Am I wrong for wanting my husband to stay at home?
I’m normally a lurker on Reddit (I’ve had to borrow my much younger tech savvy friends account to post as I don’t have my own) but this whole situation has driven me mad, and I’m desperate for some insight.
I (26) have finally finished my foundational training, and I am no longer a resident doctor (thank god!). This means I will be starting my speciality training this year, which comes with a fairly substantial pay raise.
So, I decided to tell my husband that he should stop working full time and stay at home. This had always been the plan and, as he already does more of the domestic labour (70/30), this wouldn’t be a big change.
It has always been my plan in life to have a stay-at-home husband. I hate cleaning up for other people and generally help around the house in other ways (e.g. I cook, someone else cleans.) even in childhood. This is something my husband has always known and wants it just as much as I do.
The issue is, when I brought this up to both my mother-in-law and other women in my parish, I got a LOT of push back in a way that genuinely surprised and hurt me.
There were a lot of implications made on how this would affect me being a good mother; that “I won’t ever truly experience being a mother if I’m not at least 90% present in their lives” or how I wasn’t allowing my husband to ‘lead’ in a biblical way and a general lack of understanding on why I ever would want to be the bread winner.
I’ve been raised Catholic, my grandfather was a seminarian before he met my grandmother, and I’ve never had this kind of ideology pushed on me by fellow Catholics (evangelicals, yes, but never Catholics).
I feel very isolated in my community now, and I’m a little lost in my thinking. I want to be an active member in my children’s lives when I have them and, though the way this issue has been pointed out was hurtful, I’m quite worried about not being present, along with a hundred other things.