After a husband told his wife that he could prove "how easy" being a stay-at-home mom was, she allowed him to get the full-blown experience. The woman took to Reddit to share her experience of allowing their kids to disrupt her husband's meeting after he rambled about her life not being hard. The original poster identified herself as a 31-year-old woman who runs a small business from home. Her 36-year-old husband has the option to work from a home a few days a week, but doesn't because he says it's easier to focus in the office. They have two sons, 5 and 7.
"I don't have a lot of daily work, just some emails and planning (maybe 3 hours a day?) but the business does make about a third of our household income," the woman wrote about her business. "But my younger son is home all day and just dealing with him takes a lot of energy. He's really high energy and will probably wreck something if you leave him alone for an hour. And then the older one comes home at 3 and both of them are with me until 8 or 9, which is when my husband usually comes home."
"A few days ago, I was really tired and I didn't make dinner. When my husband came home I asked him if we could just order something. He was also tired and we were both short tempered so we ended up snapping at each other," she continued. "He said I should have at least ordered before he got home and he was hungry, I said I forgot and it's not fair that food is always my problem. He said that I'm home all day and I even admit I don't have much work to do, so I'm basically a SAHM and should at least take care of dinner."
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The woman goes on to tell her husband that he doesn't know just how much she does every day, so he replied that he'd work from home and handle the kids for an entire day just to prove that "it should be easy" for her. She agreed to his experiment.
"I slept in, and when I woke up he was already frazzled from getting the older one ready for school. He ended up having to cancel a meeting to make breakfast, and was worried about that. Then when he took another meeting later on, the boys went out to play in the yard and got super muddy and left footprints all over the house. which he then had to mop, and I didn't help at all," she explained.
"By this point I did feel sort of guilty because it was definitely harder for him to take care of work at the same time, but all I wanted was an apology. He said he was doing this to show that I do nothing all day, and if he just admitted he was wrong I would have helped out straight away."
Fast forward, the husband got into another meeting later in the day and he told the boys not to mess with him for an hour. Did they listen? Of course not. They ended up getting into an argument 20 minutes into the husband's meeting. "Our younger one went into my husband's room to complain. He was really loud and my husband's video was also on, then he told the kid to leave him alone but he was upset and crying and wasn't listening," the wife said.
"After a few mins my husband went back to the meeting and apologized to the other people. when it was finished, he was really angry at me. he said I could see what was happening and I just watched him struggle without helping. I said all you had to say was please help, he said I shouldn't be so petty and prideful. This probably made him look a bit stupid in front of his manager, but it was only a few minutes and I don't think It was the huge deal he made it out to be."
Other Reddit users in the comments instantly jumped to the wife's defense.
One person commented: "He's seriously saying you 'shouldn't be so petty and prideful'? While you are being petty (with reason) he is the one being prideful, all he had to do was admit he was wrong and you'd have helped but he chose to screw up in front of his manager rather than admit fault. NTA."
"Him saying you can see him struggling but you did nothing is the whole problem," another user wrote. "He sees you struggling and does nothing to help take things off your plate, he piles more stuff onto it. Maybe you could have helped out during the meeting but honestly I say NTA. When he calms down point out that he experienced a fraction of what you have to handle on a daily basis."
"NTA, you need to stand your ground," someone else pointed out. "The facts are he asked for this, so he got what he wanted. You gave him a day with the kids whilst working and he couldn’t do it. The worst kind of people are those that can’t admit they are wrong, he is being wrong and loud, trying to turn this into you being petty, he made the rules and now he’s mad that you’ve followed them."
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