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Jeez dude, slow down already. Sell the house and move to a lower income neighborhood. It's not like university is all that expensive in the UK, so the kids can be on their own. Sell all the junk that won't fit in the smaller house. Let the wife take the bus if she wants to get somewhere. Quit giving her money. There's nothing like being broke to motivate someone to get a job.
I've been home with my kids for the past 11 years. This is how it looks from my side of things:
I stopped working when we had our second child, because my husband insisted that he wanted me home with them. I tried to go back to work when she was two and my husband sabotaged me...called my employer claiming to be my probation officer. He said it was just a harmless prank call, but it wasn't. I lost that job. After that, he insisted that I couldn't go back to work again. Sometimes we were really, really poor but he insisted that if he was working full time, that was enough to support the family and I must be wasting money if it wasn't enough. There was a year where my budget each month for groceries, toiletries and cleaning products was $160 for a family of four. We would have qualified for food stamps and that would have made it a bit easier, but he wouldn't apply or let me apply for them. I babysat for money for a little while, but then he decided having an extra child in the house was a liability issue. I taught myself to decorate cakes and found out what it would take to have a legal home business with liability insurance, but he said I can't do that either because he's afraid I might get scammed into giving refunds and lose money on the business.
I thought I could go back to work once the kids were in school, but my husband decided they were unsafe at school and started begging me to home school them. I refused until my daughter's school situation got really bad, and then I gave in. So we've been homeschooling for 4 years.
I spent several years applying for jobs for him online, writing cover letters, corresponding with employers using his email address, and got him interviews with a few different companies. He finally got a better job with decent benefits. He's been there several years and we're getting used to having enough money for food and health care and car repairs. I feel comfortable for the first time in years.
Now he wants me to go back to work. Our youngest is 10. Both kids are home all day every day. My husband works a rotating schedule, so every three months his schedule changes. I'm not comfortable leaving the kids home alone for more than an hour or two. I'm definitely not comfortable leaving them home alone all day. I also don't know what kind of work I would do. I used to work retail, but I can't stand up for 8 hours at a time anymore. I would still have to work on school work with the kids when I got home from work, because my husband won't consider sending them back to school.
I think the reason my husband wants me to go back to work is that most of his coworkers' wives work. The job pays enough to cover daycare or after school care, unlike the jobs he had before. He sees his coworkers having a lot of extra money and spending it on fun things and thinks he should be able to do that too.
A 40 hour workweek is normal - but a lot of people do overtime. 40 might be the minimum expected hours, but you can bet many will end up doing way more, usually unpaid. Also, in the US there is no mandatory paid vacation. There isn't even paid paternity leave so fathers can't take time off to spend time with their children as well.
Americans have some of the longest working hours in the OECD, so yeah they definitely work a lot.
As well as the least amount of workers rights-with "at-will" nonsense, being able to get let go for no reason at all! Lowballed on salary/benefits, paid time off. I'm glad I'm out of that nonsense-Oz workers enjoy some of the best worker protections anywhere. IDK how or why American workers stand for it. Glad I was able to move here!
Jeez dude, slow down already. Sell the house and move to a lower income neighborhood. It's not like university is all that expensive in the UK, so the kids can be on their own. Sell all the junk that won't fit in the smaller house. Let the wife take the bus if she wants to get somewhere. Quit giving her money. There's nothing like being broke to motivate someone to get a job.
We're talking about a woman who is probably around 50 with no marketable work skills. What kind of help does the husband think he's going to get from his wife? It's not like being a wife and mother out of the workforce for as long as she has is going to get her positions that are any higher paying than they were before she had kids. He already said in her letter that she had low-wage jobs at that point.
Basically the moral of the story is don't marry a white woman, because they will ruin your life and take what you have worked for.
How racist! I'm a white woman, and have worked every day of my life since I was 16 with the exception of a few months off after each child was born and another few after a surgery. I had a husband who looked for any excuse not to work, complained about every job he had, and viewed work as some hateful duty best performed by someone else. I know just how stressful it is to be the only one pulling in a paycheck all too often.
The end of the letter states her getting a job would make him feel loved. He's obviously burned out, and what was ok in the earlier child-rearing days is not ok now. He wants to accept a less demanding, lower paying job but can't because his wife is too busy hanging out with other non-working wives and doing the volunteer, hobby type activities. If she really cared for him, she would step up and get something - anything - that would allow him to make that change in his career, seeing as how he is stressed and close to burnout.
The fact that she still refuses to work in the light of that tells me she is extremely selfish or just doesn't care about her husband's mental health.
How times have changed. It wasn't that long ago that women were expected to stay home full time and raise the kids and take care of the home. Men felt emasculated if their wife HAD to go to work to help support the family. Now women are expected to work full time until retirement with very brief interruptions to have a child or two that are put into the care of strangers at 6 weeks old. The husbands now encourage the wife to work full time in most marriages.
Is it the economy or women's lib that is causing this? Is it our desire to have more of everything? Who knows but in the case of this letter writer from the Guardian, he waited much too long to have this discussion with his wife. He should have talked to her when the youngest started school. It seems she only went to law school to meet a lawyer and live the good life without working outside the home. And before anyone jumps all over me I firmly believe that taking care of kids and a home is more work than a 9-5 job. However the wife is not a mind reader - if the author was feeling all this pressure he should have told her when her law degree wasn't 20+ years old. Maybe after all these years she is afraid to go to work?
Did he write the article expecting sympathy or because he is too much of a coward to actually talk to his wife? They need to go to marriage counseling, not get a divorce. That would just leave him in a more precarious position having to pay for two households, alimony, etc. If they still love each other or even like each other, at this point try to fix the marriage.
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