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Man Says He Desperately Needs More ‘Me Time' — But Is Afraid to Ask His Wife Who Stays Home with the Kids All Day

Man Says He Desperately Needs More ‘Me Time' — But Is Afraid to Ask His Wife Who Stays Home with the Kids All Day

Yahoo2 days ago
The man said he is expected to entertain the kids once he returns home from 'stressful days' working in healthcareNEED TO KNOW
A man is struggling to balance his "stressful" healthcare job with fathering his three children
Venting on Reddit, he said his wife stays at home while he works six days a week and then expects him to entertain the kids once home
'AITAH [am I the a–-----] for wanting some me time when I get home?' he askedA man is unsure how to tell his wife that he needs time alone when he returns home from work before embracing his fatherly duties.
On Monday, Aug. 4, the man explained in a post on Reddit's AITAH forum that he has been working six days a week since he and his wife had their second child. He said they thought it would be best for him to be the provider and his wife to stay at home with their kids, who are ages nine, six and two, as it keeps childcare costs low.
'I work in healthcare, so I can have pretty full-on/stressful days and can often feel very emotionally as well as physically drained when I get home from work and have been feeling increasingly burnt out recently,' the OP (original poster) said.
'I find I can function at work to get the job done, but once I'm home, I've got nothing in the tank, which leads to having very little patience and really only being present in body only,' he added.
The man described his journey to and from work each day as being part of his daily 'me time.'
Once the children are sleeping, he is also able to doom scroll on his phone, game or watch TV on the couch.
The OP added that he goes for a run once a week.
Speaking about his wife, he said, 'There are days when I get home and am greeted with, 'Tag they're yours, I need a break,' which I can totally get after spending all day entertaining the kids and breaking fights up between them, but I also feel I've been at work all day and need some time before changing from work mode to dad mode."
'AITAH [am I the a–-----] for wanting some me time when I get home?' the man asked.
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Responses to the post attempted to give the man practical solutions, including hiring a babysitter and agreeing with his wife on a specific time frame to relax after work.
'Can you get a sitter or someone to watch the kids for 1-2 days a week?' one person suggested.
https://people-app.onelink.me/HNIa/kz7l4cuf
'I heard a marriage counsellor being interviewed on the radio a number of years ago,' another wrote. 'One of the stories she told was very similar to yours — the husband coming home overwhelmed with work to be greeted by a wife who was overwhelmed with childcare."
'The solution was for him to have 10-15 minutes decompression time when he got in from work. But once that time was up, he had to do whatever she needed him to do,' the same person said.
Read the original article on People
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My husband is 10 years older than me. The age gap was noticeable when we first started parenting, but now I see it as an asset.
My husband is 10 years older than me. The age gap was noticeable when we first started parenting, but now I see it as an asset.

Yahoo

time2 hours ago

  • Yahoo

My husband is 10 years older than me. The age gap was noticeable when we first started parenting, but now I see it as an asset.

When I met my now-husband, I was 19 and he was 29. Initially, our age gap highlighted differences in life experiences and parenting styles. A decade later, these differences are no longer a source of friction. I met my now-husband and father of my children when I was only 19, still a sophomore in college, living with my parents. He was 29, living in a home he owned, operating his own business, and already a father to a 3-year-old son. In the greenest part of our relationship, our age difference was most evident in the way our minds worked. Mine was still learning how to be an adult, while he had a firm grasp on who he was. He was actively raising a child, and I had just been one myself a few years prior. Still, I fell right into loving and parenting his son with him. Three years later, we began having our own children together and ventured off onto an entirely different learning curve. At first, we had to navigate boundaries When all we had was our oldest (my bonus son, as I call him), I set boundaries for myself. I let my husband handle most of the discipline and never overrode his decisions, even if I had a different opinion. I respected that he was his biological parent (and he had a biological mother in the picture too) and I was not. When I gave birth to my first biological child, I remember grappling with the feeling of: "This is fully my child. He isn't any more mine or his. He is as much my son as he is my husband's." I also felt inferior in some ways, because I knew my husband had already raised a baby successfully, and I was just trying to figure out what I was doing. Our son was colicky as a newborn, and my husband was so good at getting him to stop crying. You know when you're holding someone else's baby and they start to cry, so you hand them back to their parents? I caught myself doing that a few times with my own baby and husband. That made me feel like I wasn't capable of handling my son on my own. Our perspectives shifted, and we adjusted timelines We welcomed a third child into our family — a daughter — when our oldest was 10 and our other son was 4. I liked the way our kids were spaced out. I felt like I had time to enjoy each one of them in their youngest years. Around the time we had our daughter, though, my husband started thinking more about his age, and it became a factor in how we moved forward with our family. "I don't want to be at retirement age by the time our youngest graduates high school," he'd say. And while plenty of people continue having children well into their 40s, that wasn't something my husband wanted to do, and I respected that. This eventually compelled me to wind my own biological clock up to tick at a faster pace. I wanted one more baby, and so did he, but we had to close the gap between kids three and four — so we had our last son a month before our daughter turned 2. Time has taught us a lot Now, more than a decade into parenting together, the age gap that once felt like a noticeable lapse in experience just feels like balance. There are moments where our perspectives still differ — when I want to give the kids the benefit of the doubt while he wants to follow through with discipline to teach them lessons — but our differences are no longer a source of friction. They're part of what makes our parenting dynamic work. Our children get the best of both of us, and I've come to believe the space between our ages has given us more to offer, not less. Read the original article on Business Insider

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