Pay Dirt: I Pressured My Wife To Work. Now I Regret It

[minoanmiss]

About a year ago, my wife and I had some hard discussions about her having to go to work to make ends meet financially. She had strong feelings about being a stay-at-home mom for our girls who are 8 and 12, while my position was from the financial side only. I was rather insensitive at the time in our discussions, which did not help matters.

Now, we have had a positive change in our finances, and she could leave her job and go back to being a stay-at-home mom, with our income staying where we need it to be to meet expenses and save for the future. However, she does not want to do that, as she has invested time and effort into finding a job, which I do understand. I feel that our girls need someone’s presence daily, before and after school, as well as during the summer months. Right now, I get the girls off to school in the morning, but there is no one home after school, and they will start having full days alone during the summer. Last, we are spending our family time just doing chores and catching up on things that used to be done during the week.

I want to be supportive but feel strongly that our girls need someone to be with them more than we are now. I would gladly do it, but I am unable due to being the primary earner. Is being concerned just showing how much of a caveman I am? How can we best work through this situation?

—Trying to Do the Right Thing




Dear Trying,

You’re not a caveman, but I think you fail to understand that people operate in two-income families with younger children all the time. Your girls are not being shortchanged because their mother decides to work. If anything, she is modeling something for your daughters that is important: that their mother’s agency and time matter just as much as yours.

If you feel like your daughters need someone to be with them more than you are, child care is an option. If your finances have changed for the better, you might also want to consider after-school programs that your girls might enjoy. There are plenty of summer programs your girls can participate in with other children, so they’re not spending the day alone during the summer either. In fact, they might prefer that over your wife staying home with them.

I would not pressure your wife to quit her job, though. It’s really her decision to make, and choosing to work or stay at home is not a minor thing. It’s life-altering, and your wife’s happiness matters here, too. You do not want her to resent you or your children because she feels like she has no choice in the matter.

Comments

[conuly]

LW, if you feel so strongly that the kids need a stay-at-home parent, there's nothing stopping *you* from quitting your job.

[oursin]

This is probably my g-g-generation, but good heavens, they're 8 and 12! - I don't think I was ever literally a latch-key kid, because my mother (when my little brother was old enough to go to school himself) got a job in a school with school-friendly hours, but it was certainly A Thing in those days then. But at that age, do they need Mommy hanging over them all the time? They might reasonably manage not to fall into the fire or put beans up their noses if left to their own devices.

[jadelennox]

I had a key on a string around my neck at 12, though my older sisters were usually (not always) also home. I understand times have changed, but yeah.c

[cereta]

I was taking care of younger siblings at 12. Yeesh.

[oursin]

I was certainly considered responsible enough to take my siblings out for walks when I was 9 or 10 or so, though perhaps within a fairly delimited area, when I look back.

[minoanmiss]

thank goodness Lincoln freed the slaves.

I really want to know what " rather insensitive at the time" refers to. I have guesses, each more dire than the last.

It may be because this LW pisses me off from the getgo but I can't believe a grown man needs to be told "childcare options exist in the afternoon especially for people with some money to apply to the problem". His only acceptable modes seem to be "wife works full time" and "wife is a full time SAHM with no outside employment." I'm not sure I'd recommend this in this particular case, but the wife could change her hours to be home when the girls get home, as just one of many many examples of other possibilities. Plus, you know, the different kinds of paid childcare. I'm not sure if it's possible to really be this unimaginative or if he has already discarded every other idea as unworthy. I hope not.

(Also I would recommend to his wife she keep a savings account of her own and throw a tithe of her take home in there, since she's married t someone who's so willing to jerk her around like this. There's only one mention of what the wife wants and absolutely none of any suggestions she's made.)

(Also, I was a latchkey kid with an obsession with fire when I was 8, and I never burned the house down. But different kids have different needs.)

[xenacryst]

Also I would recommend to his wife she keep a savings account of her own and throw a tithe of her take home in there

In my headcanon, this is actually one of the big reasons she doesn't want to quit - she's already doing this. I mean, she also doesn't want to be the unpaid domestic labor and actually enjoys her job and socializing with people who aren't financially (and probably emotionally) abusive dickwads, too.

Actually, in my headcanon, she eventually saves enough to take the kids and leave, leaving the cold leftovers on the counter, a pile of dirty dishes on the dining room table, and the windows open without the screens in so that he comes home to find a flock of crows picking over the remains of the pasta he said was only middling and couldn't she have made a better meal like she used to. He marries his secretary, whom he's been having an affair with anyway, but he turns out to be infertile after the episode with the crows and his unfortunate attempts to remedy the situation with his Tesla, so the secretary makes a getaway with the cute guy from the receptionist's desk and they raise a nice family, scraping together enough to let the kids go to circus summer camps. The former wife, meanwhile reconnected with her high school boyfriend, who turned out to be trans, and she and her queer polycule happily took them in, and the last we see of LW is him looking disapprovingly out his office window at the Pride parade in the streets below and not recognizing his former family as they dance in a myriad of rainbow colors at the head of the parade.

[minoanmiss]

OMG this is beautiful. Ngl, I just got a comment on another post that made me think "why do I bother" and then you gave me this and I am going to daydream of it for awhile. Bwee. BWEEEEEEEEEEEE.

[xenacryst]

Sometimes writing fixit fic is the only way I can get through reading these letters.

[cereta]

A++++

[melannen]

LW, the correct thing to do in this situation is go to your wife and admit to her that a year ago, you were wrong. That you were deeply undervaluing the work she had done as a stay-at-home parent, that you had to see to understand, and that was your fault, and you're deeply thankful both for all the things she did when she was staying home, and that she forgave you for being such an ass about getting her a job.

Then you need to work together, listening to her and understanding she has expertise in this that you don't, to figure out what you can do with that extra money to make things better for you and your daughters as a two-working-parent family.

[ambyr]

“Last, we are spending our family time just doing chores and catching up on things that used to be done during the week.”

“Things that used to be done” is quite a use of passive voice, there. Things your wife used to do, LW. I wonder if at least some of her resistance to SAH motherhood is her awareness that her husband’s expectation is that if she stays at home, 100% of domestic chores happen invisibly, without his contributions.

[ashbet]

DINGDINGDINGDINGDING!!

[lunabee34]

Yep. I think this us 100% it.

Now that they're both working outside the home, he has to do some chores and he would like his maid back.

[resonant]

LW is playing a board game in which he (I'm assuming 'he' is accurate) distributes resources that belong to him, such as money, living space, and his wife's time. What's his is his and what's hers is his too.

[feldman]

Hoo boy, nail on the head right there.

[purlewe]

And we have it!

[minoanmiss]

YES THIS. I was struggling to phrase just WHY I was so mad when I read tis letter. This is it.

[petrea_mitchell]

Another latchkey kid here. 8 and 12 seems plenty old enough to be left alone and find ways to amuse themselves in the afternoons.

I'm puzzled by how there's no mention of the kids' social life-- do they not have the ability to see their friends outside of structured activities?

Doing chores together seems like not too bad a use of family time. I guess LW used to think of it as their fun time, and now it's not?

[lilysea]

I'm puzzled by how there's no mention of the kids' social life-- do they not have the ability to see their friends outside of structured activities?

If their friends from school don't live within safe walking distance - remembering that many parts of the US

a) lack footpaths

b) don't have safe pedestrian crossings for busy roads

this might well be the case

[mommy]

I spent several years of my childhood living in a place several miles out of town with a street address that included Mile Marker [#], Highway 70. Sometimes kids really do live in the middle of nowhere with no access to other kids.

[lassarina]

I was a latchkey kid at 13 and responsible for neighborhood children younger than myself on a regular basis (I turned 13 in the mid-90s), so this seems entirely fine as a situation to me. LW needs to "remove head from sphincter, then" be a partner/parent!

[shanaqui]

Possibly this is my "child of a financially abusive parent" pinging too sensitively, but... LW, how do you feel about your wife's likely increased independence? Her desire to decide how her own money is spent? I find it interesting that your financial position has so quickly mended that she just just go back to being a stay-at-home mom all of a sudden, now she has a job she values...

And wouldn't it be sooo much nicer if she would just do all those icky chores for you?

[minoanmiss]

Yeah, this set my financial abuse scars itching too.

[lilysea]

And wouldn't it be sooo much nicer if she would just do all those icky chores for you?

The thing is, if they're as well off financially as he says,

they might be able to afford a cleaner -

and they could split the cost proportionate to their income

eg if he brings in 80% of the households money, he pays 80% of the cost for the cleaner...

[green_grrl]

Funny, the kids survived just fine alone when they were 7 and 11, but now it’s SO CRITICAL that wife leave paid work and return to her rightful house elf SAHM position.

[conuly]

Nevermind, of course, that her paid work can probably stretch far enough to cover aftercare, anyway.

[minoanmiss]

Oh but this is work only Their Mother can perform.

[mirlacca]

Puppetmaster much? He bullies his wife into going to work, and now that HE thinks it's inconvenient (where was all this concern when they were both working?), she's supposed to stop because HE wants her to?

Pffft.

[ethelmay]

Dissenting slightly on the childcare issue only: I had kids four years apart in age, and at twelve and eight I would never have left them home alone for that long at all, let alone routinely. A twelve-year-old on her own, yes, occasionally. Not every day for three hours, and not being expected to mind a younger sibling for fifteen or so hours a week (and full time in summer, no way). It's not that they couldn't manage most of the tasks involved individually and occasionally, but to do so consistently, week in and week out, well, that's a job, and not one a twelve-year-old should have to do if it isn't an emergency. (And a lot of kids just wouldn't be mature enough for even one occasion. I don't believe my parents would have trusted my four-years-older brother to babysit me for an afternoon when he was twelve. He would have just said pffft, she'll be fine, and taken off to do something else.)

In addition, in some states it wouldn't even be legal. In mine (just checked), there's no specific age limit, but there are DSHS guidelines that say children between nine and twelve can be left alone for less than two hours, and children who are 13 or older can be left alone and babysit.

[minoanmiss]

that makes sense.