My husband complains about how I’m ‘relaxing at home’ on maternity leave, yet naps after work

Repeat after us: maternity leave is not a holiday. 

“Maternity leave is not a holiday,” we hear you chant in unison.

Nice work!

Men need a wake-up call

Now, if only the ones who really needed this wake-up call would let that sink into their masculine little noggins. No offense (actually nah, please take a lot of offense).

Because let’s face it, some husbands out there could use a hefty dose of reality.

Many still somehow consider maternity leave to be a walk in the park, even though their partners have just given birth, their bodies are still recovering and they’re dealing with all the new challenges that come with trying to keep a literal human alive with said broken body.

To add insult to injury, they’re also dealing with sleepless nights, endless nappy changes, trying to fit a good cry in between multi-tasking, and also making sure that their household keeps running and doesn’t turn to sh*t.

“He naps on the couch after work”

One such mom who has unfortunately been dealing with an ignorant AF partner like this took to the Inner West Moms’ Facebook page recently to vent her frustrations. 

She wrote: “My husband and I are in the middle of our biggest fight yet, I constantly feel undervalued by him and I’m not sure what I’m after here – whether it’s to be put in my place, or told I’m not being crazy. 

“We have a five-month-old and he just described my life as ‘relaxing at home’ while he goes to work. 

“I am on mat leave for a year and he does work hard for our family. He does all the cooking (because I can’t cook to save my life), but I do literally everything else including washing the dishes he used to prepare the dinner. 

“I don’t feel like I’m relaxing, especially since our baby hasn’t slept more than four hours at a time since she was born. And I do 100% of the night settling (baby doesn’t take a bottle). But is it easier than I think? Am I being overly dramatic that I’m super pissed off about his attitude to what being a mom is day to day?”

She also later added in the comments that her husband “has a nap on the couch after work after having 8+ hours of sleep, and I want to nap too but can’t switch off when I’m alone.”

“He’s gaslighting you”

The post now has over 120 comments from supportive moms who reassured the woman that she wasn’t “being crazy” at all. 

The top comment joked: “Offer to give him an opportunity to relax at home on Saturday and leave the house.”

Another replied to that comment, adding: “100% But might I suggest a series of Saturdays… maybe 20 of them and all the days in between the 20 Saturdays? Let him get a full five months of relaxation in. Preferably with a newborn. It’s cheating if someone else has already done the hard yards of the fourth trimester.

“Let him navigate sleep routines, working out whether to intro solids early or later and the various schools of thought around that, let him relax his way through sleep regressions and colic, reflux, internal panic about developmental milestones…night feeds…”

Someone else recalled: “At about three months I left my husband alone with our son for a full day and he said work was much easier. A lot more empathy from that day forward lol. Personally, I went back to work part-time after nine months because I found full time at home with a bub too much.”

“There is plenty of literature that suggests that being a SAHM is more work – especially with breastfeeding too – than any other job besides those vocations who manage emergencies (paramedics, doctors, firefighters) because you are literally on alert all the time,” someone else pointed out.

Someone agreed saying: “Your husband is on a ‘break’ when he is at work. If you tried to outsource what you do in a week you would need to employ three people, full time seven days a week.

“One person to do the cleaning and housekeeping and two nannies, one day shift, one night shift. No one in their right mind would do all three, except SAHMs. I think he gets away lightly from the daily grind at home by only cooking meals. His contribution could be replaced very cheaply with a home meal delivery service.” 

“You should sit down and communicate with him”

A different group member said the husband’s attitude was, “disrespectful” while someone said it was textbook gaslighting.

“I can’t believe in 2023 men still have these archaic ideas of SAH moms,” commented another woman.

But one mom with multiple children gave this helpful advice: “I feel you both would benefit from sitting down and communicating how each of you feels and then come up with a plan on how to share the load. It’s super important not to get dragged into the drama cycle where one is the persecutor and the other one the victim – both not empowering positions.”

“So how you phrase something makes all the difference. Here is an example: Instead of saying ‘I am doing everything at home and you do nothing after work’ you could say ‘I feel overwhelmed because I am lacking sleep and have no energy, can we find a way to make this work?’ the second phrase doesn’t give him an invitation to become defensive and snap back.”

“Make it about yourself instead of accusing. When you are exhausted it’s so easy to go into fight/flight and become defensive.”