If y'all haven't figured me out by now, I'll tell you that I need time for things to swirl around in my head and thoughts to pop out. My brain is like a slot machine where you pull the lever and things spin and then something comes up. ;-)
So.....in thinking about the whole time share thing, and re-reading my thread and Maybell's, here's what I have come up with. If H asked for 50/50 then who am I to judge why he did that? He may or may not have known what he was getting into, but that's not my problem, he will figure that out soon enough. Still, I personally am not ready for 50/50 but I am willing to increase his overnights from 2/14 to 5/14. For D11, I proposed every Thursday as an actual overnight, not just dinner, and then added Sunday night to the weekend mix. So every other week he has Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, (and just Thursday night on the off weeks). I can live with that for now and puts us further down the road towards 50/50 someday. I am pretty sure that D16 will never get to 50/50, but that's more up to her than it is us.
I've also considered how our previous sharing of child responsibilities affected our M. I am comfortable saying that I never criticized H for his parenting, and didn't try to micromanage it in any way. If he fed the kids cr*p for dinner and forgot to bathe them not a word was said. However, I will admit that I did resent having to shoulder the burden of childcare while he did whatever he wanted to, dinners out, football games, etc. I often thought that when I wanted to do something, it was a big production to do it, having to find and pay a sitter, make dinner ahead of time, etc., whereas when H wanted to do something he just did it, usually without discussing it with me first. That probably played a role in my attitude even though I didn't recognize it. And it's just another example of how I didn't stand up for my wants and needs, but swallowed hard and swept things under the rug.
Also, just the sheer time it took to raise three kids and manage a house while working full time left little time for H and the M. If I had asked for his help more, that perhaps would have left time to spend on the M. So, that's that. And it's too late now.
I even know why I did all this. I put my parenting percentage at 80%, but my mom's was 99%. She had total responsibility for raising me and my sister, my dad barely interacted with us at all. I thought my M was so much better than my parents because my H actually participated with the kids some.
