Even up familial duties before marriage flags

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/12/2020 (2116 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: I am a man working from home, and seem to have become the only real parent, and the household workhorse. My wife is a baker and her early mornings are starting to become a big issue at home.

She starts work, most of the time, at 4 a.m. or earlier, and then sleeps and is tired for the rest of the day — too whacked to do anything much, except get on her basement bicycle and elliptical machine and talk to her girlfriends through her headphones.

That means I have to spend all the time with our little kids — making dinner, helping them get dressed, doing laundry, doing homework. What is my life, I ask you? I love our kids, but handling all this work alone is not something I love.

I’ve asked my wife if she’d consider changing careers, and she got pretty insulted. I feel trapped here. Is there anything I can do, or is this my freaking life now?

— Simmering, Fort Garry

Dear Simmering: You are living in an unfair situation, and simmering precedes a boil. Time for a big talk and a schedule sheet on the fridge.

What about early evenings, after your wife has been home and slept until late afternoon? Thirty minutes of exercising should wake her up and enable her to help make dinner and have a coffee with you. She could throw in laundry, play with the kids or help them with school work.

By the way, does your wife get a day or two off per week? Some people don’t, during this pandemic, but if she does, work out a deal where the kids become largely “hers” again for one or two days, just as they are mostly your responsibility the other five days. Feeling trapped is a dangerous way to feel in a married-with-kids relationship.

You need to get out and do things for yourself. Just getting out of the house alone and driving, walking in nature or running off frustration in a park can help a lot.

Life is hard on the nerves for all of us these days, but especially for couples with kids, work and no time to relax together.

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts: Nervous Dad, who wrote you about how to approach his son of 16 to “get him started in this world with a responsible attitude toward women and sex,” has left it too late. You don’t do that kind of education in one day, with a chat and a box of condoms!

I sincerely hope, for the boy’s sake, that for the past 16 years Dad has been modelling a responsible attitude toward women and sex — in the way he treats women, especially the boy’s mother. And I hope he shows it in the words he uses to describe any and all women, by showing respect for women who hold positions of authority, and so on. Children learn by example, as much as they do by more traditional ways of teaching.

As for sex, Dad should have had the responsible sex chat with his son years ago, at least by the onset of puberty!

— Mother of Two Sons, Winnipeg

Dear Mother of Two Sons: Sixteen is better than never, but 12 or 13 would certainly be a good time to start. When my sons were that age, the popular thing for parents to do was to buy a ton of condoms, hand a bunch out, and put the rest in a bowl, left uncounted, for teenagers to take and use, if needed.

At the high school where my sister (Dr. Carol Scurfield) held a Friday clinic for many years, the condom supply bowl also had treats in it like candy, and students were welcome to come by and help themselves to either or both, so it wasn’t obvious what a student was taking out.

Please send your questions and comments to lovecoach@hotmail.com or Miss Lonelyhearts c/o the Winnipeg Free Press, 1355 Mountain Ave., Winnipeg, MB, R2X 3B6.

Miss Lonelyhearts
Advice Columnist

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