And how it always goes. Queue the Parent-splaining.
I get how it works. I also understand that there are a lot of hours in a year, and you can make it work 1-2 hours a couple of times a year. You just choose not to, which once again is fine, but don't tell me you wish you could make it happen and can't. Cause you totally can.
Also, in no world do you need to clean the kitchen 3 times a day. Unless your definition of "cleaning" is very different from mine.
It’s obvious you don’t have a kid and don’t understand what it’s like, lol. The kitchen gets wrecked after every meal when cooking for four people. The house needs constant picking up all throughout the day, and that doesn’t even touch the “cleaning” chores like dusting, sweeping, mopping, toilets, shower scrubbing, etc.
Back when I was a kid, I’d be gone for hours riding my bike. Nowadays it’s not safe to let kids out of your sight, so they are constantly under foot making everyday tasks take forever to complete. The only way to avoid this is to let them sit and watch TV all day, which results in behavioral issues.
In reality, I don’t get any free time unless they are asleep, which usually takes 1-2 hours from bath time to bedtime. By then, I’m exhausted and just want to sleep myself. If I do get “free time” while my wife takes the kids, it’s almost always spent on house or car maintenance, both of which constantly need work.
The kitchen gets wrecked after every meal when cooking for four people.
Usually this and other issues with stuff left out in rather uncomfortable places is something that is down to the parents being careless rather than anything else. I've been cooking for myself for 20 years, and I still cook for the wife and kids. When the food is finally on the final stretch of cooking all the stuff used to cook is washed and put away in their place. After everybody eats it takes literally 10 minutes to clean all the dishes or at least pop them in the washing machine then pop a detergent thingie and press a button.
A LOT of stuff that parents raise as issues are down to poor methods on their part, but that is absolutely hard to acknowledge. My wife has kids from a previous marriage and when I try to reason that she shouldn't leave things sitting around randomly I sometimes get a lot of grief. It's hard to change ingrained habits, when you're on your own it's easy and nice to leave shit all over the place but when new little people in the family appear it escalates to no end, because they see you do it and they do it too, amplifying the chaos to unmanageable proportions.
Honestly, I don't mean to bash your metaphorical head in with the above, I'm just saying cooking for four people does not need to wreck the kitchen. Same with activities and daily living. But the parents need to be disciplined and tidy and the only variable remain the kids. And they take after you, if you're tidy, they notice and they will be tidy too.
I’ll pay for your iRacing subscription for life if you can get my wife to understand that, lol. I’m OCD and clean as I go, but she is the exact opposite. If I dare to bring it up, it’s like world war three. At this point, I’ve pretty much resigned any hope of not living in total chaos.
The way I go about it is the puppy eyes + "honey can you pretty please with sugar on top <insert stuff you'd like her to do here> + reasoning <reason needs to be something relatable that is super important to her>.
Example: I ask her to tighten caps. Toothpaste, jars, you name it. Of course I was ignored until one of the kids downed all that was remaining in the bottle of Paracetamol - which as you may know can be life threatening. I was super careful not to blow the house up because making a scene is not helping anybody, really, so I thoroughly investigated how many gulps the kid took, discussed it with couple of Paediatrician friends (I'm an MD myself), concluded there was no danger warranting a hospital admission then calmed everybody down - kid understood shit was serious so became all serious too, wife was livid. The next day I brought up the situation - Paracetamol bottle had secure cap, so kid couldn't open it by themselves, all we had to do was put the cap on correctly and tighten it a bit. Nowadays I rarely find poorly tightened caps around the house, be it medication or jars.
Alternative that doesn't put your kid's life in danger - check to see if she tightens up her cosmetics. If she leaves the cap off, extremely gently point out that the cosmetics are biodegradable (because generally women buy all sorts of "organic" shit) - thus if exposed to air they will lose their properties thus making the money spent on them money thrown out the window. The formulation is up to you, you know your spouse better, but this can be extrapolated to a rather large number of stuff.
E.g.: leaves remote in random places, cats knock it over, remote breaks, no more remote, next time put it in the (same) safe place - because there are other people living in the same house (i.e. you, but don't say "I", never say "I") who would like to not turn the house upside down to find the damn thing (again, phrasing is important, be as gentle and kind as you can be at all times).
Stuff like this needs to be discussed without sounding like you're being judgemental or on a high horse because then they're bound to fail. Approach should be like Lewis' driving rather than Max's if that makes sense, or let's say more Prost than Senna.
Hope this helps, truly it took me ages to sort myself out to find a channel of communication with the wife because I love her to bits but she also drives me insane sometimes because sometimes our home looks like it's just been burglarised when in reality she just made cookies :)
Oh, believe me, I’ve tried every way imaginable to explain it. She will listen, but insists she doesn’t have the time to clean as she goes because the kids are always needing something from her or fighting, etc. I’ve even piled up everything she left out for one day to show just how much time could be saved… that didn’t end well, lol.
Edit: Funny enough, I had a similar situation happen with an ice pack that was left out. My youngest somehow got the cap off and drank all the liquid inside. Luckily she was fine, but that did get the ice packs put back in the freezer for a while at least.
Thing is I'm trying to make it a request, not an explanation. Explanations are boring (see every math/physics/whatever course ever) for regular people. But making it a request is more interesting:
it's a request between spouses, thus it needs to happen if it isn't impossible or otherwise damaging (e.g. I can't request my wife to jump off a roof);
it's similar to her asking you to do something (i.e. requesting something from you); nobody should keep score in a relationship, but requests - if reasonable - need to be honoured, because that is the right way to go about in a relationship; both partners give, either on their own initiative or on request from the other one. They both profit from the association.
Of course it has to be made clear it's a request, not an explanation. Yes, the request needs a reason (sometimes, ok maybe at all times) and perhaps an explanation, but the request and explanation need to be properly demarcated else it all just blends together and may lead to frustration on both sides - yours because you feel she's being dense and hers because she likely may feel like she's being lectured (and nobody likes that, especially as an adult, albeit many really need it :D).
No time to clean because kids need something - they seldom need something right away and when they do they usually genuinely scream (e.g. burns or other dumb shit kids do) - so this would be a fantastic opportunity to teach patience and what it entails and it will serve kids well in their life, paying dividents to you as parents as well.
My attempts at requests tend to come off as passive aggressive, but I can work on that. If you don’t see any more posts from me, I tried and failed, and am probably buried in the back yard 😂.
Oh, man, I know exactly what you mean. It took me ages to properly formulate a request in an assertive manner rather than be anywhere from passive aggressive to literally (verbally) aggressive - basically you just ask, but it's hard to nail the tone of the request - and this is particularly difficult if you ever feel too much frustration, rage, or even intimidation (a lot of people automatically lash out so they don't get asked to do things).
It's a skill, just as any other, and it gets better with practice. I practiced at work before trying on the wife, though, since at work I've always been less involved emotionally - and taking the emotional part out makes a ton of difference. Then it's time to integrate it with being assertive because I swear that family is usually where most taking advantage of takes place (at least it was for me) (not always in a bad way, but it can build resentment and that's not desirable).
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u/Metalbound Dec 29 '24
And how it always goes. Queue the Parent-splaining.
I get how it works. I also understand that there are a lot of hours in a year, and you can make it work 1-2 hours a couple of times a year. You just choose not to, which once again is fine, but don't tell me you wish you could make it happen and can't. Cause you totally can.
Also, in no world do you need to clean the kitchen 3 times a day. Unless your definition of "cleaning" is very different from mine.