Stay-At-Home Mom Asks If She's Wrong Threatening To Drop Baby At Husband's Office After He Didn't Do Chores
She wants him to start pulling his weight.
PNW Production / Pexels It goes without saying that childcare is difficult, especially when parents have jobs outside the home while managing it.
One stay-at-home mother is facing backlash after she threatened to drop her daughter off at her husband’s work in the middle of the day if he didn’t start helping around the house more.
Internet users are claiming that the woman had no right to threaten her husband since taking care of their daughter was her job, and going into the office was his.
The stay-at-home mother believed that her husband wasn't pulling his weight at home.
Posting her story on the subreddit, "r/AmItheA–-hole" (AITA), the woman asked other Redditors if she was wrong for threatening her exhausted husband and if she should have handled the situation differently.
The 42-year-old woman began her post by sharing that she is a stay-at-home mom with a toddler daughter and that her 42-year-old husband works full-time outside the home.
The woman detailed her daily routine and responsibilities around the house while her husband goes to work.
“Every morning we get up early and I feed my toddler and allow her to watch some learning shows while I do morning chores and make breakfast,” she wrote.
“I do laundry including washing and folding, clean up the rooms we are using, chop wood, clean the fireplace, shop once a week, plan meals, feed our cats, and handle any kind of other tasks such as doctor's appointments, contracting work, etc.”
Additionally, the woman cleans the kitchen often as her toddler is messy with her food.
In the evenings, she completes other household tasks.
“At night I make two dinners, clean up my cooking mess, clean up her toys and her messes, get her ready for her bath, then put her to bed,” she wrote. “I also clean the bathrooms and vacuum about once a week.”
She explains that her husband also has his duties around the house.
In addition to his full-time job, the woman’s husband is responsible for certain responsibilities around the house, including doing the dishes, taking out the trash, cleaning the cats’ litter boxes, and cooking dinner twice a week.
Sometimes, her husband swaps the duty of bathing her daughter since she is “too tired” to do it herself some nights.
On the weekends, he takes their daughter out to run any additional errands while the woman cleans up the house.
The woman adds that finding additional childcare for their daughter is difficult since no preschools or daycares are open in their area.
Recently, the woman revealed that she is frustrated at her husband, as he tends to fall asleep after dinner each night, neglecting his household chores.
“This is a huge issue for me because not only does it mean that we don't spend any time together during the evenings, but also if I don't wake him up nothing gets done,” the woman wrote.
“He's always been like this, but before we had a kid I didn't really care. Now it's a different story. I just cannot handle having to do his share on top of everything else.”
She's brought the issue up to him before but confronted him about it once again.
The woman has addressed the issue to her husband before, urging him to set an alarm and to do the dishes right after dinner before he falls asleep.
“He'll change things for a week or so, but then go back,” the woman wrote.
A few nights ago, the woman revealed that she woke up at 2 AM and caught her husband fast asleep on the couch with his tasks incomplete.
“I lost it and screamed at him that if he didn't quit falling asleep after dinner, I was going to drop our toddler off at his job in the middle of the day,” she wrote.
“He got really angry and then did his chores. We have avoided each other since then.”
The woman claims that her parents urged her to “let it go” since her husband works hard all day.
Now she is wondering if her husband deserved her reaction and if she could have handled it differently.
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Most Redditors slammed the woman for threatening her husband.
“Your threat of dropping your child off at his work makes it sound like you think you’re doing him a favor by watching the child while he’s at work, and you’re not doing any favors,” one user wrote.
"You’re a SAHM [stay-at-home mom], watching the kid IS your job (literally)."
“It’s not like you have to do the job for him, you just have to wait for him to do it. If you dislike being a stay-at-home mom so much, move and put your child in daycare and go get a job,” another user commented.
“But he’s doing more than most fathers on here do already.”
“Do you realize you are threatening your child, your husband's, and your own livelihood by threatening to drop your child off at his work because he didn't do the dishes right this second and went to sleep because he was tired from working all day/week whilst also taking care of your daughter on his days off so you can work on the house?” another user pointed out.
However, other users believed that the woman’s husband needed to be doing more to help out around the house.
“He’s not pulling his weight with the family, he doesn’t just get to go to work and come home and that’s when his whole job ends,” one user commented.
“He is disrespecting you for his own “comfort”. He isn’t a partner, he isn’t a father…he is barely a thing,” another user believed.
Megan Quinn is a writer at YourTango who covers entertainment and news, self, love, and relationships.