Hah, could my title be any longer? No sure how to phrase it more succinctly... and if there already is a tribe like this please direct me to it but I would love to start a support thread for stay at home parents whose partners work very long and/or unpredictable hours (say in the medical or IT fields).
I am really struggling to adapt to my husband's 100+ hour work weeks and weekends where he has to go in for a "few hours" and then mine and the kids' weekend is scrapped because we spend all day waiting for him to come home, which if he does is late. Even when he is at home my DH is working or thinking about work. I understand that he has to do this to provide himself with job security and he is at the point in his career where he HAS to work like this to advance his career so I am not resentful of him but I am very lonely, sad, and frustrated (at the situation, not him) that I never get a break. I have a mostly nonverbal 2.5 yo DS and a 6 month old DD and I am burnt out. I am thinking about hiring someone to either help with the house or just watch the kids for an hour while I go to things like dental appointments or take a shower but I feel guilty for not being able to "keep up". The most difficult thing to deal with is probably the unpredictability of his schedule. He works in the IT field and if something HAS to be fixed in his company it falls to him. Which it does, all the time. His days have gone from 8-5 to 7-9 most days (missing his kids go to sleep, only seeing them in the morning), working through the night and "some Saturdays" has turned into every Saturday and some Sundays. He is upset by the situation but there is nothing he can do. I miss my husband and can't handle never having a break, a second to myself, to recharge and be a better parent.
Anyone else out there dealing with this?
I am really struggling to adapt to my husband's 100+ hour work weeks and weekends where he has to go in for a "few hours" and then mine and the kids' weekend is scrapped because we spend all day waiting for him to come home, which if he does is late. Even when he is at home my DH is working or thinking about work. I understand that he has to do this to provide himself with job security and he is at the point in his career where he HAS to work like this to advance his career so I am not resentful of him but I am very lonely, sad, and frustrated (at the situation, not him) that I never get a break. I have a mostly nonverbal 2.5 yo DS and a 6 month old DD and I am burnt out. I am thinking about hiring someone to either help with the house or just watch the kids for an hour while I go to things like dental appointments or take a shower but I feel guilty for not being able to "keep up". The most difficult thing to deal with is probably the unpredictability of his schedule. He works in the IT field and if something HAS to be fixed in his company it falls to him. Which it does, all the time. His days have gone from 8-5 to 7-9 most days (missing his kids go to sleep, only seeing them in the morning), working through the night and "some Saturdays" has turned into every Saturday and some Sundays. He is upset by the situation but there is nothing he can do. I miss my husband and can't handle never having a break, a second to myself, to recharge and be a better parent.
Anyone else out there dealing with this?
. I hear DH pulling into the drive now (at 10:30pm here) so I'll bbl.
I think I needed this thread just as much as the OP did. I can so relate to everyone's stories. A 60 hour work week is a very good one, those don't happen that often. I smashed my phone once when DD1 was a screaming baby who hadn't slept in 2 days and I hadn't seen DH in 4, he called to say he wouldn't be home that night until late. He spent my entire labor with DD1 on the phone, she was born at 38 weeks, he wasn't expecting her then, and he spent the whole day telling everyone that as soon as my labor stopped he would be into work. 
I made very clear with the next two children that if I ever saw a cell phone during those labors that it would end up in the birth tub with me. As I was typing this I got a call from an employee who couldn't get through to DH's cell so he calls me to see if I am around DH.
all around.
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) my SIL was very insistent that he be there. I was like, "Uh, we can plan all we want and he will try but it is really outside of his control sometimes and I cannot *make* him be there any more than he can make clients magically stop blowing up his phone with texts and phone calls and threats of terminating their service when servers crash." And I'm pretty sure our neighbors think we are the most anti-social people in the neighborhood because we rarely make it to neighborhood get-togethers.
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