Is This a Normal Marital Relationship?

As much as I hate to say this, we can't change others, we can only change ourselves. (I have moments with my dear hubby.) A housekeeper is a good suggestion if you can afford it. But if you can't, you might want to check out Flylady.net. Someone else posted that 15 minute bursts of cleaning would help, and that's part of what she highlights. I subscribe to her emails and here's what I get: a daily "mission" that only takes 15 minutes, a reminder to clean my sink and a reminder to not try to catch up, but to start right where I am. She encourages "sidetracked home executives" to get out of their CHAOS (can't have anyone over syndrome) one step at a time. I work full-time, my husband just opened his law practice and we have a 3-year-old and 11-month-old. We are tired. Flylady helps. I'm not perfect with it, but my house looks much better.

One other thing to help the kids get in on it, check out www.housefairy.org. Very cute way to motivate the kiddos.

Good luck!

Counseling will help. Really. It's not a bad idea to go and work things out with a 3rd party.

If that isn't possible, then hire a maid. You work full-time and there's no reason why you shouldn't have one.

Make a chart for chores, and indicate that you shouldn't have to be there to enforce them, and set a time (like "right after school", by "bedtime", etc) and include yourself and hubby. If this isn't an option, then just do the kids.

Also, cook ONCE A WEEK! Doing freezer meals on Sunday was a life-saver for me. Then you make one mess on one day. If you can afford it, The Dinner Station or Super Suppers are a great place to make your freezer meals. You can do 12 meals in under 2 hours!

Whether or not it's "normal" isn't the questions, it's whether or not the marriage is healthy. I'd seek some information and maybe counselling on how the two of you can get back on the same page. Great book is called "His Needs, Her Needs" and lays out 5 basic needs for every man and every woman in a marriage relationship and how when those needs aren't being met, there's unrest, frustration, etc.
And it talks about balancing those needs: He might not complain about the house being a wreck if he was having sex more often, but you might be interested in sex more often if he helped clean the house...
And you've got quite a full plate. If I was working full time again, I'd definitely hire a housekeeper and lawn service. That would be a nonissue. Of course a housekeeper won't come in and do your dishes every night, so you're doing a great thing with having the kids help out with daily chores too. Wonderful!
The "His Needs, Her Needs" book also recognizes that most relationships start to crumble a bit when kids come on the scene, and if both parties aren't careful, things really get out of hand and nobody is satisfied or happy. And the idea of "happy" brings me to another FANTASTIC book called Sacred Marriage. It's the only Chrsitian book on marriage that I've ever come across that "gets it." The author really hits home when he proposes that marriage isn't meant to make you happy, but to make you holy. Two fallen people living in a sinful world are basically destined for destruction (I know, sounds harsh...). You can do the normal thing and complain, get angry with each other, and grow further apart, or find ways to fall "toward" each other.

If you can, I'd see if he would be on board with establishing a regular date night (ours is monthly, but some folks do every other week or weekly -- I'd recommend starting with having one as frequently as you can). Once you've got some time together away from the chaos, hopefully walls will start coming down and y'all can come back together on things. Yes, the relationship and parenting gig is a team effort, but if the team never has a chance to huddle up, no one knows what the rest of the team is doing. It's that kind of lack of communication that makes people lose the game.

I think this normal unfortunately. My suggestion would be to hire a housekeeper. Find someone that can do a deep cleaning once a week. If your budget is an issue, just cut back in another area. It's worth it to have that kind of peace of mind without all the bickering back and forth. I'm doing this to save my sanity and I'm a SAHM, but a very busy one.

Best wishes to you.

Is it normal? Yes & no. I feel that every man has this God complex in them that thinks they rule the world, & that they don't have to help with anything menial...you know, like cleaning. I only have 1 kid, but my DH does help. We do have our specific jobs around the house, but he does help. Every once in awhile he gets lazy & stops helping. I'll stop cleaning, & then he gets angry because it's so messy. Then we both get to clean it up.

Hire a maid once a week. If your DH gets angry, then tell him either you fire the maid or he helps. Maybe that will get him to help.

Good luck!!

This is not normal. I agree with what someone else said, its not a cleaning issue. I now stay at home, but when my husband and I were both working outside the home (and parenting), we each had a list of chores. It might sound juvenile, but it did work. It also helped us realize what expectations the other had.

Also, if your husband is behaving like his father, then he probably doesn't realize that there is another way to behave. He's just doing what he saw while growing up.

Hiring someone to clean your house my alleviate some of your stress, but I don't think its going to help your husband's attitude or behavior.

Seems to be the norm in my household. I also have 4 children; two sets of twins. I work full time and manage our real estate portfolio with 28 rental units. I do hire help and keep the place in fairly good shape. He will travel out of town for a week, leaving me with 4 very young children to care for on my own when the nannies leave; perhaps they are ill and have to go to the doctor etc etc., and he will come in while the children are still playing with their toys, which are confined to one room but are spread around the floor, since they are crawling babies, and he will gasp and ask "Why does this place have to be such a disaster when I come home?" Is it disrespectful? Yes I think so. Do we need counseling? Yes I think so? Will we get it? Probably not in the near future but hopefully before we completely fall apart. As you no doubt can relate, how in the world do you find time to go to counseling on top of work, the needs of 4 children, and all the other things? And I'm sure others would tell us that if our marriage is important we will make the time. And it is important to me, but does not seem to be too important to husband - as usual he thinks it's my problem. If my management and organizational skills were not so poor I would surely be able to handle all this better and he's sick of my excuses. Does it make you feel better to read something that you can relate to? Probably. But that's what we women often do - we spend our energy talking to others about our problems rather than confront the person causing the problem. Smile. Have a good weekend and try to focus on making sure your children have a healthy environment. If it's not, perhaps you need to make yourself get some help so that the kids will have a better chance than perhaps your husband had.

I swear men have cycles just like women sometimes. My husband gets in these moods too on occasion. I point out to him when he does it that I think it's strange that yesterday he was fine with the mess but today, for some reason, that's changed. What happened between yesterday and today to make him such a grouch about it? He usually comes up with some irrational answer since he hates it when I'm being rational when he's already in a grumpy mood but in the end, he realizes it's not an all me or all him problem but a problem we both need to work together to handle. I tend to try to let the mood pass and then address it with him when he's having a rational day. When I do that, we usually have a more reasonable discussion about the issues at hand and I usually get an apology for him speaking so disrespectfully to me before. I too have heard the "Oh, you're right. You do everything and I do nothing." sarcastic response many times. When it gets to that point, that's the end of the discussion for me. He knows that's not what I mean and I'm not going to sit there and stroke his ego just 'cause he's feeling inadequate or whatever. I'm also not going to sit there and defend all the things I do around the house and at work and try to say they are more or less important than what he does. Marriage is a partnership and there is a division of labor in every marriage. It's up to the two parties in the marriage to work out what that division of labor should be.

In regards to cleaning, my husband and I found that 15 minute burst cleaning works really well for us on the weekend. My kids and I clean for 15 minutes while my husband is taking a break and then when our 15 minutes is up, my husband gets up and cleans for 15 minutes while we sit and take a break. At the end of his 15 minutes, we trade again. That way the cleaning continues the whole time but we're each getting some break time and it feels like we are all doing an equal share. We got the whole downstairs clean in just a couple of hours doing that before we had a little get together at our house last week. No one felt like the other was doing more and we weren't all too pooped to party once all the cleaning was done. During the week, we each have our own duties as well. I take care of everyone's laundry but my husband's. He does his own. He takes care of the dishes and I'm responsible for the shopping and cooking. I pay the bills and he takes care of the yard work. My husband doesn't ask if they bills got paid or complain when we have take out instead of a home cooked meal and I don't say anything if there is a stack of dishes waiting to be washed or the grass is getting high in the back yard. I know he will get to it eventually and I'm not going to start a fight about it when he skips a night of dishes because he feels especially tired from work. Sometimes you just have to let some things go for the sake of sanity in your marriage.

I would say that if your husband is resistent to coming up with a plan you are both happy with with regards to the division of labor in your marriage, you may need to seek counseling. My husband and I went to counseling for about a year when we first got married because we were fighting all the time about stuff like this. If you or your husband do not feel like you are gaining anything by making the compromises needed to get along, you can't really do anything to make the situation better. You both need that motivation and if he doesn't have it, you need to sit down think about where to draw your boundaries so you're not made a doormat in the process of trying to make your marriage work.

Good luck to you!

he won't know how you feel until you express your feelings!

children are messy...if he wants the house spotless all the time I suggest you tell him to clean it all the time....

also, I understand you wanted the dishes done, but to wake up your child to do them??? I mean really...the dishes could wait....

ask your husband how he would feel if you got off work in the middle of the day and he came home to a dirty house...

seeking out a professional for this matter may help you two...good luck!

My husband has cleanliness issues at our house too! We saw a counselor on it and she said that so much of his life he had no control over the chaos that by cleaning and expecting such aclean house it gives him control over one thing in his life. Can't help you with the rest of it...still a work in progress here. :)

I guess my advice/comment is that I don't think that you have a housecleaning issue...you have a marital issue. A maid isn't going to make your husband show you some respect. I think that what you have described is very disrespectful and it sounds as though your husband is looking for a mother and not a wife. I don't believe that we can change other people's behavior, but I do believe that if you allow him to continue to treat you this way that you are basically condoning this behavior. I would certainly sit down and have a conversation with him and tell him how I felt. I would suggest marital counseling for you both and counseling for you individually. I guess my thought process is that if he is "obsessed" with a clean house then he can get off of his butt and clean it. I believe that marriage is a partnership with shared responsibilities. I am a SAHM and I expect my husband to help with household chores and help with the kids at night. It sounds like you are running yourself ragged.

I have dealt with a virtually identical situation - my husband has become his father (IF they don't recognize that these patterns repeat, they absolutely will repeat). You definitely need counseling as others have suggested. You might also want to get him in for a full physical, including checking his hormones (theirs can get messed up just like ours), as that could possibly explain his bad moods.

I don't have much other advice than that - my personal experience is that they won't change and any attempt to get them to change makes them more entrenched in being that way, but it really depends upon their personality.