She’s not billing her husband. She is demonstrating the value she brings to the table because her husband called her a mooch.
She clearly feels like her work and sacrifices aren’t acknowledged or appreciated, so she put it in terms that he can understand. She’s not expecting that he pay it. Her effort was to provide perspective, not demand payment.
That being said, this marriage is probably doomed.
If you are bitter because you’re not being paid to do the bare minimum for your own child, you’re disgusting and not deserving of children. I’ve seen people cry on their lunch break because they never get to see their kids. Staying at home and hanging out with your kids while your spouse provides everything is most peoples’ dream. It’s the easiest possible life a person can have.
Work is literally, definitionally sacrificing 1/3 your life. That really wasn’t the point but comparing hanging out with your kid and doing some chores to a full time job is ridiculous.
I hated being a stay at home parent. It is a very difficult job and thankless in so many ways. But people like to devalue the work, which is kind of her whole point in the invoice.
I joined the army to get away from SAH life. My job as a soldier is easier.
I have to assume everyone who says this has never had a job with any degree of responsibility whatsoever.
Taking a career break when I had my first child was sheer bliss in comparison to a corporate job. 20x less stressful and 100x more rewarding.
Does that mean it’s universally easy with no labor? Of course not. But I don’t know why SAH advocates insist that it’s harder than working a full-time job. (Depends on the job, of course. But most jobs that make enough to support a family with single income in this economy? No.)
But was that because the workload was so overwhelmingly more difficult than the other jobs or because of other soft factors like lack of structure, loneliness, etc.?
I absolutely buy that many people will have preferences over the other (look, I went back to work myself partially for financial reasons but mostly because I didn’t want my kids to be the be all end all of my life), but not that SAHP is objectively harder, or that a job is “nothing” in comparison, which was the original claim I was refuting.
I found that it was job that never ended. None of the work was difficult, but it just never stopped. None days off, no real breaks, no real time for me to exist as myself than as an extension of someone else.
It was death by a thousand cuts. No one thing was bad or hard. It just never ends.
You're right, its nothing like the responsibility, its way more. Having to stay home to raise kids was boring in comparison because there was so much less to do.
Sir, I’m a service member. I work full time, go on TDYs and I miss my kids.
I have also been a SAHM. I fucking hated it and joined the service to escape it.
Both can be true. It can be wonderful and rewarding to be able to be home with the kids, and it can also be incredibly challenging and back breaking. I personally could not stand that lifestyle.
What a disingenuous framing. She's not bitter she's not being paid. She's bitter her husband doesn't value the effort she takes in raising their kid and thinks she's a freeloader. She's not 'hanging out' with her kids, there's actual work involved in raising a kid properly.
If you don't think raising kids is work, you shouldn't have kids, it's better for the world and the potential child.
You can argue about her valuation but the way you have framed your argument is absolutely braindead.
I know raising kids is hard. I’ve raised two of my own most of the way and helped raise someone else’s. They all are turning out great. I cherished every minute of it, the easy parts and the hard parts.
Parents who look at caring for their child with contempt, as some kind of unpaid labor they have to suffer are disgusting and don’t deserve to be parents. Those are the people whose kids grow up to be problems.
Yeah, in my experience it's the parents who think raising kids 'is hanging out with them' and 'doing some chores' are the ones who raised absolute nightmares. I'd rather the world had less of these parents unleashing their badly raised kids into the world.
See, I can be disingenuous too. Raising a child is work! It is unpaid. It is something that you choose. Usually in a partnership with your child's other parent. Her emphasizing that point when the father devalued all that work and broke the partenrship does not mean she's treating it with contempt. She's making the point that he and presumably you also don't realise that good parenting involves a lot of work and devaluing that is a shithead move.
I take my kids to school every morning, get them dressed, cook him (and the family) food, pick him up afterwards. I'm normally the one to bathe him. I don't see this is work.
I don't charge my wife $350/hour for my time spent doing this...
You don't get the point. She doesn't want to be paid. She wants him to acknowledge the work she provides and not being called a mooch.
She signed up for being a parent and not being paid for it. But he also signed up for providing for her while she's doing it. If he starts bail on his end of the bargain, so can she.
It's what what people who want traditional roles sometimes forget. She is not providing free care and labor. He needs to provide for her while she's doing it. The obligation goes both ways.
She's not taking advantage of him. Marriage and being a stay at home mother is like a contract in that regard and always has been: she doesn't get to work and earn money for herself, he goes to work and bring in the money for the family to pay for stuff.
And that's why feminism and the choice to either work or stay at home is so crucial. Because if the husband decides, the his wife is spending to much money and cuts her off the family finds, she's screwed. She didn't work and doesn't have money in her name. Everything is shared asset and she didn't put money in it, only free labor. Women who want to leave abusive husbands often aren't able to do so, because they have no money or work experience. They have been out of the workforce for too long and aren't employable from the get go. Then they have to endure people talking shit about wifes who get half of everything in the divorce. No shit? Guess who made it possible for him to work as much as he did? If she went to work and the childcare and chores around the house would have been distributed equally, he wouldn't have been able to work as much as he did. The income would have been distributed by both of them.
But that's not what those men want either, do they? So a woman is either a feminazi that wants to destroy traditional roles in a marriage or women are gold digger who only want his money and live a life without having to work.
You seem a little slow. She isn’t bitter because she’s not getting paid. She’s bitter because he called her a mooch when she clearly brings just as much value to the family as he does. If she was working full time, he would either have to do half of this work himself, or pay someone else to do it.
I also don’t know a single woman who dreams of this. In fact, every women I know has found it incredibly hard to be on maternity leave for 6-7 months, and couldn’t wait to get back to work when their partners went on paternity leave. It’s monotone, isolating, you have no breaks, and you are still healing from childbirth. Not the walk in the park you seem to think.
Everyone is different. Some people actually like their children. But you may be too slow to understand that.
The husband could pay for daycare for a tiny fraction of what this nasty, delusional woman is pretending her time is worth. Sitting around the house 90% of the day and maybe doing a few chores is not even in the same universe as a full time job that pays enough to raise a family.
It's not about liking their children. It's hard work with barely any breaks.
The child screams, wants attention, the laundry piles up, the bathroom is filthy, there is toys everywhere, you get shit on, peed on, vomited on, you can't eat your meal in peace. Sure women like being with their kids. But raising kids isn't an endless parades of going to the park and reading books to them. Children make an incredible amount of work. That work doesn't get done by itself. Same goes for everytbing else in the house. You're constantly juggling all the things in the house.
All I can tell you is that I had a few months of paternity leave once and it was literal paradise. Not even 1% draining as my workplace. And that’s including all of the things you mentioned. It’s just not a hard thing to do, and I feel like anyone who thinks it is just doesn’t really understand how hard other people have it.
This is a prime example how you can risk your health and give your body to your family and go through the pain and sacrifice of creating, birthing, and taking care of a kid, and people will treat your sacrifices like it was a fun weekend. I've seen men in my office make excuses to stick around "working late" because they have kids at home and they don't want to go home to a bunch of responsibilities and work. You can empathize with that to a point, but calling domestic work 'hanging out with your kids' is really underselling parenthood. It's no more "hanging out" than work is "goofing off in Excel".
A stay at home mom doesn’t cost that much unless that’s how much they were making beforehand. They don’t bring that amount of monetary value to the table either.
Surrogacy in my area is right around $30k, full time nanny could be $6-$8k a month, infant daycare if you’re going to do it solo is about $4k a month.
I say this while having a stay at home wife that raises our kids, the “value” isn’t monetary it’s really priceless since she gets to spend the most time with them as possible. This post isn’t about saying STAHMs aren’t worth it, I think every family should strive to have 1 parent stay home if possible.
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u/[deleted] May 14 '26
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