Marriage and the Power of Divorce

Noodleface said:

She doesn't get out much but that's not my fault. She wanted to be a stay at home mom. I offer to stay in with the kids any time she wants, but rarely takes me up on it.

I don't know what she does with her time. My two kids are pretty difficult (one almost 3, one almost 1), but not overbearingly so.

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A couple years ago I had to force my wife to take a few hours of time for herself every week (Sundays usually). She’s a stay at home mom and “she didn’t have anywhere to go anyway.” She resisted my suggestion for weeks (if not months) and said she didn’t want or need alone time.

I finally put my foot down and told her to get the fuck out and get some lunch. “Don’t come back for two hours because I’m not letting you back in the house.”

Fast forward six months and she’d get ragingly pissed if something unexpected came up on a Sunday and we had to reschedule her alone time to another day of the week because she NEEDED it. Many “I told you so’s” have been [softly] muttered ever since.

Moral of the story - get her to leave the house and spend some time away from the kids. She’ll thank you for it later. From the sounds of things it might be MUCH later, but she’ll thank you nonetheless.

Cad said:

So why don't they leave the fucking house and do fun activities? Christ this is not rocket science.

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Simple shit really, we used to take the kids out for ice cream which was right by a huge park (hines drive park), then we would sit and eat it and watch the kids play on one of the massive play structures. Took like $10 and 2 hours.This park stretches for miles and has a ton of different play structures so it was a different trip every time.

My wife used to be stay at home and she used to take the kid to all kinds of activities that cost peanuts, like $5 per kid for a few hours. For example bouncy houses that were in a waerhouse, they had like 20 different bouncy castles there. And other shit like that.

Shit even a trip to mcdonalds, one of the ones with the play structures used to be a favorite of theirs.

Soygen said:

It's not rocket science, but it's also not nearly that "easy" every day. Your advice wreaks of someone who is out of touch with someone who doesn't have hired help 95% of the time.

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You might not get black lung from being a stay at home parent, but it’s no picnic either. I mean, if you’re staying home with your kids because you’re lazy, then yeah, it’s easy to ignore them and sit on the couch eating bon bons and watching soap operas all day. But if you actually care about your kid being a well socialized and functional human being instead of a sociopathic tyrant, you have to be continually engaged with them. Having more than one kid helps if they’re close enough in age to play together, but kids don’t even parallel play until they’re around 2 years old. Truly playing together doesn’t happen until 3 or 4.

Tl;dr: taking care of young children for a few hours once in a while is easy. Taking care of young children from the time they wake up until they go to sleep every day is a job and far from easy - especially if you never get a break.