Let us not speak of the things I do all day.
Let us instead speak of the things I do not do.
The spouse is starting to crack down on certain things the boy does that he does not approve of. He seems to have a hard time understanding that the reason the boy sees these things as acceptable is because his father does them. To tell him to go do something "else" and to "put away the screen" when you would rather be playing your phone game is incredibly hypocritical of you. Yes, the spouse acknowledged that but how do I respond? The boy has come to me many times because his desires to get up, to go out, to be active... are thwarted by his father's desire to sit still, do stare at a screen, to be lazy... yet the boy is scolded for being lazy. When I am home with the boy we go out, we do things, we do not spend the entire day staring at screens... yet this is the belief my husband has.
He does not notice what I do all day, unless I don't do it.
If I stop doing things for a week or so he starts to notice that the house is messy, he complains about having no clean socks or underwear, he bitches about the cat hair... he has no idea that bare minimum one hour of my day is spent taking care of these things... the cat hair, the dust, the laundry, the dishes... I know he doesn't think dinner fucking cooks itself but the kitchen is not magical, the floors don't eat the hair and the couch doesn't shake itself off every couple of days like a wet dog.
He wants the boy to ride his bike, but the only one of us with a bike is me... and that requires me to get out every day on my bike... on my days off that's not a problem... but the days I work? The spouse is still sleeping when I leave for work and after my 45 minute commute he's still sleeping... He's asleep when I clock in and by that point I've been up for three hours, have done most of the daily chores, gotten the boy to school/camp and prepped dinner for that evening. After an eight hour shift I have an hour drive home through typically worse traffic than I encountered that morning and once I arrive I'm bombarded with neediness from four cats and two people who all want my opinion, my attention, me. All I want to do is put my shit down and eat my dinner... but that can take forever to get to, especially when my presence sends a subconscious signal to my husband that he can now relinquish the dinner responsibilities and leave me to time the sides and get everything out of the oven when the timer goes off. ALL I WANT TO DO IS SIT DOWN AND TAKE OFF MY SHOES but by the time I've got the side going, my shit finally put away and have had a moment to go to the bathroom it's time to eat... and as previously stated... the kitchen will not clean itself. The solution is not to have the boy clean the kitchen, but to split the duty, to share the load, to not leave it on my shoulders every single night. If I don't do the dishes there's a 90% chance that those dishes will still be in the sink when I wake up in the morning... and if I get mad about it... I'm unreasonable and the bad guy.
So I'll sacrifice a little more of my free time to get the boy out of the house even more... to make sure to do it when the spouse can see, to photograph it when it happens and slather the information all over social media so he's aware that the boy and I did not spend the entire day sitting around the house with our faces in our screens... after all... we wouldn't want to spend our days together the same way he spends his days with his dad. That's not fun at all.
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