Finding free time as a parent — to recharge your batteries, enjoy a hobby, socialize, or even nap — can be difficult. There are only so many hours in a day and, let’s face it, your kids are going to take up most of them. So it’s an all-too-common frustration to moms everywhere when their male partners tend to forget that fact and blithely go off for hours at a time to play 18-holes at the local golf course, leaving you with everything to do by yourself. But TikTok user Meg (@its.mama.meg) has a unique approach: actually, your husband should be golfing more.
Hear her out.
Meg has three kids under the age of four and her husband golfs for hours basically every weekend.
“A lot of my girlfriends are like, ‘how? why?’” she says. “And here’s the reality: he loves golf. It is the thing that makes him maybe the happiest on the planet … so it’s important to find a way for him to do that in a way that works for all of us, without me being resentful at home with the kids by myself.”
Now, certainly, there are some trad-wife pick-me women on social media who would launch into a tirade about how mothers have to be more sacrificing and submissive and supportive of their husband’s passions for… reasons. But not Meg. Meg is a woman with a plan and it’s one that more families would certainly find helpful.
“The day he’s going to golf he gets up with the kids,” she begins. “He gets them dressed, he makes breakfast, he’ll do a quick tidy on the house, and then he takes them out for two beautiful hours and that’s all time that I have to myself now. I can go get brunch, I can get my nails done, I can do anything I want to do.”
When her husband gets back, he gives the kids lunch, puts them down for a nap, and then heads out to the golf course. In the comments, Meg shares that he’s usually gone for about four and a half hours. Four and a half hours is absolutely manageable, especially for a mom who’s just had a whole morning to herself.
Oh, and to top it all off, when her husband gets back,
“Usually he brings dinner home with him.”
Clutch. No one wants to cook on a Saturday anyway, right?
“So if you’re a dad who wants to golf more,” she advises, “there’s a way to do this in a way that’s not leaving your wife in a huge lurch.”
Now perhaps you’re thinking about how this might play out in your family. And perhaps you are married to someone who will claim ignorance about what the kids want for breakfast or where to bring them for two hours or how to put them down for a nap. I call this “convenient incompetence” and, sadly, a lot of people do it. Among parents, moms are frequently the ones to get the short end of the stick and, as a result, default to a mindset of “I’ll just do it because my partner isn’t going to do it right and then I’ll have to redo it.”
Meg wants us to look at this in another way.
“Here’s the thing ladies: if they can take a ball that is this small and put it into a hole that they can’t even see, they can do hard things like take care of your kids so that you also have time out of the house.”
“I don’t think it’s realistic that when you become parents you give up everything you love,” she continues. “I really think that’s so extreme. And our kids are better off for us filling up our cups, too.”
I mean, no lies detected with this one.
So the next time your husband approaches you and says he wants to golf (or go to a football game, or run an hours long Dungeons & Dragons campaign with his friends), “tell him what your terms are,” Meg suggests. “Tell him what you need him to do to make it more palatable for you.”
Go enjoy that mani-pedi, lady.
