A mum has slammed her husband for spending too long in the shower when he should be helping her out with the kids.
The path of parenting never does run smooth – as you’ll know if you’ve ever been on Reddit, where parents often take the opportunity to vent about their other halves.
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Writing on the ‘Am I the A**hole’ forum, one woman shared her frustration with her husband after she spotted a painful pattern.
Laying our her situation, she began: “Mostly SAHM of two kids here, ages one and three. I work two days a week at most, usually only one. Most of the time I'm home with them.
“My husband is a blue collar worker in construction. He works long days, his job is pretty physical, and he works really hard. He gets up at 5am and gets home by 630. My days are usually around the same, give or take an extra hour in the morning.”
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The mum said that, every single day, her husband gets home and heads straight into the shower as soon as he gets in.
As he spends ‘at least 25 minutes on the toilet’ and has ‘25 minute showers’, she said it’s not a particularly swift process.
The woman said she can’t ‘start dinner with the kids hanging off my legs’, so asked her husband if he could wait to wash up until after they’d been fed.
She continued: “He complied at first, but he's now telling me it's very unfair to ask him to sit in dirty clothes and be a sweaty mess for two hours until they get to bed. Which I understand it's uncomfortable, but you know...I 've just been alone with the kids for 13 hours straight. Every day.
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“I have stuff I still need to get done, too. My kids are in their tantrum phase as well, which has been really hard.”
The Reddit user said her husband ‘got really snippy’ and told her she was ‘being incredible selfish’, asking others if she was in the wrong or him.
In an edit, she added more context, saying: “None of this is about decompression time, it's about getting the kids to bed on time because they wake up even earlier if I don't get them to bed by 8pm.
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“We have plenty of time after they go to sleep for ourselves, and I don't mind him doing whatever he wants to do at that point.”
She also said that while he works in construction, he doesn’t come home covered in mud, filth or fibreglass.
“I'm not asking him to wait two hours to shower, I'm asking him to wait 30 minutes so I can get dinner done, get him and the kids fed, and then he has the rest of the evening to himself to shower, decompress, play his games etc,” she said.
“I take care of the rest of the night.”
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Many Redditors were divided on the matter, with one arguing: “No one needs 50 minutes to decompress. A hot, relaxing shower for 20 minutes would do the trick. He's milking the system and trying to shirk his responsibilities. He'll only have, like, an hour with the kids per day with this schedule. It's insane.”
Someone else said: “I wouldn't say you’re the [a**hole] but you are naive or ignorant. Working construction he needs that 50mins asap when he gets home. He needs it to show up for you. Just give it to him you are being selfish and probably need to meal prep on the weekends or during the day. You have time if you do it right but give him his time especially if this is your only concern.
One person suggested diplomatically: “This problem will solve itself as the kids get older. But for now take another posters advise. Baby gate.”
Topics: Parenting, Reddit, Sex and Relationships, Life, Real Life
Jess Hardiman