Married with Children
20 upvotes | July 22, 2020 | by simpleguy237
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I'll try to keep it brief. Married with one 2-year old daughter. I
have a good full-time job and my wife is unemployed. I also lift about
5 days a week and she runs occasionally. We are both in our late 30's.
You will understand this post better if you have children.

The problem is my wife doesn't want to be a mother to our daughter. By
that I mean she constantly ignores her and doesn't want to follow
"good parenting" habits. The ignoring part gets to the point of
neglect where I have to fill in when our daughter is calling my wife
for something. By parenting habits I mean feeding habits, correcting
our child when she does something wrong, teaching our child, guiding
her, not arguing with me that it's OK to put lipstick (with chemicals)
on her, not trying to make a 2-year old feel guilty about things that
are not her fault, protecting her when she's about to fall, etc. My
wife's negative behavior is an everyday thing. It's not just a once a
week incident. It's not that my wife doesn't know any better, or that
she's tired, or that doesn't she have the time, or that she is dumb.
It's just that she doesn't want to be a parent.

This would be easier to fix if she admitted it, but she doesn't. In
fact, she's always bragging to people about the things that our child
can do and even takes credit for the things that I showed our child to
do. I've heard her lie on the phone saying "I'm about to go take my
child to do such and such" but when the phone closes it's back to
ignoring her. I understand the bragging and the lying but at least put
some effort into being a good parent. Before we got married, she used
to talk about how she would be the responsible parent and I the fun
one. Right now I have to be both.

So I really don't know what to do in this situation. As far as I know,
we don't have a problem with sex. And if there were a problem, it
would be easy to fix. Just literally leave the house for any reason,
and her attitude changes. But I don't know how to change her attitude
towards our daughter. I've tried stepping in when she ignores her (in
fact I do this every day). I've tried telling her to stop ignoring
her, don't feed her junk, stop yelling at the baby, etc. I've tried
showing her articles online for specific parenting situations. None of
it works. The point is she just doesn't want to be a good mother
because there is no apparent threat against her for not being a good
mother. She knows I can't just leave and mess up my daughter's life.

So how can I get some leverage over her? How can I make her want to be
a good mother or else she'll lose something? I realize that this is
not an easy question to answer. At least not for me. Thanks in
advance.

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Archived from https://theredarchive.com/post/715928