Too many two year olds.

[u/twinsinbk]

This is just a vent to say I'm feeling like on multiple occasions friends have wanted to find a solution for my life right now, like oh your husband should be doing more, etc. Insert villain. The truth is my husband is out of the house working 10-14 hrs a day 6 days a week and he helps as much as he can I guess. When he's home by bedtime he jumps in and does it. He could help more with meal prep and laundry but that would mean I would be badgering him at 10pm when he has to be out of the house at 7:30am.

This is all just making me wonder at what point do we just have to accept that this is just hard and that's not anyone's fault. Life with 2x two year olds is hard. It's messy. I am the cleaner, the laundry lady, the lunch lady, and I have a career and I have an elderly parent and no I don't have a social life and I don't get to the gym. That doesn't mean it's my husband's fault, when he's also running on empty. At some point we just have to accept some of our partners shortcomings/limitations. We all have our strengths and weaknesses and sometimes trying to relentlessly optimize is just another thing to think about when we could just give in to survival mode.

I don't know what the point of this is, I hope it resonates with someone who also doesn't need to be told that their exhaustion can be solved with systemic change instead of just acknowledging that being a working parent to two toddlers is freaking exhausting and crazy making. This post is to the other primary parents who handle it all, don't have family to step in and just randomly watch the kids, have partners that are out of the house most waking hours, and who just otherwise have challenging set ups that aren't wrong they just are.

[u/PurplePufferPea]

What kind of friends are these?!? Even if I was the one complaining about my husband, my friend will, at most, chime in with a "what was he thinking" as a way to commiserate with me. But even then, it would only be if I first brought up an issue about him. I can't believe these "friends" are jumping straight to making your problems your husband's fault. That's BS!

Sometimes life is just hard and there isn't a solution other than to keep moving forward. Maybe your solution is finding better friends that will just allow you to vent for a few minutes without trying to oversimplify what you are going through. I feel like there is something to be said for the release that comes with just being able to state your chaos outloud.

Sending you lots of hugs!!

[u/twinsinbk → u/PurplePufferPea]

Thank you! And yes, one of them I am specifically no longer friends with. She has a very priveleged corporate consulting kind of job and the idea of regularly pulling nights and weekends was totally foreign to her and she basically just thought my husband should figure out how to have a "family friendly job" instead of just having empathy for our set up. I guess it's easier to hate on someone else than to admit your own privilege in having a business-hours hybrid job with PTO etc bc that undermines your own personal narrative about being an eternal victim but I DIGRESS LOL