Who has more to do? Stay-home dad, working mom don’t have answers — yet | Jun 12th 2006
By Jacqueline Dooley
Like many couples with kids who have one full-time working parent and one parent who stays home, my husband and I have been known to get into the “competition” mindset of who has more on their plate.
I’m well aware that taking care of small children can be an exhausting, unrelenting and often thankless full-time job (which doesn’t come with benefits or time off), but I don’t fully understand what it’s like for him since I’ve been far removed from five straight days in a row of full-time child care for quite a while.
I’m way more familiar with the nine-to-five grind that can be tedious, stressful and endless to the point where I cling to those brief moments of working-mom respite — weekends, vacations and holidays.
In my household, there are two interesting twists to this age-old debate of “my plate is fuller than your plate.” First, the mommy/daddy roles are reversed since my husband is the full-time caregiver. Among other things, his responsibilities also include housework, grocery shopping, cooking and shuttle duty (to and from preschool).
The second interesting twist is that I’m home all day long with him and the girls, which can make me (mistakenly) believe I understand his day perfectly.
It is an ongoing challenge for me to temper the urge to complain that I have more to do than he does, or that I am more in need of a break. I don’t think this is an aspect of working from home, but I think that being home all day brings this issue up more often than it might otherwise come up.
Social life is gone
This is because I work differently from home than I did when I had an off-site job. At the “real” office, I actually took two breaks a day and had a one hour lunch, for example. I chatted with colleagues and friends. Sometimes I went out after work and went shopping or went for a drink with a friend. In short, I had a life.
Those moments of socializing purely for the fun of it are pretty much gone. My days are starkly divided between work hours and personal hours. But personal is almost always all about family and this leaves little room for socialization. My friends are no longer in the cubicles across from mine.
This lack of focus on my social life and my own personal needs has a detrimental effect on my relationship with my kids and my husband. When there’s no down time for me, I become admittedly passive aggressive.
For example, my husband may ask for a break five minutes after I’ve finished working and I’ll say yes because I know he needs it, but I am reluctant to let him go guilt-free.
Even though I don’t want to dredge up the tired old tally of what I do versus what he does, it somehow comes up anyway. We both feel guilty. He doesn’t enjoy his break and I don’t fully enjoy the kids or the reprieve from work because I haven’t had time to decompress.
I’m not sure what the solution to this dilemma is, but I think it may have to do with communication on one hand, and respect for each other’s day on the other. The lesson I’m finding hardest to learn is to stop feeling guilty about asking for something — like a break once in a while.
I think once I can figure that out, it will work in my husband’s favor, too, since I’ll stop bestowing guilt. Maybe then we can finally put an end to the “more on my plate” competition.
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This article was published in the Poughkeepsie Journal on Saturday, June 10th, 2006.