Ask any young parents and they will tell you, that raising children is not easy. The best thing that you can do is to share the load of responsibility because it is good for you and good for the kids.
What do you do when one person in a relationship is not taking up their portion of the responsibility? Even if they have a ‘good excuse’ that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are excused completely from doing any work.
The woman in this story had enough of her husband hiding in the bathroom to avoid helping with the kids so she did something about it. She turned off the Wi-Fi, but did she take things too far?
My husband and I are the parents of twins who are less than a year old. Anytime my husband SHOULD be doing something with the children ( it’s his turn for a diaper, a bottle, even just soothing a fussy newborn) he ALWAYS goes to the bathroom first. We are both on maternity / paternity leave currently.
My husband is on medication that makes him spend a lot of time in the bathroom about an hour after a meal. It’s a medication he has been on and off several times over the past year. He is never on it for more than a few weeks, and it does not affect him all the time, but he always claims that is why he is in the bathroom. ( I did ask, the doctor didn’t say it was impossible, but highly unlikely. Doc wanted him to come in for a checkup if this was the case and husband said oh it’s not THAT bad and refuses to go in )
I would rather let him use the restroom first than have to put down a baby mid task, but over the past couple months he has been spending more and more time in there. He always takes his phone. He is always watching youtube. His average session is 25 minutes in there, often longer, rarely shorter.
It’s the most frustrating when it comes time to feed them ( one of the twins needs to be held specifically for health reasons, so I can not double feed ) because we will get up, I will warm up bottles, change one baby bum, get the first one fed, burped, and laid down in their crib, get the other baby changed and be settling down to feed baby number two before he can be bothered to emerge and figure out why one child has been screaming because they had to watch their sibling eat l, and then the other when cry when they don’t get to cuddle at all because I have to immediately set them down to feed the hysterically sobbing child.
Yesterday was a week and a half since I started truly keeping track, and he, only twice in 10 days, not ditched me to go camp out in the bathroom and let me finish %80 of the childcare.
Today I started a new rule. If he is in the bathroom for more than 10 minutes, I flip the wifi off. He has not spend more than 15 minutes in the bathroom at a stretch today, but is extremely upset. I feel like the fact that without the wifi his uncontrollable toilet issue cleared up rather quickly proves why it needs to be done, but he feels I am being unreasonable, and I need to make sure sleep deprivation isn’t making me an a**hole.
TLDR: AITA for turning off the wifi when my husband is in the bathroom for extended periods of time, avoiding domestic and fatherly duties.
Edit: to answer questions that people have been asking.
Yes, I have talked to him about this. 10 days ago we had a conversation about the situation, and he denied how long he’s been spending in the bathroom. This conversation is also the one where I proposed he see a doctor.
Yes he has down time. He spends a good deal of time working on his car and plays diablo about 8 hours straight every day. He spends most of his time on the other side of the house on his PC in his office.
