Our youngest is now at the same preschool, and we felt as if (for fairness) one of us needed to be the classroom parent again. We decided that my husband would do it. It’s his turn!
He agreed to do it and then has completely dropped the ball on everything.
After the second week of school, I took over, to my great annoyance. Also, I work full time now; I’m not more available than he is to do this stuff anymore. But he’s just not good at it and doesn’t seem willing to put more effort into it than he had been.
So where do we go from here? It’s too late to get out of it. We shouldn’t have signed up in the first place, yes, but we somehow have to honor the commitment now.
— Dividing Responsibilities
Dividing Responsibilities: Hand that ball back to him. He made the commitment, he honors it — or he bears the consequences of no-showing the other parent volunteers, the instructors and a classroom full of little kids. Say it to him like that: “You agreed to do this, so do this — or stand in front of a roomful of little kids and tell them they’re outta luck.”
Or he calls every parent in the class to secure his own replacement.
“I will not absorb it for you. I had my turn.”
“Not good at it” is a weasel’s off-ramp. None of us is good at doing extra work until we volunteer anyway and decide, rightly, that sometimes we just suck it up — because always leaving it to everyone else says not-too-good things about us.
If he genuinely has an obstacle to getting the job done that neither of you anticipated, such as a work environment that simply will not bend to the needs of a little classroom, or a form of neurodivergence that puts “getting milk to Room B” and “scaling Everest” in the same ring of the Venn diagram, then, okay — your taking over makes sense. And I do see a sliver of inequity in the fact that you weren’t working full time when you did it but he is.
But none of this addresses the three-word alarm in your letter: “doesn’t seem willing.” Ugh. So that’s where you have to, have to, take a stand.
Re: Dividing responsibilities: I agree that Dad shouldn’t just get to drop out before some serious discussion and another stab at this. But if he continues to be unreliable or actually isn’t adept at the job, isn’t the kid going to suffer some of the consequences?
Is it possible they could find another way for him to compensate Mom’s time, such as picking up other parenting or household responsibilities that he can be counted on to take seriously?
Anonymous: I’d feel better if he were the one proposing this, to put it mildly. I think “weaponized incompetence” is not only common enough that I don’t need to define it, but also exposed enough that anyone faced with it needs to say no.
If the only way these kids get milk is if the universe steps in for this dad, then, yes — there has to be some kind of marriage-rebalancing trade. Perhaps he does bedtime till the kid goes on Social Security.
