It’s no secret that the parenting workload is often totally imbalanced between moms and dads. It’s one of the most common causes of divorce, in fact.
But for some couples, this imbalance reaches levels that start to feel absurd and point to a bigger issue that seems to be impacting more and more couples these days. The situation a mom on Reddit is facing is a perfect example.
The mom is furious after her husband forgot to feed their toddler dinner on a night she went to bed early.
The forgetting is bad enough, but the circumstances make the issue so much worse. The mom wrote in her post that she’d been out on the town at a friend’s engagement party the night before, her first night out since their son was born just over a year ago.
You can probably sense where this is going. “I managed to let my hair down,” the mom wrote, which meant she had a wicked hangover.Â
She still managed the usual routine, however, taking the baby for a walk, going grocery shopping, and cooking for her partner.
But by the evening, she was struggling to keep her eyes open, so her partner told her to call it a night, and he’d take over so she could get some sleep. “I told him he needed some dinner and went up to bed,” she wrote.
When she later asked him what he fed their son, her partner said ‘his milk’ because he didn’t know what else he ate.
“I woke up in the middle of the night and asked him what he had for dinner,” the mom wrote, “and he told me ‘he had his milk’ like it was the most normal thing in the world.”
They got into a bit of a tiff about it, and soon the truth came out — he didn’t forget anything; he just simply didn’t know what to feed the kid. And then he took it a step further.
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“He eventually landed on [the fact that] he didn’t know what he eats and that I didn’t feed him dinner either,” she wrote. Big “Well, if you want our son to eat, maybe you should have fed him yourself” energy.
Anyway, the mom said what you’re probably screaming at your screen right now: “You’ve watched me make him dinners for the past three months; you know what he eats. You were just lazy to the point of child neglect!”
The mom now feels totally unsupported and like she doesn’t matter to her partner.
“I’ve been thinking for a while that he’s just so lazy, and I’ve also tried to talk to him about it,” she wrote. “He gets angry for a day and then fixes it for a few days and then goes back to being lazy. The cycle continues.”
She added that “nothing gets done in the house unless I do it,” from the childcare to cleaning the house and cooking, unless she “explicitly” asks him to help. “I feel like I’m being punished,” she went on to say. “I feel like I don’t have a partner. My time or my sleep or my sanity isn’t as important as his.”
On top of all that, she works full time just like he does, “so it isn’t reasonable that I take on most of the household tasks and childcare.” It’s left her feeling disrespected and that she’s tethered to “a lazy dad. And THAT has led her to one conclusion: “I need to leave.”
Lawyers and marriage counselors say that situations like these are driving an unprecedented wave of divorces.
Her situation may be egregious, but it sure isn’t uncommon — so much so that it has, of course, gotten its own buzz phrase name on social media: “weaponized incompetence.” Though some on Reddit felt the term didn’t quite fit for a truly upsetting reason.
“I feel like this is even worse than weaponized incompetence,” a commenter wrote, “because he actually low-key harmed his child… [by] starving them because [he] couldn’t be bothered enough to just google what to feed a 13-month-old.”
Statistics on divorce are notoriously difficult to accurately compile. But anecdotally speaking, divorce lawyers like Dennis Vetrano on TikTok, say it is the #1 reason couples end up in his office these days. And when he posted about it on TikTok, scores of marriage therapists responded to say they too have seen the same exact trend in recent years.
And there’s actual hard data to explain why this mom, in particular, is at a breaking point. It comes down to feeling unappreciated.Â
A 2022 study published by the University of Michigan found that feeling appreciated presented a significant buffer against the negative impacts an unequal division of household labor has on relationship satisfaction.
It’s one thing to fall down on the job of feeding your own child and feigning ignorance about what to even feed him. But shifting the blame as this dad did just might be the death knell for his marriage and scores of others just like it. As Vetrano put it in a TikTok video, “women. Are. TIRED.” And a lot of them simply aren’t willing to take it anymore.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.
