her. her response: 'your definition of interrupt is different than mine.' had i not asked the question, she would have gone on a rampage about how i had interrupted her knowing damn well that she was just crafting reality to her own best devices.
4. paring down of her duties, increase in mine:
remember when i said that the breakdown of duties was that she cooked and did laundry and i did the dishes? that's totally gone now. every night that she's cooking, she needs help somehow. that's ok, but if i'm helping out in her arenas, shouldn't she help out in mine? that seems fair. but i do 95% of the dishes (no, not an exaggeration and we don't have a dishwasher) and constantly have to pick up behind her after she cooks. spices, milk, various ingredients are all mine in addition to doing the dishes afterward. this is after i put the kids to bed (she doesn't like to brush their teeth because i do a better job?!). this usually means that while i'm putting them in pajamas, she is downstairs, usually cycling through channelsto see what she is going to watch. when the kids are finally in bed, she'll rush upstairs to give them a quick kiss on a commercial before zipping back downstairs before the commercial break is over. i'm left to put them into bed, make sure they stay there, get them water, retuck them in after they go to the bathroom and then, when they're done, go back downstairs and do dishes while she watches television or reads.
i'm probably doing half the laundry now, not just mine. i'm cleaning 90% of the house. to be perfectly honest, i have a hard time figuring out what she does during the day. i know from experience in business that things always take longer than you would think, looking at it from the outside. that being said, zero progress from month to month, year to year isn't getting anything solved. i'm carrying more of the load all the time and i fear that eventually i'll be carrying all of it.
5. lack of appreciation/respect for what i do:
when i say this, i mean that there is a general level of disrespect. if i get the living room clean, she will walk through and drop her coats on the coach three days in a row until i hang them up myself. it's like she can assume that i'll get tired of it and take care of it, so why bother? she could easily take ten minutes and do some dishes during the day, but that almost never happens. ever. but those ten minutes at least buys me that same amount that evening to do something else.
she leaves her bathrobe soaking wet on our bed and, instead of walking the 10-15 step to hang it up, will pile it at the foot of our bed. this is an example, not the sole issue. there are many similar issues where she just doesn't do anything and assumes that it will get done, either by me or sometime in the nebulous future (when there is always a reason not to). i'll clean her car and, within a week, it's so bad that you can't sit in the passenger's seat without having your feet in a sea of juice boxes and trash. she knows that i'll eventually clean that up.
6. i don't even know how to describe this, but it seems like if she's doing something, she wants me to drop everything and do it. i was talking with my daughter the other day about school and she called me down to help her make dinner. she needed a fork from the drawer and afterward, needed nothing else but still wanted me to stay in case she needed me. this is common.
7. with regards to cleaning, when she decides that she wants to, it has to be on her own terms – room by room. this means that she first wants to deal with the living room which people would see first if they came over. so she wants to deep clean and purge. i agreed four months ago to do it her way and we still aren't there. how can it take four months to clean a single room? if while she is gone, i clean the kids rooms, she gets mad because i'm not cleaning her way, working on that singular room. she says it deflates and demotivates her to have me take a different route.
there is more, but these would seem to be the bulk of it. if we dealt with these issues, we'd have most of it licked, so i will stop here with my recitation of grievances.
how does this affect me? i'm bitter. i'm constantly stressed. there is never enough time and i'm fighting an endless battle against forces that are supposed to be my ally but in reality i feel like is at best neutral in the fight and more likely than not, working against me. every time i walk home into a messy house, it's like someone punches me in the stomach. so i try to fight back the tide of mess again that night, just hoping to go to bed with the house somewhat better that night than it was the night before. i feel like if i can chip away, maybe eventually/slowly, i will get there. i have waning motiviation – why work toward something if you're never guaranteed to get there, no matter how hard you try? our room is an embarrassing wreck so romance is stifled to say the least. would you want to have amorous relations with the lights on if there were clothes piled all over every available surface and the floor was littered with papers and books? maybe i'm being petty? i'm actually at the point where i'm starting to wonder if the issue is me, but then i pull back and (try to) look at it objectively and i can't see that this is my issue (generally speaking).
how does this affect my kids? i'm worried that they will grow up to live in completely dirty conditions, as screamers and manipulators. they live in an environment that is dirty and embarassing. what is shocking to others is become normal to them and that doesn't bode well for the future. how can you expect a child to grow up right if you can't provide them with the proper role modeling?
i'll reiterate, i'm not perfect. i know it. i do judge her a lot. but i feel like that's an excuse to deflect the fact that she's failing a lot. if a person fails constantly, doesn't logic dictate they subject themselves to judgment by doing so? i can always do better and, despite my misgivings, i try every day. i don't feel like i can say the same for her.
help. please. i really have no idea what to do.
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