Even in the white collar world, a good professional job tends to be pretty demanding in terms of time commitment. My husband has (as family stuff goes) a very good job, but we have the following stuff:
–round the clock emails that have to be dealt with quickly
–evening events
–weekend events
–a week of business travel from time to time
–lots of working on “vacations”
If I were you, I think I’d try harder to produce family and daddy-with-kids time, rather than to roll back military time, if you know what I mean. For instance, I try to enforce rules like no phone during dinner with some success (but sometimes it really is that important). I have attempted to establish the idea that (barring some special circumstance), my husband is in charge of the 3-year-old for the hour after dinner, so I can go grocery shopping by myself, take a bath, do some emails and paperwork, work on laundry by myself, etc. (The big kids are just fine left to their own devices.) We also both work on trying to make Sunday sacrosanct, so we try to knock out school work, work work, and household maintenance on Saturday and then spend Sunday doing Mass and family fun. Saturday morning is devoted to home projects and we almost always stop by lunchtime.
So, rather than asking him to work during particular times, perhaps you could ask for dibs on certain time slots?
bitterhope, over to you.
