My husband and I just had our first child about four months ago. He took off sometime and i've been on maternity leave. He will start his paternity leave soon.
We have repeatedly been getting into conflicts over many things since the baby was born. I would say we had some conflicts before, but many of them have been magnified. One major conflict that we have is around his work hours. He will typically be gone from home 10+ hours a day but often the entire day and evenings. More recently, he's been getting home around 11 or 12 at night. The type of work that he does is very self driven and project focused rather than a 9-5. He feels that since he already took some time off for the baby and will be taking a few weeks off for his paternity leave that he needs to really focus on getting as much of his project done as possible before he starts his paternity leave. I can understand that and I have tried to be flexible but I resent watching the baby all day, evening and night. To his credit, I do believe he tries. For example, in terms of household contributions, he does all the grocery shopping, cooking, and trash as well as some cleaning, although I definitely clean more than him. He will also watch the baby at times. I know he loves our baby.
So I guess my question is, what do I do about this? I don't feel like it's unreasonable for me to want an hour or so of time a day off the clock however clearly talking to him about this does not solve this issue. Another thing is that he will be full time at home while I go back to work next month but in the long run eventually we will both be working full time. When I was pregnant, he probably was gone about ten hours a day, and he also had more time on the weekends. He was involved during the pregnancy and supportive and went to all of my prenatal appointments except for one. I will also note that recently I was gone visiting family for the past week and I do feel like he actually spent more time at home when I was away, although he still did work long hours. In full transparency for this post, I will say that he has remarked on numerous occasions that he feels that I nag control and manage him and in some ways I can see where that can be true. But on the other hand I don't feel like my requests of him are unreasonable.