A woman whose family begged her to get two dogs now hates the pets – and her life. Mariella Frostrup says she needs to focus on the real causes of her unhappinessIf you have a dilemma, send a brief email to mariella.frostrup@observer.co.uk

The dilemma Five years ago I gave in to the urging of my daughters and husband and acquired two dogs. I am not a dog person but felt that feelings might develop. They did – negative ones, which have worsened over time, and now I cannot stand the animals. As well as the usual care and attention – walks, feeding etc – they are intermittently incontinent and frequently wake me in the night by scratching the floors. No amount of training has cracked the problem. My husband takes responsibility for them when he is around, but my daughters no longer pull their weight. I am starting to dislike my life intensely. Like a lot of working mothers, I feel underappreciated. I have suffered from depression throughout my life and am on antidepressants. I feel the dogs really are the final straw. My husband dotes on them so much he simply cannot believe it when I tell him how I feel. If I asked him to choose between the dogs and me, he would choose me. But he would never forgive me for making him get rid of them.

Mariella replies Hmmm, where to start. Run for the hills and dispense with the lot of them?

Clearly your problems don't stem from the dogs, but they are certainly exacerbated by them. You could actually divide your letter into two parts, the first part ending just before the line: "I am starting to dislike my life intensely." I'm sure you don't need me to organise your domestic life, a skill that frankly I continue to struggle with myself, or tell you how to manage incontinent dogs. My instinct on that is that, like all living creatures, they soak up the atmosphere around them, and the neediness and disobedience you describe are simply a dumb animal's only way to express its stress. That won't help you, as you are already feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders and I'm not trying to make you feel guilty.

I will offer one tip on the animal-husbandry front before I move on, as we had similar problems when work meant our dogs had to be cared for by friends and neighbours two nights a week. All of a sudden two perfectly house-trained animals with whom we'd lived happily in a central London flat couldn't be trusted to get through the night without leaving an unwelcome deposit in the morning. Our vet blamed the move and the subsequent disruption and advised a strict routine, with a meal at exactly the same time at the beginning and end of day and walks at regular intervals, to help diminish their agitation. We embraced his advice and haven't had an episode since.

The truth is that sorting out your dogs is probably your least daunting challenge. You've naturally chosen them as the object of your ire, as they are more easily dispensed with than husband and children. As you say, like many women you are feeling dumped on, and that's compounded by your propensity towards depression. Stewing over the injustice of your situation, in my own experience, only makes things worse.

Antidepressants are seldom the final answer, but at least they should iron you out enough to help you tackle your present difficulties. It may seem stupidly obvious, but a list is always helpful: looking at your responsibilities, however onerous, laid out in order, just awaiting the tick of completion, can create a pleasing if slightly delusional sense of achievability. It's also a way of addressing the unfair division of labour within your family.

If your girls are old enough to start shrugging off responsibility for the pets they coveted, they are also old enough to start taking on their share of the chores. Instead of your madly trying to juggle everything and ending up achieving nothing, division of labour is the way forward. Distributing the day-to-day tasks among the wider family is something we women are rather bad at. We go about resenting the weight of our duties while failing entirely to delegate control. It's a skill set we need to hone better, as it's essential for our sane survival in today's allegedly equal but still woefully unfairly distributed domestic environment.

Obsessing about the injustice of these incontinent beasts will only prolong your misery. When you stop making the dogs the focus of your irritation you'll get a far clearer view of the real causes of your unhappiness. It may not be good news for the rest of the family when the spotlight hovers over them, but tackling the root causes rather than the nearest example of your frustration is the only way forward.



If you have a dilemma, send a brief email to mariella.frostrup@observer.co.uk. Follow Mariella on Twitter @mariellaf1