Ask Aviva: Overwhelmed at home while hubby's at work

Dear Aviva,

My husband works two jobs — both of equal importance. This is to allow us to have a stable financial household and allows me to stay at home with my young children, which is very important to me. However, due to his very tight and very busy schedule, it leaves little time for him to help around the house. Most of the housework — cleaning, laundry, feeding and bathing the kids, falls on me. I literally feel like I am drowning in it all, but I feel too guilty to ask my husband to pitch in more since he’s providing the financial end. How can I ask him to chip in here and there to help save my sanity? And on the flip side, why can’t I handle it all?

—SAHM

Dear SAHM,

Okay, at first I thought you were calling yourself “Sam,” all in caps, and with an “H” thrown in. Then I realized that this must be an acronym for something (hence the caps). So I mulled it over and gave it my best shot —I figured it was “Stay At Home Mom” and then I Googled it just to be sure. Well, the first thing that came up was “The Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine.” But the second thing that came up was a website with tips for “Stay At Home Moms.” Bingo! You’re not Sam. And unless there’s something major that you’re not telling me about, (like a medical degree), you are not a member of The Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine. You are a Stay At Home Mom!

Why am I taking up this article to tell everyone how I didn’t know what SAHM was? Why couldn’t I have just said “SAHM means Stay At Home Mom?” Well, this tells us that you are aware of the websites that give female homemakers tips and support. And according to me, this little bit of info is a double-edged sword.

This tells me that you feel like you belong to a subgroup, which is good. And it also tells me that you have access to all of the 213,000 websites that dispense tips to your subgroup of SAHMs. All this access within just 0.19 seconds of searching for SAHM tips on Google.

But this can be bad for you because it means that you have all this near-infinite access all day long, without anybody looking over your shoulder. This could get out of hand.