Meeting the Husband´s Needs

Dear Naomi, I like your attitude to children and am trying to practice it with my children for several years, but I often do have some problems with my husband, who does suport my ideas strongly, but at the same time feels that I dont care for his needs and that I am prefering the children. He is out of home every day from 6:30am until at least 6:30pm and comes home very tired (often needing to do some more work) and feels very bad, when the house is messy (at our home I am the messy person and he is the more neat one), but has no energy to clean the mess. He told me, that he feels that there is no place for him here. As he comes home in the evening, the children are usually already needing me a lot, so I can not take care of him, as he wishes (I sometimes try it, but this leads usually only to my conflicts with children, who do need me as well). Than he usually needs to go to bed earlier than our children, so we dont have any time together.

During the weekends he does some work on the house - I usually try to help him to be together, but our younger child is only 2,5 yo, so he needs me very often and I cannot spend longer times working together with my husband, what is annoying him. I feel guilty, that I do try my best to give anything my children need, but when it comes to my husband, I dont care... My friends think, that I should do some compromises in my attitude and for example ask the children to go to bed earlier to have some time together in the evening or to not pay so much attention to the children during the day and keep the house more tidy, but I am not able to do this... I want every member of our family to be happy at our home, but don´t know how to meet the needs of everyone... Thank you very much for any sugestions.