Julep: blowing a gasket

I've been back at work for ten days. Mr. J has realized he cannot get much done while I'm gone, what with entertaining an infant. I know, this is not news to any thinking woman. I did try to tell him lots of times that he needed to set up childcare before I went back, but he wanted to play it by ear.

Now, it appears that his solution is for me to work 10 hour days at the office, then come home and immediately take over sole responsibility for our child - meaning I play with him for 2.5 hours (if I'm lucky this includes scarfing down a few bites of dinner), then spend an hour on bath/bottle/bed, then have about 20minutes to stagger around setting out clothes and lunch for tomorrow before I fall into bed. On weekends, my shift starts at 8 am and ends at bedtime since, you know, Mr. J "has him all week."

Mr. J also thinks I should quit all my community involvement and volunteer obligations, because if I don't come home immediately after work he "doesn't have any time to work" and I'm "basically putting volunteer work over his paid work." He assures me that nobody else with small children does volunteer work with evening meetings, or participates in evening book clubs, or what-have-you.

Not to mention that he is making me feel like the worst mom in the world because I don't want to spend Every. Waking. Minute. with my child when I am not at the office. I'm not saying that I don't want to see BabyCakes at all! But once a month I want to meet you girls for cocktails, and once a month there's the library board meeting, and for a run of five weeks Charities Committee meets once a week, and hey, every once in a while I may participate in some other after-school activity. Does that make me an unfit parent?

I said, how about we keep the 6-10 pm window as family time, in which we both take turns on childcare (one more than the other when someone has had a particularly hard day and needs to decompress), we both participate in bedtime, and when BabyCakes falls asleep, we can actually have a short bit of time together to watch a TV show or, you know, some other adult activity. Some evenings one of us may have something to do in that time block, and sometimes the other will, but by and large we will all three be together, and he and I can share the evening responsibilities. Same goes for the weekends. Is that really too much to ask?

He got very snippy about how much THAT would cost, to hire occasional help so he can do more work during the day and not in the evening. I had the gall to suggest that if we hire childcare, some portion of the cost should come from his business account - you know, rather than being exclusively funded by my paycheck. He says he "can't afford that." Sure,it's a much better option to make me provide all the childcare he needs to get his work done. Better for him, anyway. What cost my sanity?