That folder on the dining table was the single most effective thing I have ever done in my marriage. Because Derek could dismiss my exhaustion. He could dismiss my frustration. He could call my work "nothing" to my face. But he could not dismiss a number, in black and white, that represented what it would actually cost to replace me — and that number was more than he made. The woman doing "nothing" all day was doing, it turned out, more than a full-time job's worth of labor, and he'd been getting it for free, and the only reason he could call it nothing was that he'd never once had to pay for it.
"We can't afford this," he said, staring at the total, and I watched the whole thing land on him at once: that if we couldn't afford to pay for my work, it was because my work was worth more than we could afford, which meant it had never been nothing, which meant he'd spent our entire marriage being subsidized by a wife he held in contempt.
Chapter 4: The Choice I Gave Him
The babies were never once in anything but excellent hands, and I need to say that plainly, because it mattered more to me than any lesson. The nanny I hired was wonderful and professional. My mother was in and out constantly. The twins were cared for, safe, and loved the entire time — the lesson was for Derek, and I would never have risked my children to teach it. That's the whole point, actually: I made sure they were cared for properly, which is exactly what Derek wouldn't do.
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.
