For context, my husband and I had a baby girl 8 months ago. I took 3 months leave; he only got 2 weeks. During this time, I did 90% of childcare/housework even during the weekends when he was off. When I told him I felt like our workload wasn’t equal, he told me it’d be different when I went back to work. It wasn’t, and I’ve still been doing the majority, in addition to working full time. While we are at work, our daughter spends her days at his parents’ house.
Feeling overwhelmed, I have recently let the house become a mess. I do what I can when I have the time/energy, but I’ve definitely been slacking. Our daughter is about to start crawling, and I’m not comfortable with her doing so with the way the house is.
Fast forward to last month. He lost his job unexpectedly, and has been out of work since. He has another job lined up, but it doesn’t start for another week. During the month he has been off, he has put in what I believe to be minimal effort. He does help some with dishes, trash, and feeding the cats, but even those are not done on a consistent basis. No laundry, no litter box cleaning, etc.
The part that really bothers me is that this whole time, he hasn’t watched our daughter once. He’s still sending her to his parents house while I’m at work and he’s at home. At first, it was okay because he was spending his days on the job hunt. But now that he has work lined up, I don’t feel he has any reason not to watch her.
Now, today. He told me this morning that his sleep schedule was all messed up, because he has nothing to do besides sit around and wait to start work. From what I’ve seen, he spends all his free time either sleeping or playing video games and is frequently sleeping when I get home from work. So I presented him with an option: start watching our daughter while I’m at work until his new job starts, or spend a good chunk of his day cleaning the house. He chose housework. I went on to say that when I said “a good chunk,” I meant a GOOD chunk. Specifically, about 3 hours a day.
He didn’t like this, and thought it was excessive, that there wasn’t that much work to be done. We started arguing, I asked if he really couldn’t see everything that needed done, he asked me to list specifics, I did. His response was “So you basically want me to clean the entire house.” To which I replied that yes, there’s no reason it can’t be done.
I believe this is only fair. I work 40+ hours a week in addition to 4-5 hours of childcare each night before she goes to bed, and all day on the weekends. He has’t been working for a month, and would be dedicating a fraction of the time to the house that I dedicate to work/childcare. He believes it’s excessive, unreasonable, that I need to help out with the cleaning too, and that I have unrealistic expectations for the house.
AITA for asking him to clean the whole house while he’s out of work?