What I gave Derek was a choice, laid out as plainly as the invoice.
Option one: he could pay it. The nanny and the housekeeper would continue, the work would get done by professionals, and it would come out of our joint finances — his income included — because the work was necessary and I physically could not do it. If my labor was worth nothing to him, fine; he could find out what it was worth to the market, and pay that, indefinitely.
Option two: he could do what I’d actually asked for in the first place. He could help. He could be a parent to his own children, share the load, come home and pick up a baby instead of complaining that there were babies to pick up. He could treat his injured wife like a partner instead of unpaid staff. And if he did that, consistently and genuinely, we wouldn’t need to pay strangers to do the job he was refusing.
“So which is it,” I asked him. “Do you want to help raise your sons, or do you want to pay full price for pretending you don’t have to? Because ‘moms don’t get sick days’ is over. Moms get sick days now. I just hired the staff to cover them, and the bill is yours either way.”
