We both work full time, we have two toddlers, his mother also lives with us and we’ve been married for 7 years.

He typically works from 6AM - 2PM. My day starts at 7 AM getting the kids ready, taking them to school, I work from 9 until 5/6pm, then dinner for the kids & his mother, spend time with the kids before bed etc. I do have a sitter during the day to help watch them while I work. I do have a cleaning lady once a week to help with big stuff like scrubbing toilets, I’m talking about the daily cleaning that needs to happen with 5 people living in a house

The routine that we have most nights is that by about 7/7:30 PM or so he wants to “go to bed” because he has to wake up at 5:30am and needs time to decompress. He ends up being on his phone/watching TV in bed. This leaves me to be the one to clean up after dinner, get the kids ready for bed, do the dishes, take out the trash, etc. by myself, which I’m fine with.

He wants me to come to bed by 8/9pm so that we can spend quality time, which leaves me no time to do any of the other things that I need to do like errands, chores, finances, returning emails related to my kids schools, scheduling stuff, all of the other things that go into managing a household.

The other thing is that when he gets home at 2:30/3 PM if I’m not obviously on a zoom call for work he wants to be physically intimate. While I do enjoy this it’s hard for me to stop what I’m doing in the middle of the afternoon, get into that mode mentally and physically, and then go back to all of the things that I was in the middle of before.

And then I’m behind in work and I’ve lost a half hour or hour that I had scheduled to accomplish XYZ. But if I seem in anyway hesitant he gets upset that he’s being back burnered for my “projects” (aka stuff that is related to managing our life) and is angry with me. So I rarely do this now, but it ends up leaving me stressed out even more.

Mail is piling up. Clutter in corners of stuff I need to go through. A mile long to-do list. He has literally said he knows that he should appreciate all of the things that I do to keep our family / house running but that he doesn’t. Because he could hire an assistant to do these things and that would be a better use of time than me doing them. (We can’t actually afford that nor would he want to)

My end of day is capped at 8/9pm for him. I’ve been getting up at 5:30am when he wakes up to use that hour and a half in the morning to catch up on work and try to get stuff done, but since it’s not during business hours I can’t accomplish as much as I’d like. He essentially only has to worry about work. That’s his only responsibility. I manage everything else including his mother and her caretaker (she has dementia).

My question is when you work full time and have two little ones and want to be available to your husband when he needs, how do you manage to also keep up with the chores, errands, finances, other household stuff? I’ve thought about taking one afternoon off from work every other week to handle stuff but I’m not sure that’d be enough.