This is certainly the most idyllic scenario for this kind of situation. Parties stay married, wife considers it his sacrifice (rather than hers), she takes care of the homefires so to speak joyfully while he brings in all the money, etc..,

In that kind of a situation it is ideal.

Certainly we all know of variations of this ideal theme: mom stays home and does nothing, hubby works his rear off only to come home to have to do it all there too, they divorce, she gets the kids most of the time and a huge chunk of his salary to keep the status quo and she can only find the kind of job she has spent doing most of her life (cleaning, cooking, childcare) or is way behind in years of experience in her chosen field.

Or those that have a stay at home parent and live off of the government and snub their noses at 2 working parents.

When it is good and the stay at home parent is truly doing her job it is a huge blessing to the sole bread winning husband too. He can be more focused and more successful at his career then the one who has to stop at the store, take the kid to the appt miday, etc.., For about a year my dh stayed home and I loved it from the working perspective because he did have the kids well entertained and cared for, dinner ready, and house clean. It is much more relaxing to come home to that.

It is also interesting how she sees it as his sacrifice. I wonder if he also sees her giving up a career, and being a really good Mother, childrearer, cook, maid, etc.., as a sacrifice. I would think it would work out best in that scenario. That each really appreciates the others contribution.

It works wonderfully until the marriage doesn't work anymore.

Then you have a woman who has no skills and can not live in the same style but isn't willing to give it up.
You have a man who is resentful that he has worked his life away and doesn't know his children.

Let's see her in divorce court. He won't even recognize her.

All his sacrifices will be duly punished by forcing her lifelong dependence on his money. She will get more than half, her attorney's fees paid and the rest of her life paid, even if it is she who wants the divorce.

Still a "win" for her.

Meh. I'm a SAHM. My DH is happy to enjoy a family life in the evenings and weekends and during the day he gets to go hang around with adults, do some thinking, feel successful, and not talk about poop.

I'd like that too.

In my situation, I've got no education and live in a country where I learned the language in my late 30s. So I'm ok with providing a great support system for my kid and my husband until my kid goes to school. Then, if I ever decide what I want to do with my life, I'll probably get some schooling and work part-time until my DH retires.

He likes his job very much, and thinks he'll keep working into his 70s. We get 2+ months of vacation per year already, so we can certainly enjoy travelling etc without waiting for retirement. (I guess he gets vacation, I don't actually get any vacation, ever, from my responsibilities0.)

If our marriage didn't work out, he knows his kid because we prioritize family life. Yes, he'd have to share some of his income with me, but then again, I don't have the same opportunities to earn a living due to having moved to join him in his home country. I could move back, but then our kid would lose out. He could emigrate separately, I suppose, but then he'd give up most of his vacation time... and thus time with our kid.

I guess I'm lucky that my DH and I actually talk, like adults, about possibilities and opportunities and preferences, all along the way. Neither one of us assume that life is static. So we'll probably continue to think the other is great, forever.

This is an archaic and outdated system. Women giving up education and work to stay home past the infant years harms both parties. She has no future, unless she is self-employed from the home, has no social security (U.S) , no healthcare of her own, no retirement benefits of her own. Thus, the government forces the ex husband to provide this after divorce, or the government does, if she is below a certain income level.
Even your parents are free from obligation to your support after 18 years old.

I am a sahm right now and my husband loves it. I make sure the house is nice and tidy, he has clean clothes just appear in his drawers, I take care of all our children's needs. He never has to take off from work to care for them. When he gets home he has dinner ready, and then he gets to just chillax.

My dh put his ex through school and graduate school. He sacrificed years of his own education and career for hers. When they had kids she wouldn't take time off from work ever, so he did all of the appts, daycare, etc. and when she kicked him out she got a quarter of his income.

So either way he was screwed. And she makes 3 times as much as him.

My godmother is remarried to a wonderful man who was a Dr.

He was married for 30 years, had 3 kids, the youngest was 19 when he had a heart attack.
He almost died and when he recovered he realized that he'd been skating through his life for the last 10 - 20 years. He wasn't happy and the near death experience had an impact on him.

He left his wife almost upon release and she was devastated. She'd been a SAHM and housewife her entire life. She went to University to get a MRS.
He left her the paid off house, the paid off vacation property and half his retirement funds.

That wasn't enough. Her entire identity was wrapped up in being a Drs wife. Not necessarily his wife but the wife of a prominent man. She sued him for spousal support for the rest of her life and got it!
That still wasn't enough. She went a little crazy and the kids were very worried about her. At first the kids blamed him but soon saw that it was a problem with her.

The thing is she had what she thought was a perfect life. She thought they'd live out their retirement, socializing with friends and entertaining grandchildren. She had no life of her own outside of the world they'd built. It's sad really.

This is an interesting perspective
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/02/a-letter-to-my-wife...

This man is full of resentment at his wife.

Marilyn Lemak: I 'did a terrible, tragic thing'
For the first time, the Naperville mother who killed her 3 children speaks publicly about the crime she did 13 years ago, about mental illness and about life in prison

March 25, 2012|By Stacy St. Clair, Chicago Tribune reporter
Marilyn Lemak says she needs the public to understand how sick she was when she murdered her three small children in March 1999, according to a video recently obtained by the Tribune.
Marilyn Lemak says she needs the public to understand how sick she was when she murdered her three small children in March 1999, according to a video recently obtained by the Tribune. (Camicas Productions, Chicago Tribune)
Speaking in a thin, halting voice, Marilyn Lemak frequently pauses and searches for the right words as she tries to explain the inexplicable.

She says she needs the public to understand how sick she was when she murdered her three small children in March 1999, according to a video recently obtained by the Tribune. She wants people to know that she was a good mother, that she has not forgiven herself and that she wishes she were dead.

In a documentary slated to air Sunday on the French television channel M6, Lemak, 54, struggles to describe how a deepening depression amid a bitter divorce prompted her to drug and suffocate her children inside their Naperville home more than 13 years ago. She says she agreed to the TV interview — her first public comments since her arrest made national headlines — to help erase the stigma of mental illness, especially among affluent women with seemingly idyllic lives.

"I was a good mother who got very seriously mentally ill and did a terrible, tragic thing. And I think that was the depression," she says. "But I think that I was a good mother, yes."

Lemak is one of several women featured in the documentary "Mal de Mere," which examines how society responds to mentally ill mothers who harm their children. The Tribune, which allowed the French team access to its archives and to reporters who covered the case, received an unedited copy of the hourlong interview.

In the raw footage shot last August at the Dwight Correctional Center in Livingston County, Lemak bears little resemblance to the vibrant, copper-haired mother who once enjoyed organizing play dates and school fundraisers. She now appears pale and surprisingly small, with thick eyeglasses, baggy prison garb and a utilitarian hairstyle that leave her looking both schoolmarmish and frail.

She describes how she laced her children's peanut butter sandwiches with prescription medication, then sang to them as they lost consciousness on March 4, 1999.

"And you cut their breaths?" the interviewer asks.

"Yes, I held my hand over their nose and mouths. Yes."

"And everything was finished?"

"Right," Lemak responds.

And for the first time she publicly acknowledges the magnitude of her crime.

"Looking back, how could I have done something like that?" she asks. "I don't want to make an excuse. I, I don't know if I'll be able to forgive myself or not. ... I'm trying but it hasn't happened yet."

Anger as motive

Lemak, a former surgical nurse, also slit her own wrist and swallowed several pills that night in a failed suicide attempt that authorities have long described as insincere and proof of her selfishness. Despite prosecutors' insistence that she committed the murders to hurt her then-estranged husband, Lemak says she did it to escape the pain brought on by depression.

"It had been weeks of this, and I was not getting any better. ... I was feeling worse and worse. I was feeling more hopeless, more helpless, like it was never going to get better," she says, shaking her head at the memory. "And I decided to take my own life and that my children would come with me because it would be better for them too."

Statistics, however, indicate that depression rarely leads to homicidal acts. To the contrary, prosecutors and expert witnesses argued that Lemak's actions the day of the murders — canceling the baby sitter and maid, cutting the phone, locking the doors — indicate a calculating, methodical woman in full control of her actions.

"There are hundreds of thousands of people who suffer depression on a daily basis, and they do not commit crimes," said DuPage County Assistant State's Attorney Joseph Ruggiero, who prosecuted the case in 2001. "These horrendous murders were generated and driven by her anger. While she was diagnosed with depression, the motive for these crimes was and always will be her anger."

Given the selective details and often jumbled recollections, it's clear that Lemak tries to shield herself from the fact that she murdered her young children: Nicholas, 7; Emily, 6; and Thomas, 3.

Though she acknowledges committing a terrible act, she avoids expressly saying she killed her children. She talks about the kids being in heaven or "not here," but she only once refers to them as dead. And she never calls them by name, instead referring to them as "my oldest," "my second" or "my third."

She maintains her composure throughout the interview with only a few exceptions. She truly cries just once, when she describes how she used to look at the three bright stars in Orion's Belt and imagine they were her children looking down on her.

"I think about it every day," she says of the slayings. "Why did I get to that point? And why didn't I die? And I haven't reached an answer ... there is no easy answer. But every day I think about them. Every day. And I wish that they were still here."

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Lemak paints a troubling picture of her life in Naperville, portraying it as a privileged place where she says women felt guilty asking for help. She says she often questioned why she couldn't just be happy, despite the showcase Victorian home, the cleaning lady, the nannies and the money. She suggests she could have prevented the killings by talking to someone about her struggles when the symptoms first surfaced.

A self-described perfectionist, Lemak says she first grappled with depression after Emily's birth, and it worsened after Thomas was born. Medical experts offered a similar timeline during her trial, though they disagreed on whether her mental illness met the definition of insanity, preventing her from being able to distinguish right from wrong.

"I had a picture in my mind of how my family should be with a mother and a father and three beautiful children and two dogs and a beautiful house," she says. "And it wasn't working out that way. It looked like it from the outside, but it wasn't like that in my mind. It wasn't perfect."

Living with it

Lemak was sentenced to life in prison for the murders. Though her lawyers offered an insanity defense, a DuPage County jury agreed with prosecutors who insisted that she killed the children to spite her then-husband, David, an emergency room doctor who had reluctantly accepted her request for a divorce and had recently begun dating someone.

In the video, she refers to him as "my husband" and does not discuss their marital problems. She speaks softly, and not unkindly, as she describes how he tried to help her cope with depression but ultimately could not.

"I did talk to my husband about it. He was a physician, and he didn't know what to do either. I finally ended up calling a hotline to try to find someone to talk to, and I was put on medication," she says. "But at that time, I remember telling my husband, 'Don't tell anybody. This is nobody else's business. This is my business, and we're not going to discuss it with family or friends.' And I didn't."

David Lemak, who now practices medicine in Michigan, did not respond to requests for comment. He has not spoken publicly about the case since her sentencing, when he asked that his ex-wife be spared the death penalty so she would spend the rest of her life haunted by her actions.

"There, she will have to live each day with the knowledge of the horror she is accountable for," he told the court in 2002.

It seems as if his wish has come to fruition, as Lemak says in the video that she would have preferred the death penalty. She would have been sent to a psychiatric facility if the jury had found her insane, but Lemak says that was not a welcome alternative.

"I wanted the death penalty. I wanted to be dead. Getting a life sentence? ... I have nothing anyway," she says as she struggles to maintain her composure. "No matter where I was, whether I was here or in a psychiatric facility, it wouldn't matter. I would still think of it every day."

When asked if she still entertains suicidal thoughts, Lemak responds with a short, rueful laugh.

"That is something I used to think about all the time, being that I made the attempt at home and failed, and I wasn't expecting to fail," she says. "If I knew there was a way I wouldn't fail, I would consider it. But I can't think of a way that I wouldn't fail for sure."

'The weight of her act'

Claire Perdrix, the French journalist who did the interview for the documentary, says she believes Lemak genuinely wants to help combat the stigma associated with mental illness. She was struck by Lemak's timid nature and thought she seemed "so small, (as) if she was still totally crushed by the weight of her act."

"I don't want to blame her, nor to give her excuses," Perdrix said. "We don't have to excuse her terrible act. We have to understand it or nothing will change."

Lemak describes an uneventful life at Dwight, where she takes classes and works as a baker in the kitchen. She no longer takes psychiatric medication and finds that staying busy has been a valuable coping mechanism. She has a cellmate, though she acknowledges that some of her fellow prisoners consider her "a terrible person" because of her crime.

Her parents visit weekly, and she is in frequent contact with her siblings and other relatives. People from her old church, including her former pastor, still keep in touch, she says.

Lemak has pictures of her children in her cell, but she is not allowed to hang them on the walls. She looks at them frequently, she says.

She says she no longer cries every day, but she has not forgiven herself for killing the children.

"How can I?" she asks. "Again, I think that's part of the stigma of depression. I know that I was depressed. I know that I was not in my right mind. I was not thinking clearly. But I should have been."

She says she thinks of the children every day. And she often speaks to them, telling them how sorry she is.

"I think if you believe in God and heaven, and that's where they are, then what could be better than that?" she asks. "But they didn't get to live their lives, and that's the tragedy. They should have been able to live their lives — and then go to heaven."

sstclair@tribune.com

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Marilyn Lemak: I 'did a terrible, tragic thing'
For the first time, the Naperville mother who killed her 3 children speaks publicly about the crime she did 13 years ago, about mental illness and about life in prison

March 25, 2012|By Stacy St. Clair, Chicago Tribune reporter
Marilyn Lemak says she needs the public to understand how sick she was when she murdered her three small children in March 1999, according to a video recently obtained by the Tribune.
Marilyn Lemak says she needs the public to understand how sick she was when she murdered her three small children in March 1999, according to a video recently obtained by the Tribune. (Camicas Productions, Chicago Tribune)
Speaking in a thin, halting voice, Marilyn Lemak frequently pauses and searches for the right words as she tries to explain the inexplicable.

She says she needs the public to understand how sick she was when she murdered her three small children in March 1999, according to a video recently obtained by the Tribune. She wants people to know that she was a good mother, that she has not forgiven herself and that she wishes she were dead.

In a documentary slated to air Sunday on the French television channel M6, Lemak, 54, struggles to describe how a deepening depression amid a bitter divorce prompted her to drug and suffocate her children inside their Naperville home more than 13 years ago. She says she agreed to the TV interview — her first public comments since her arrest made national headlines — to help erase the stigma of mental illness, especially among affluent women with seemingly idyllic lives.

"I was a good mother who got very seriously mentally ill and did a terrible, tragic thing. And I think that was the depression," she says. "But I think that I was a good mother, yes."

Lemak is one of several women featured in the documentary "Mal de Mere," which examines how society responds to mentally ill mothers who harm their children. The Tribune, which allowed the French team access to its archives and to reporters who covered the case, received an unedited copy of the hourlong interview.

In the raw footage shot last August at the Dwight Correctional Center in Livingston County, Lemak bears little resemblance to the vibrant, copper-haired mother who once enjoyed organizing play dates and school fundraisers. She now appears pale and surprisingly small, with thick eyeglasses, baggy prison garb and a utilitarian hairstyle that leave her looking both schoolmarmish and frail.

She describes how she laced her children's peanut butter sandwiches with prescription medication, then sang to them as they lost consciousness on March 4, 1999.

"And you cut their breaths?" the interviewer asks.

"Yes, I held my hand over their nose and mouths. Yes."

"And everything was finished?"

"Right," Lemak responds.

And for the first time she publicly acknowledges the magnitude of her crime.

"Looking back, how could I have done something like that?" she asks. "I don't want to make an excuse. I, I don't know if I'll be able to forgive myself or not. ... I'm trying but it hasn't happened yet."

Anger as motive

Lemak, a former surgical nurse, also slit her own wrist and swallowed several pills that night in a failed suicide attempt that authorities have long described as insincere and proof of her selfishness. Despite prosecutors' insistence that she committed the murders to hurt her then-estranged husband, Lemak says she did it to escape the pain brought on by depression.

"It had been weeks of this, and I was not getting any better. ... I was feeling worse and worse. I was feeling more hopeless, more helpless, like it was never going to get better," she says, shaking her head at the memory. "And I decided to take my own life and that my children would come with me because it would be better for them too."

Statistics, however, indicate that depression rarely leads to homicidal acts. To the contrary, prosecutors and expert witnesses argued that Lemak's actions the day of the murders — canceling the baby sitter and maid, cutting the phone, locking the doors — indicate a calculating, methodical woman in full control of her actions.

"There are hundreds of thousands of people who suffer depression on a daily basis, and they do not commit crimes," said DuPage County Assistant State's Attorney Joseph Ruggiero, who prosecuted the case in 2001. "These horrendous murders were generated and driven by her anger. While she was diagnosed with depression, the motive for these crimes was and always will be her anger."

Given the selective details and often jumbled recollections, it's clear that Lemak tries to shield herself from the fact that she murdered her young children: Nicholas, 7; Emily, 6; and Thomas, 3.

Though she acknowledges committing a terrible act, she avoids expressly saying she killed her children. She talks about the kids being in heaven or "not here," but she only once refers to them as dead. And she never calls them by name, instead referring to them as "my oldest," "my second" or "my third."

She maintains her composure throughout the interview with only a few exceptions. She truly cries just once, when she describes how she used to look at the three bright stars in Orion's Belt and imagine they were her children looking down on her.

"I think about it every day," she says of the slayings. "Why did I get to that point? And why didn't I die? And I haven't reached an answer ... there is no easy answer. But every day I think about them. Every day. And I wish that they were still here."

1 | 2 | Next
by Taboola Sponsored Links From the Web

14.3K
Lemak paints a troubling picture of her life in Naperville, portraying it as a privileged place where she says women felt guilty asking for help. She says she often questioned why she couldn't just be happy, despite the showcase Victorian home, the cleaning lady, the nannies and the money. She suggests she could have prevented the killings by talking to someone about her struggles when the symptoms first surfaced.

A self-described perfectionist, Lemak says she first grappled with depression after Emily's birth, and it worsened after Thomas was born. Medical experts offered a similar timeline during her trial, though they disagreed on whether her mental illness met the definition of insanity, preventing her from being able to distinguish right from wrong.

"I had a picture in my mind of how my family should be with a mother and a father and three beautiful children and two dogs and a beautiful house," she says. "And it wasn't working out that way. It looked like it from the outside, but it wasn't like that in my mind. It wasn't perfect."

Living with it

Lemak was sentenced to life in prison for the murders. Though her lawyers offered an insanity defense, a DuPage County jury agreed with prosecutors who insisted that she killed the children to spite her then-husband, David, an emergency room doctor who had reluctantly accepted her request for a divorce and had recently begun dating someone.

In the video, she refers to him as "my husband" and does not discuss their marital problems. She speaks softly, and not unkindly, as she describes how he tried to help her cope with depression but ultimately could not.

"I did talk to my husband about it. He was a physician, and he didn't know what to do either. I finally ended up calling a hotline to try to find someone to talk to, and I was put on medication," she says. "But at that time, I remember telling my husband, 'Don't tell anybody. This is nobody else's business. This is my business, and we're not going to discuss it with family or friends.' And I didn't."

David Lemak, who now practices medicine in Michigan, did not respond to requests for comment. He has not spoken publicly about the case since her sentencing, when he asked that his ex-wife be spared the death penalty so she would spend the rest of her life haunted by her actions.

"There, she will have to live each day with the knowledge of the horror she is accountable for," he told the court in 2002.

It seems as if his wish has come to fruition, as Lemak says in the video that she would have preferred the death penalty. She would have been sent to a psychiatric facility if the jury had found her insane, but Lemak says that was not a welcome alternative.

"I wanted the death penalty. I wanted to be dead. Getting a life sentence? ... I have nothing anyway," she says as she struggles to maintain her composure. "No matter where I was, whether I was here or in a psychiatric facility, it wouldn't matter. I would still think of it every day."

When asked if she still entertains suicidal thoughts, Lemak responds with a short, rueful laugh.

"That is something I used to think about all the time, being that I made the attempt at home and failed, and I wasn't expecting to fail," she says. "If I knew there was a way I wouldn't fail, I would consider it. But I can't think of a way that I wouldn't fail for sure."

'The weight of her act'

Claire Perdrix, the French journalist who did the interview for the documentary, says she believes Lemak genuinely wants to help combat the stigma associated with mental illness. She was struck by Lemak's timid nature and thought she seemed "so small, (as) if she was still totally crushed by the weight of her act."

"I don't want to blame her, nor to give her excuses," Perdrix said. "We don't have to excuse her terrible act. We have to understand it or nothing will change."

Lemak describes an uneventful life at Dwight, where she takes classes and works as a baker in the kitchen. She no longer takes psychiatric medication and finds that staying busy has been a valuable coping mechanism. She has a cellmate, though she acknowledges that some of her fellow prisoners consider her "a terrible person" because of her crime.

Her parents visit weekly, and she is in frequent contact with her siblings and other relatives. People from her old church, including her former pastor, still keep in touch, she says.

Lemak has pictures of her children in her cell, but she is not allowed to hang them on the walls. She looks at them frequently, she says.

She says she no longer cries every day, but she has not forgiven herself for killing the children.

"How can I?" she asks. "Again, I think that's part of the stigma of depression. I know that I was depressed. I know that I was not in my right mind. I was not thinking clearly. But I should have been."

She says she thinks of the children every day. And she often speaks to them, telling them how sorry she is.

"I think if you believe in God and heaven, and that's where they are, then what could be better than that?" she asks. "But they didn't get to live their lives, and that's the tragedy. They should have been able to live their lives — and then go to heaven."

sstclair@tribune.com

Prev | 1 | 2
by Taboola Sponsored Links From the Web

When our BM tried to "commit suicide: in front of the kids, the teacher at school stated that she thought she would try to harm the children in order to get revenge on the father for divorcing her. It is in the DCFS reports, which are inadmissible in court. You may speak of it, but not bring proof. That is in order to not deter persons from making DCFS reports. By the time he got to trial 4 years later, she was "cured." No proof of this "cure" was presented. DCFS made him sign an agreement to go back and live in the home as she could not be alone with them. They did not force them to go live with him as they should have.
From that time to trial she became homeless because her mother evicted her for abuse and theft. She still got custody. Our system is broken, a travesty to children. Can you imagine a father who did this?????

As for the pay inequity, SAHMs is exactly the reason.

If Mary and Joe both go get a job at Starbucks, they will receive the same pay plus a pound of coffee each month.

If Dr. Mary and Dr. Joe go apply at a hospital after medical school they will receive the same pay.

If Dr. Mary takes off 6 years to have children and Dr. Joe doesn't, Dr. Joe will be offered a higher salary as he has 6 years' additional experience, professional accomplishments and professional mentors. The same goes for executives. You can't make partner unless you are willing to work 7 days a week, 14 hours a day. You can't come back after years off work and expect the same salary or position.

I have a friend who is a teacher who, after being unmarried and reaching her late 30's, decided to get pregnant by sperm from a sperm bank. She doesn't make more than 25 dollars an hour. She pays her townhouse mortgage and child care with that. She can't get CS. She brings her lunch everyday.

If you want to be independent, you will. If you want to be dependent, you should not expect lifelong pay from another adult.

This prevents all women and men from having equitable relationships. I also believe this is why men have affairs with co-workers. Women need to have their own goals and sense of self-worth.