A Stay-At-Home Dad Wants To Quit After One Weekend Alone With The Baby

It is really impossible to know how hard it is to care for a baby until you have one. I remember the complete shock I was in the month after I returned home from the hospital, realizing that I would not have a worry-free moment — or a hands-free moment — for a very long time. Possibly 18 years.

So for parents who make promises about childcare before they know what it’s like, the stark truth can be tough. And it can put your marriage into jeopardy. That’s what happened to one family, who took their issue to Reddit’s Am I The A**hole? forum to find out who’s in the wrong.

A wife and new mom wrote in to share her big problem: Her husband agreed when they were expecting to leave his job and care for the baby while she brought home the bacon. But after a single weekend of solo childcare, he’s changed his tune. Let’s let her explain, starting with how commited to her profession she is.

“I (36F) am a neurologist and I absolutely love my patients and my job,” she begins. “I believe there is no greater honor in life than being able to help others. The road to my medical degree was not easy, and it was paved with many rejections. I was a troubled teen in high school and I didn’t get accepted into any colleges my senior year. I had to work my way up starting with remedial classes at my local community college. When I finally got into medical school at 26 I was absolutely thrilled.”

Wow, good for her. Then she met her partner.

“I met my husband (37M) in my third year of medical school, we have been married for four years now,” she continues. “My husband works in marketing, and I make three times his salary. From the beginning of our relationship, I was very upfront that I was unsure about having biological children. My dream was always to adopt from foster care and my husband seemingly understood this.”

But things changed over time.

“However, after his best friend had a baby boy last year, he began to really press me on having children,” she wrote. “I was initially very against this idea because I was just beginning my career, I wanted to wait a few more years before revisiting the topic of children. In August of last year I found out I was unexpectedly pregnant due to a condom breaking during sex. I was initially considering an abortion, but after many heartfelt conversations with my husband, we decided to keep the baby, and he would quit his job and stay home until our daughter was old enough to start preschool.”

That sounds like a great solution for this couple. She goes on to explain that it made sense because she makes so much more money, because he’s the one who wanted the child so much, and because she’s just starting her career after finishing residency. In addition, since she was molested as a child, she doesn’t want her child in the care of strangers when very young and non-verbal.

She adds, “I was very clear i had absolutely ZERO desire to stay home and be a housewife. I respect stay at home mothers but my work is my life, and I would go crazy at home all day. This just isn’t a lifestyle I want whatsoever.”

But now the baby is here and after one weekend away, the father has changed his tune a lot.

“Our daughter is 9 weeks old today and I am preparing to return to my practice in a few weeks,” she said. “This weekend, I left my husband alone with our daughter while I attended a medical conference out of state. The conference was amazing but when I returned home, my husband began acting weird.”

Then he confessed he didn’t want the life he thought he did.

“Today when our daughter was napping, I pressed him to tell me what was wrong,” she said. “He absolutely broke down and said he doesn’t think he can do this. He expressed how trapped, alone and overwhelmed he felt all weekend. He now wants me to extend my maternity leave and is talking about trying to get his job back. This made me freak out, and I asked ‘Well what will we do with our daughter now?!’ He responded by suggesting I leave my practice and work from home. I said absolutely not, and he suggested daycare.”

At this point, she lots her cool and screamed, “If i knew you were going to back out of your promise to take care of our daughter, I would have NEVER had your child.”

Down in the comments, people had lots of opinions.

“You expressed boundaries and rules and he’s crossed them. Stick to it your boundaries. If he’s unwilling, consider how important that boundary is to you and how far you’re willing to enforce it,” one person wrote. “A child isn’t something one can be so flippant over and ‘I changed my mind’ is unacceptable if he is the one that pushed for it in the first place. Also economically it makes no sense.

“You didn't overreact, he needs a wake up call,” another person said. “You only gave him something so enormous and major (his own biological child), because he promised not to destroy your career and trap you as a mother. Now he's discovering that raising a child is non-stop hard work, something you were aware of before you ever got pregnant... he can't trick you into having his child and then claim it's too hard to be a father and so you have to give up your life and dreams in order to become a supporting character of his dreams.”

Many people suggested that with a doctor’s salary, a private, in-home nanny might be the best road to go down, possibly with her husband working from home.

“He can look into a nanny, do the legwork and come up with a plan. They can interview together,” one person suggested. “You can bet if the roles were reversed OP would do everything and hubby would give the final yes/no.

Of course, let’s keep in mind that a full-time nanny costs an average of $19 an hour, which comes out to about $40,000 a year. But the bottom line? It sounds like this is his problem to find a solution to.