Postpartum mother asked husband for help while cleaning up their sick baby, then claims his response pushed her to her wit’s end: ‘Not your maid’
Division of labor
A woman and mother is asking the internet for advice on handling a situation with her husband. She says her 41-year-old husband refuses to help while she is postpartum, leaving her feeling depressed. The 35-year-old shared her story on Reddit, describing how she asked him to do the laundry but later found that he had left it undone for a long time.
The woman said their baby had been sick and had vomited, leaving the bedsheets and clothes belonging to both her and her daughter dirty. She said that afterward, her husband said he would help with the laundry. She said she asked him several times throughout the week whether he had done it, only to find the dirty items still untouched in an unknown part of the house a week later.
The woman alleged that she confronted her husband about it. However, she was met with subtle hostility. “I don’t know what you want me to do, you need to communicate better. I’m not your maid,” her husband apparently told her.
Not the first time
The woman described another instance in which her husband had failed to help with housework. “I have done my best to keep it together, to keep the house as clean as possible while juggling taking care of our daughter 2 days a week at home, and working 3 days a week,” she said. She added that her husband had treated the dishes much as he had the dirty clothes.
She said she has dyshidrotic eczema, a chronic skin condition that causes small, severely itchy, fluid-filled blisters on the palms and sides of the fingers, and is trying to recover. Her husband apparently offered to do the dishes to give her time to heal, but, she alleged, he let them pile up for a week. “I couldn’t let it continue because it’s disgusting and I can’t stand the mess,” she said, possibly suggesting that she eventually washed them herself.
The woman was looking for answers, and commenters offered advice on how to handle the situation. Some said there was nothing more she could communicate, noting that her husband knew what was expected of him but still didn’t do it. Others reminded her that he should share domestic work equally and that, by failing to do so, he was showing her what their future together might look like and asked her to take it as a warning sign.
An individual wrote, “Oh, he understands. He just doesn’t care enough to do it and is waiting you out to do it for him. Make sure your birth control is on point cause I can’t imagine another baby with this man.” Another said, “He’s lying. He knows you communicated just fine. He knows he hid the sheets away instead of just putting them in the machine. He knows he promised to do the dishes and that it’s gross to leave them for a week. He knows you shouldn’t have to do everything yourself. He knows the workload is uneven. He knows YOU are HIS maid. It just benefits him to lie about it.”
Housework is uneven for men and woman
Look around your home, and you’ll often notice that women do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to household chores. Whether it’s washing, cleaning, or cooking, they’re usually the ones taking care of everything. While men and children can come home from work, school, college, or elsewhere and relax, women are often still busy catering to them. And when the discussion shifts to focus on just the couple, the dynamic, in most cases, doesn’t look much different, and there are studies to back this up.
According to Phys.org, which reported on research conducted by the University of Alberta, the gap in household contributions that “already existed” for women surveyed at age 25 “stayed the same” into middle age. The study examined “unequal patterns in domestic workload” among 520 people, split between both sexes.
The research also found that women’s domestic workload increased further during the child-rearing years, while men too contributed significantly more to housework during that period. However, Matthew Johnson, the lead author on the study and a relationship researcher at the University of Alberta, says, “It’s also possible that when the children came along, men did do more work, but there was so much more, it could still have been a lesser share.”
It’s unclear what the woman intends to do in her current situation, but what would you have done if you were in the same predicament?
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