So when I found out I was pregnant with my son in 2017 my husband and I were over the moon since we had been actively trying and had 2 heartbreaking miscarriages before. At 20 weeks, we both agreed that I’d be a stay at home mom for insurance reasons and also daycare is super expensive. We knew it’d be close some months but we could survive off my husbands income.

When my son turned 3 months old, I found out I was pregnant with our daughter. It was a complete shock but we still decided it would be cheaper for me to stay home with the kids. A month before our daughter was born my husband quit his job (they wanted him to travel and he didn’t want to) he found another job fairly quickly that paid about the same but the hours were a little different. Before he would work 7am-5pm or later and now he works about 5am-3pm.

To earn a little extra he accepted my grandpas offer to work for him during the summer so he’d go to work for my grandpa from 4pm-8pm. But those hours always varied and because of my grandma and grandpas health, they are out of town a lot of the time so my husband doesn’t have to work.

I know what I agreed to when I became a stay at home mom. I don’t regret it, but what does bother me is that my husband thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to do whatever he wants in his spare time. I get that he works hard and deserves a break, but at the same time, I’d think that he’d want to spend that extra time with his family. Usually when he gets off work he will sleep til dinner, eat, stay up for maybe an hour and then go to bed. And during that hour of free time, doesn’t hardly interact with the kids.

This weekend he happened to get 3 days off which is abnormal for him. The first day he left by himself to go watch our college football game, then drove an hour away to run an errand. I told him he should take our son with him but he refused saying he didn’t want to clean out the back seat of his pickup and that he was just going to grab one item and then come back. Seemed pointless to him. Today he has been out all day dove hunting with his buddy. Tomorrow we plan to take our son to our county fair and watch the rodeo. But if I know my husband (he’s a retired bull rider) he’s going to end up behind the chutes and I’m going to be taking care of our child by myself once again.

My son clings to my husband when my husband decides to play with him. It’s heartbreaking to me. He’s not a bad husband or dad by any means but he’s absent (which I guess could qualify him to be a bad dad in some ways) he doesn’t even have a bond with our daughter but doesn’t hesitate to scold me when I’m “spoiling” her (she’s 3 months old now). I’ve confronted him so many times about this issue but he’s so quick to defend himself and if I’m persistent in the argument, it turns into a giant blow up. I don’t know what else to do. Even his mom has mentioned his absence but he doesn’t listen.

I just need some outside advice. My mom keeps telling me to leave him but that’s just not something I want to do unless we exhaust all options. Friends have suggested marriage counseling but that’s not something my husband wants to do. I’m just stuck.

Edit (because I want to stay anonymous) to shirin- thank you so much for your comment and advice. My husband and I are both fortunate enough to have family to babysit for us some nights so my husband and I can spend alone time together. I’m a big believer that you have to be your best self to be the best parent, so taking date nights and time to ourselves has been very important to me. I just think he took it too far and decided that he needed continue his own personal hobbies without including his family in them to make himself feel better, but it’s been hard to explain to him that he’s in a way abandoning us for his own personal feelings.

-Nicole, thank you for the suggestion of the book, I will definitely look into it! The way my husband grew up was that his mom took care of everything with the house and the kids and his dad would bring the income in (it didn’t always work like that, my father-in-law was also a rodeo man and if you didn’t do good at whatever event you were entered in, you didn’t win money. It’s literally like gambling in my opinion). His mom had to start working and my husbands grandma ended up taking care of him the majority of the time.

As for working, I try to take side jobs as much as i can like bartending or cleaning houses. It has to be under the table otherwise they cut off my kids Medicaid. But we live in such a small town that jobs like that are hard to come by. I tell my husband of opportunities I have to get us a little cash, but that also makes him have to stay home with both our children and he never seems to agree to that cause he’s so tired from working his jobs and wants to relax. We just can’t seem to find a happy medium.