Feminist Advice Friday: My husband pretends he didn't want kids to get out of household labor.
A reader wonders why her husband is now pretending he didn't want kids. But we all know the answer: gaslighting.
A reader asks…
How do you reconcile household labor inequality with being the one who wanted kids?
My husband and I both talked at length about how many kids we wanted, how we would raise them, etc. It was part of the conversation well before engagement, let alone marriage.
He was often vocal to people before he met me that he always wanted kids (so did I!), regardless of marriage. He was quite a bit older than me, so he was even ready to have them before I was (but not by putting pressure on). When we both decided we were ready, we were fortunate to easily fall pregnant and have our first child.
There were a lot of red flags in how his behavior began to alter (maybe be unmasked?) during that pregnancy and first year, but I was young and put a lot of it on other things (new job! I lost a job! new house! death in the family! undiagnosed PPA!), and we ended up suffering with recurrent pregnancy loss. Of a number of miscarriages that still makes nurses pause when I tell them.
My husband eventually said he was "fine with one kid," but I was adamant my daughter wouldn't grow up alone, and on our "last try before giving up," I conceived what would be our second living child. Hers was such a remarkably easy birth and first year, that my husband said, "So are we going to do a third?" and I expressed I wanted to. I conceived my son.
My husband has definitely said the "quiet part out loud" that *I* really wanted the children, I need to be the one to take care of them. At one point, right after I read "Fair Play" and was beyond burned out and had just "gifted" my husband a solo trip for his birthday (what a chump I am, right?), I expressed needing more help from him and said that I sometimes felt like he viewed our son (our third) as a puppy I really wanted and he was deferring all the care to me, and he literally shrugged and said, "Pretty much." He must have felt wracked with guilt, because he did step it up after that... for awhile.
In all cases, these were very well intentioned, planned for babies. And honestly, in writing all of this out, I realize that he more or less convinced me that I was nagging him into these kids when he was generally on board each time? I certainly wasn't forcing him.
I know I need to leave him. I "quiet quit," as you just wrote about, back in November and have been working on getting myself back through school for a better career to support the kids/get financial independence/I need health insurance! But through the months of therapy and processing and reading, I just can't seem to shake the notion that the kids are here from my persistence. I think it's that I can't shake the time he said, "I'm fine with one kid," and wonder if that was him trying to communicate that he WAS overwhelmed with parenting.
It's so hard for me to shake this one last element of mom guilt that I pushed to have kids with someone who didn't actually want them, but I was truly like some sort of primal beast INTENT on having them (until my third almost killed me twice over in birth and seemed to cure my baby fever once and for all).
What do you think?
My answer
I’m going to start with a TL;DR version, which is that your husband is absolutely nuts, and he’s trying to gaslight you in the worst possible way. Seriously, what in the hell is wrong with this bananacrackers man?
Further thoughts:
First, a story: I’ve had unmedicated births and long labors with both of my daughters (this is my choice, not something I think should be imposed on anyone else). Yet when my youngest was born, an acquaintance noticed an IV in one of my birth photos, and saw that I was in a hospital bed. She immediately began shaming me for getting an epidural, for birthing flat on my back, for taking “the easy road.”
There is no easy road in birth, and none of these choices are shameful.
But also, they’re not choices I made.
Yet still, I felt guilty. I felt guilty for getting an epidural that I did not get, and which I think is the right of every person who gives birth.
What in the fuck.
This is how mom-guilt works.
If someone attacks you as a mother—even if they’re accusing you of something you didn’t do, even if they’re factually wrong, even if they’re attacking you for doing something positive—it wounds deeply. Because motherhood, and being good at it, are integral to most women’s identities. Because mom-shaming is one of the most hurtful things a person can do, and because being judged as a bad mother can have real and serious consequences, up to and including losing your children.
That’s what your husband is doing here. He has no options for justifying his objectively shitty and abusive behavior. So he’s weaponizing mom-guilt against you. He’s framing you as the crazed, irrational woman who was so baby-obsessed she couldn’t care about her husband’s needs.
Your husband is so high on patriarchy that he can’t see the woman in front of him. He’s decided to apply a bunch of random, objectively false stereotypes to you because this is what patriarchy teaches men to do. He’s reading random passages from the patriarchy playbook, and ignoring the woman and the reality in front of him.
He wanted kids as much as you did, and he’s gaslighting you to make you feel guilty, weak, and powerless.
Worse still, when you confronted him with this, he implied that he does not want your third child. That’s fucking reprehensible.
Yet you’re the one who feels guilty.
Patriarchy is a powerful drug.
So call this motherfucker’s bluff.
Go see a divorce lawyer today to learn about your rights. Then start documenting every single claim he makes of not wanting your children. Then leave his ass. Maybe tell him that since he didn’t want kids, you’ll also assume he doesn’t want custody.
As an aside, even if he did not want your children, he would still have to take care of them. He willingly had sex with you. And children are entitled to care. So even if his arguments were based in truth, his conclusion—that he somehow owes you nothing—doesn’t hold water.
This man is a whole-ass mess. Be done with him. I bet when you’re finally out, you’ll realize many ways he gaslit you and tried to make you question your own reality.
It’s also so manipulative & immature to act like you didn’t actively participate in trying to have a second (& third!) child. Maybe he was feeling legitimate ambivalence in the very very hard times of multiples losses & raising a little one. But then he went ahead anyway. He didn’t say, let’s stop. It is totally not functional to behave passive aggressively in this manner. He seems like he quiet quit a long time ago. What a difficult & disorienting experience for the writer.
I really wish people (esp men) would read these stories to understand why young women do not want to marry and have kids with men (or at all). When fathers behave badly the number one, most common response I read / hear is “she chose wrong” and “shouldn’t she have found out her partner was like that BEFORE marrying him / having kids with him?” Men are not like washing machines or cars that have performance more or less consistent with their initial activity. Mating is a dynamic process and men actively respond (read: CHANGE) to the environment and circumstances. Men will say / do almost anything to gain sexual access to a woman, but once he’s secured that access, the reality sets in and his efforts start to approach zero. This is the most important fact about the male “cycle” that girls and women need to know.
If men decide after the fact that they don’t want children (or you) they might do mildly evil shit like this, or they might kill you and your children. Pregnancy and post partum is the most common time for men to initiate physical violence against the mothers of their own children. It’s very very uncommon for men to be this level of demonic at the onset of a relationship (and even if they are there’s all of society reminding women we need to give unpleasant men “a chance” and change them with our love / sexual access / promise of a family). How are women supposed to predict which men are going to decide after the fact to be complete psychos and which ones are safe to have around for the decades it takes to raise a couple kids? The smarter option is to opt out, and that’s what many women are doing. 💁♀️