A woman trying to reopen the conversation about having a second child ended up stuck on one very specific problem that, to her, says everything about her marriage.
Her husband spends huge chunks of every day in the bathroom during the exact windows when parenting is hardest, and after years of resentment, she says she cannot imagine bringing a newborn into a situation that already feels this lopsided.
His Bathroom Routine Somehow Always Lands on Wakeups, Drop-Offs, Bath Time, and Bedtime
In her post on Reddit, the 36-year-old mom explained that she and her husband both work full time and share a 3.5-year-old son. But when it comes to the busiest parts of the day, she says her husband is almost always unavailable.
According to her, he disappears into the bathroom every morning during wakeup, breakfast, and preschool drop-off time. He does it again after lunch. Then again in the evening during bath and bedtime. Each session lasts about an hour, though she later clarified that some of that time is showering because he says he feels unclean afterward.
Even with that clarification, she says the result is the same: he is gone for the most demanding parts of family life, every single day.
She also pointed out that he seems able to change the timing when it benefits him. If they need to be out of the house, he somehow finds a way to go earlier, later, or skip it altogether. That made the pattern much harder for her to brush off as something he simply cannot control.
The Real Fight Was Never Just About the Bathroom
What made the post hit so hard is that she was clear this is not just about bowel movements.
She said the bathroom issue feels like one example of a much bigger problem: her husband’s lack of responsibility, awareness, and initiative. She says she is the one who gets their child ready, handles most of bath and bedtime, and carries the mental load unless she explicitly tells him what to do.
That is why the second-baby conversation collapsed so fast.
She says she waited two years for the “right time” to bring it up seriously, especially while he was changing jobs. But when she finally raised the question of how they could possibly handle a newborn if he is unavailable for three critical hours every day, his answer was that his parents could take care of the baby.
The parents, she pointed out, live two hours away.
That response seemed to break something for her. She was not asking for a backup nanny plan. She wanted him to understand that daily support from him is the issue, and instead, she felt like he immediately tried to outsource the whole problem.
The Bigger Divide Was Over Whether This Was a Medical Problem or a Marriage Problem
The woman did say he has severe hemorrhoids and is genuinely in pain, which complicated the discussion. But she also said he refuses to talk much about it, has not installed the bidet they already own, and still spends a lot of time on his phone in the bathroom.
That is where the comments got especially sharp.
A lot of people said this did not sound like a bathroom problem at all. They thought it sounded like a husband strategically disappearing during the hardest parenting windows and leaving his wife to carry the load. Others focused on the fact that prolonged toilet sitting can actually worsen hemorrhoids, which made the situation sound even less believable to them as an unavoidable routine.
Many commenters bluntly told her not to even think about a second child until the real issue is addressed. The strongest reaction was that the bathroom habit was not the marriage problem by itself. It was just the clearest daily proof of one.
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