When Chris was laid-off and I was the one working, we had no children. I would come home and we'd split the housework, just like always. He'd pack me a lunch maybe once a week, if I begged him. In fact, he'll tell you himself that he spent his time off work petting puppies all day - we even had to put our black dog, Gammie (Chris's favorite) into obedience school once he went back to work.
Now, because of my lay-off, I am a stay-at-home-mom. By virtue of that high-falutin title, I've somehow become responsible for ALL THE HOUSEWORK, ALL THE CHILD CARE, ALL THE FEEDING OF THE ANIMALS, ALL THE MEALS, AND I PACK CHRIS LUNCH EVERY SINGLE DAY. This SUCKS.
Every now and then I just get supremely pissed at my situation. Were I to go back to work, and we'd pay someone to take care of our kids every day, we would once again go back to a more fair distribution of household duties. Yet the paid day care workers would be dividing their attention amongst all the children they would be watching, and they would not love our children.
But since I'm here during the day, I am expected to keep everyone and everything clean, happy, loved, and fed, and I'M TIRED. I can not give 100% to my kids without the house falling into disrepair. I can not give 100% to cleaning house without endangering my children's well-being. Every bit of time I take to clean house is time taken away from nuturing my children. But if the house is slightly messy when Chris gets home he asks, "So, what did you do all day?" BITE MY BIG FAT BUTT.
Maybe I played spaceship with Izzy. Maybe I laid in the floor smiling at Sophie. Maybe I went down to the playroom and let them play as kids ought to be allowed - with complete and total abandon. So what if I used their naptime as time to play on the internet? Even the lowliest workers are mandated breaktime.
So the one thing that I ask Chris to do during the week is clean up after dinner, and for one reason or another, he's not done it all week. Last night he started it at 10:15, which is 15 minutes after he should have gone to bed since he gets up so early, so I tell him not to worry about it, but that he'd get to do it for sure tonight.
What happens tonight? Right after dinner, he jumps up and wants to run to 84 Lumber to check out some siding samples. I start cleaning off the table and then Izzy decides he has to go with Chris, and he tells Chris that they have to take Sophie with them too, so Chris comes and gets me to go with them too. I ask Chris to finish rinsing off the dishes while I change my shirt.
We leave, come back, I put Sophie to bed, he puts Izzy to bed, we watch TV, he goes into the kitchen banging dishes around for about 15 minutes, watches more TV and goes to bed.
I start doing my nightly tidy-up routine and I find all the dinner dishes stacked on the sink, and the dishwasher full of clean dishes being cleaned again. Apparently he thought that I loaded the dishwasher to maximum capacity today and just left it sitting there. He's not asleep yet so I go in there and ask him what he did for so long. Rinsed off dishes, he tells me. I tell him that he makes my life awfully difficult.
Then I come in and the table hasn't even been wiped off. In fact, his spoon and napkin are still sitting at his place.
See, it's not only the not helping me factor, or the leaving it all up to me to take care of factor, that is getting me all riled up. What makes me so angry is that if someone wants to come and see this place tomorrow, I'm the one who has to bust ass to get it all spic and span, all the while chasing two kids, two dogs and a cat.
We had a call last week that someone wanted to come and see the house in three or four hours. So Chris helped me and it took us almost the whole time to get the house together. Two of us. Yet he doesn't understand why I stay up half the night every night cleaning house.
All I'm asking for is to be treated as well as a stranger that we'd pay to take care of our kids. Oh, and wipe the table off too.
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