Tired mom doing 95% of the childcare 'dumps' baby off with husband, 'figure it out.' AITA? UPDATED.
"AITAH for trying to “dump” baby off on my husband and telling him to figure it out?"
Baby is 6 months old. I was on maternity leave for 5 months and have been back at work for a few weeks. Baby is breastfed and still wakes up throughout the night to eat, so I’m almost always tired. I get up to feed/change her with my husband occasionally telling me to let him know if I need anything.
I’d say 95% of baby duty is on me. I retire early with her to get her to sleep as she is a heavy contact sleeper. Hubby owns his own business and stays with baby twice a week when I’m in the office and we have a nanny that comes the other three days when I’m working from home.
As soon as I walk through the door, I get the baby and he’s off to tackle a hobby of his or handle business. Weekends are much the same. I’m exhausted. So what brings me to write this is earlier today I asked hubby to get baby so I could nap. He said to give him 15 minutes.
He texted an hour later asking if baby was sleep. Of course she was, as was I. I no longer needed him. Later on I asked, again, for him to get her and this time he says he needs to shower.
I told him he could figure it out. He then goes off on this tangent saying if he had known I’d dump our baby off he’d never have agreed to have a baby with me.
For context, I take showers when she’s in my care and turn on a cartoon for her to watch. If she’s too fussy, I’ll usually ask him to come entertain her. That’s what I meant by him figuring it out.
After his tantrum, I tried to approach him about how he responded to me and got more rude and dismissive comments, along with some curse words. He stormed downstairs to the basement and I haven’t heard from him. I texted him 30 minutes ago and got no response.
Am I in the wrong here? Of course if he needed me to get out baby while he showered, I would have been there, but he didn’t even attempt to do it alone while I got a breather.
Here's what the top commenters had to say:
OGIVE said:
NTA. You have some issues in your marriage.
tillie_jayne said:
NTA “If I knew I wasn’t going to be a Disney dad and leave all of the actual child rearing to you I wouldn’t have bothered.” Sad to say, a lot of men expect this.
car55tar5 said:
NTA at all. I have a nearly 6 month old baby, and I stay home as the primary caregiver. While my husband works full time. He takes the baby for one full wake cycle, about 2.5 hours, after he gets home from work, and he puts him down for his last at the nap of the day, so that I'm able to get about 3 to 4 hours total of time to myself. On weekends, we split Care 50/50. It is unfathomable to me that your husband is being so absolutely lazy.
SisterWicked said:
Ah, the 'babysitter dad'. I wish these types of parents would die off so that actual parents could be the dominant species. NTA. You didn't dump off anything. Make him parent his child, like it or not. Also, don't sleep with this man again. Unless you want TWO babies to "dump off" on him.
NoMembership7974 said:
If I woulda known I was going to have to actually PARENT MY CHILD, I never would have agreed to have a baby with you??? WTF?
Pretty-Benefit-233 said:
NTA. I’m so sorry you have to deal with this. Your husbands petulance and disrespect know no bounds. There’s no way you could possibly be wrong here. I sincerely hope things get better for you.
Aviation_nut63 said:
You’re not “dumping the baby”, you’re asking him to be a parent. NTA. There’s some issues here that need to be resolved. He’s an absentee father while being in the home. He’s definitely TA here. You both need counseling to try and work through this.
Bottle_Mission said:
NTA but you have two babies, not one.
UPDATE:
I didn’t text my husband to “come get the baby, or else." I brought her down and asked if he could get her. He said he needed a shower, so I essentially went back upstairs.
He comes up 5-10 minutes later and asked if I had an attitude and I tried to explain my take. He got upset and stormed off to the basement. I waited and then texted him a while later to see if he was ready to talk. He came back upstairs 3 hours later.
I’m the breadwinner, and there’s no way for me to quit my job. I showed him this thread and he actually agreed that I’m the default parent because I don’t accept his help. He DOES ask me frequently “please let me know what I can do," but agreed that he just needs to better assess and take charge without my having to ask.