This is going to be a big one. And it's far more personal that I usually share in public, but I don't have any IRL friends to talk to, so here we are.
My wife and I had the biggest fight we've ever had on the weekend and I'm at a loss at what to do.
A bit of backstory, we have a two year old. Over time we have slid away from doing everything 50:50 to me doing almost everything. Most of it is ok, I am the stay at home parent, I understand I will have to do more. Take getting up with him during the night for example. We both used to do it 50:50, but she really struggled with it and started hating it, she is terrible to be around if she doesn't get enough sleep. So I take more and more of it on, to the point where I am doing all of it. The same thing happened with getting him to go to sleep. He fights for hours to avoid going to sleep. Usually it takes me two hours to get him into bed, some nights I need to drive for an hour or more just to get him sleepy.
She had to have surgery in December and wasn't allowed to lift the kid for six weeks. So I did all the bedtime stuff for those six weeks but always thought that at some point after she had recovered she would start helping out again. Every time I'd ask she'd always put it off, or have some excuse, so I just kept doing it.
Anyway, Saturday night and Sunday morning I was hit with the trifecta. He wouldn't sleep so I spent 8pm to 10:30pm just getting him to sleep. He woke up about 1:30pm and I had to go in and rock him back to sleep. On top of that, one of our dogs shit herself all through the laundry. I'd cleaned the laundry out each of the last three or four times this had happened and each time she'd promised to do it the next time.
No surprises, she can't do it this time because we are going out at 10am and she need an hour to get ready, so I'll have to do it.
I complain to her about how much extra work I have had to take on and how I'd like to get a break from some of it, I'd like two days a week where I don't have to put him to bed at least (I wasn't this composed about it obviously, no one is at their best during a fight.)
Anyway, this fight spirals on with us arguing over how much work we do until it culminates in her telling me she doesn't want any more kids. She only sees the work and doesn't appreciate the rest. She can't have another kid if it means more sleepless nights.
That rocked me to my core and I can't stop thinking about it. I love my kid more than anything, I (and we I thought until now) had always planned on having at least two kids, probably three.
I don't know what to do. I know the level of work is too much for her, so I've been taking on more and more. But what do I do now? Do I just keep taking on more and more? Yesterday was really rough. Even outside the fight, I spent the morning cleaning up dog diarrhea and I spent the night (8pm to 1:30am) trying to get Jr to sleep, all without any help.
So what do I do? I guess I keep doing what I've been doing, keep taking it on because I can and she can't? It's not that bad to deal with if you know you have to, it's the hope that one day it might go back to being 50:50 or even 80:20 that kills you.