New Mom Cancels All Streaming Services to Hire a Housekeeper Instead — but Doesn't Tell Her Husband

Mar. 15, 2025

Husband doing the dishes in a stock photo.Photo:da-kuk/Getty

da-kuk/Getty

A 28-year-old new mom says she cancelled all of her household streaming services so that she and her husband could afford a housekeeper — but she didn’t tell her husband.

“Understandably it has been a huge adjustment for both of us. She’s still not sleeping through the night and we’re both back to work full time,” she writes. “We have always split the household responsibilities 50/50. We just help where needed and it’s always worked out well.”

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Lately, the woman writes, her husband “has been doing the chores terribly and I’ve had to come behind him to fix things or clean them again.”

“For example, he cleaned the bottles the other night and they were cleaned so poorly I had to do them again. He dropped pump parts down the disposal and then ran it, ruining them,” she adds.

But she recently endured “the final straw,” she writes, when her husband told her to go to sleep and he would refrigerate the breastmilk she had pumped.

When she woke up the next morning, she found the breastmilk still sitting on the counter, where it had spoiled.

“He said he was sorry and he [had] put on a show to relax for a bit before doing the dishes and fell asleep,” she writes. “The next day I decided to cancel all of our streaming services, PlayStation plus, and our theme park passes in order to hire a housekeeper.”

She continues: “I figured if he’s too tired to do basic household chores than a housekeeper is necessary. If he’s too tired to put milk up, then he’s too tired to play video games or for us to go to a theme park.”

The husband was angry, she writes, adding, “He blew up at me and said I had no right doing that and was furious. I thought I was doing us a favor so we can get more sleep and not worry as much about household tasks.”

While many Reddit commenters sympathize with the new mom, they also feel she went too far.

“What you have to realize is that not everyone handles being sleep deprived the same way. In my household it was the opposite. I’m used to operating with less sleep due to work. My wife wasn’t,” writes one commenter, who adds: “You should have discussed this as a couple and came to this decision.”

The commenter continues: “Cancelling everything was a power move to punish him for making mistakes. If it wasn’t, why did you just do it without talking it out first?”

source: people.com