My husband (37M) and I (37F) have been together for 14 years and married for almost 9. We have one child (2F) and a house. I am a business owner working full time and my husband works full time. For years, I have explained to him that I feel disproportionately responsible for the management of our household (bills, decision-making, cleaning, tasks), our meager social life, and now tasks surrounding the care of our daughter.
My position is that he needs to do more of these tasks. His position is that I should “stop spinning so many plates” and just put them down. I try to explain that it doesn’t work that way—that there are too many important tasks that will have consequences if I drop them. I’ve tried to share my position in several ways, including articles and podcasts about cognitive load. In addition, he often forgets to take care of things which leads to a negative pattern of me reminding/nagging him.
Recently, my therapist said that I’m feeding into the problem by reminding him to do tasks he forgets, and pointed out that this does nothing to reduce my cognitive load. She and I selected taking care of the car inspection as a task to ask him to take care of, with me being fully willing to be pulled over if it isn’t taken care of and never bring it up again. My husband, who is an untreated ADHDer, made an appt. at the dealership for service when I requested this of him two weeks ago and took the car in today, but forgot about the inspection. Now I’m sitting here wanting to throw up because all I can think about is reminding him so we don’t have expensive issues in the future.
What am I supposed to do here? My therapist is going to tell me to stick to the plan, but I want so badly to say something.
ETA: I also have anxiety and significant chronic pain.