My dad sits in his green winged back chair reading Cotton Mather. He announces, “I could use more coffee.” And, magically, a cup of black coffee appears. Well, not so magically. My mom has brought it into the livingroom for him.
“Mom!,” I shout. “He could get it himself.” Dad just giggles and returns to his reading. And mom smiles.
My mom really thinks that men are retarded. There is no point forcing my dad to take on all the chores around the house, because she’s convinced there is no way he could do it.
My husband’s aunt frequently sends me e-mails that have been forward a bazillion times through the internet. These e-mails recount all the work that women do and end with a note to hug another woman in your life or offer a prayer. Nothing about giving the guys a swift kick in the ass.
I think guys have evolved a bit in recent years. And women of my generation do expect the guys to pull their weight around the house more.
But when it comes to the kids, it is still women who bear most of the responsibility. It’s women who are responsible for finding the childcare, who fret about the morality of hiring nannies, who take days off when the kids are sick, who remember to buy the birthday cake, who attend other kid’s birthday parties, who sign the kids up for piano lessons, who go to Back to School night.
Steve took Jonah to his soccer game this Saturday. He noted that it was mostly mothers on the sideline.
It’s no wonder that women have the hardest time negotiating work and family. They have a greater share of family responsibilities.
Who sorts out the winter clothes in your house? Who buys the birthday presents? Who writes the thank you notes? Who organizes the photo album?
Apt. 11d 
It’s true that us moms take on an awful lot at home. And at school events and after school activities it almost appears as if I live in the “world of women.” Where are all the men?? I think to myself. Even though I know that most of men in this suburban NJ neighborhood are off in NYC earning their livings.
But recently I was surprised to see so many fathers show up to the Saturday soccer games. This is one area where dads really get involved. I’d say they similarly appear at Little League and pee wee football. And honestly I don’t know how these dads do find the time to coach with their long commutes and such. Not to say the moms don’t work. But many of the moms have opted to work closer to home and avoid the NYC commute as much as possible.
So yeah, dads today are definitely trying to get involved. And it is no easy task. My husband leaves the house before any of us wake up and he doesn’t come home until 7:00 p.m. (usually later because of traffic). And so I find myself, because I work from home, doing all the chauffering to afterschool activities, parties, doctor appointments and more. Sometimes I am exhausted and lately we have been out so much that we rarely get home much earlier than my husband. Childhood has become a full-time job.
Also, I’d say that many dads pick up the slack on the weekends. On any given weekend around here you will find the dads are the ones driving the kids to parties and other activities (like soccer). So I guess many women are opting to work on weekends too. Either way, it is obvious that everyone is juggling as much as they can to provide consistency in their children’s lives.
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Winter clothes? Me. Birthday present shopping? Joint. Photo album organizing? Me.
To be fair, he gets up with the kids most mornings (today was a rare exception) and gives me an hour or more of extra sleep. He feeds them breakfast, gets them dressed and sometimes even packs their lunches before I get up(though usually I pack their lunches). He does most of the dishes, most of the grocery shopping and almost all the dishwashing. Since he’s fluent in French (I’m reading fluent but a horror at oral), he tutors eldest in her French homework. He’s happy to have recently shifted to daytime hours, simply so he can take eldest to karate and take back more of his share of the parenting.
Sure, I know I spend more time on the kids than he does: it’s more suited to my temperament. He spends more time on the errands, since he enjoys that. We try to support each other as I suspect is the ideal in most contemporary marriages.
That’s such a paradigm shift from the previous generation, though. I look at families that I know from that age, where the husband declares himself helpless to fix a sandwich if his wife’s around and where she agrees. I can’t fathom the relationships where there’s such a meeting of unequals: he rules outside the home absolutely and she rules inside the kitchen. I saw some of that in the university families amongst whom I matured: though I suspect that a lot of those men were adept at paying lip service to equality while still getting a full-ride from the wife at home.
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I’m “only” a stepmother, and part-time at that, so our division of labor is interesting. He does the majority of sole-practitioner kid-related stuff when we have the kid (every other weekend and every Wednesday night), and we do a fair amount together; sometimes I take the kid solo for a few hours, and I had the kid for a week over the summer (which worked out quite well). It’s true that mom has the kid more often–but dad has made every single trip to pick up or drop off the kid for the past six years (no, wait, she dropped him off one time when she was coming into the city and we were taking the kid as a favor). Dad also spends a lot of time at the house–fixing the furnace, over the past week, and dealing with the pool, and so on. Relations are actually pretty amicable among all parties, for which I’m grateful, especially on the kid’s behalf. (I love the kid dearly, I should add, and I’m the biggest disciplinary pain in his ass.)
As for our house, however, the SO has been driving me nuts lately. I lived alone for a long time (nearly 20 years) before we moved in together three years ago, so that explains some of it, but he just leaves a LOT of crap around. It’s a serious bone of contention right now–I’m not a maid, and I’m not cleaning up after someone else. Why should I? It’s not that I’m a neat freak and he’s not–far from it. And he means well, I think. But why does someone think that the coffee table is an appropriate place to leave the kid’s underwear? (Clean, I think, but still.)
Which leads me to suspect that a lot of women clean up after men a lot more than I do–I have a nearly infinite capacity to leave the underwear exactly where they are.
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I think one important aspect of this issue has come up before in conversations here and elsewhere. It’s important not to take the division of labor as a problem before we even discuss whether there’s an agreement on the jobs that need doing and when they need doing. I’m content to leave last night’s dishwashing soaking for the early morning: it’s when I prefer to do it. (This is pre-dishwasher). If my wife does it after our daughter is in bed, I’m disinclined to regard that as an unfair division of labor: that’s her need to have it done then. (Actually, she’s ok with leaving it for the early morning as well–I’m exaggerating here a bit to make the point.) I’m content with certain kinds of messiness; my wife is content with other kinds of messiness. We intervene in each other’s mess a lot while trying to protect our own. And yet a strategic arms limitation that put both messes off limits might end up with a joint level of total messiness that would be a general problem.
I think at least some conflict over the non-necessary social or organizational labors you cite is about differently calibrated sensibilities about what is necessary and what is voluntary work of social reproduction. The gendering of those ideas is part of a deep cultural structure that coheres to middle-class ideals of domesticity, so deep that we’re often scarcely aware of it. Much of that labor was a vital bourgeois necessity in Edwardian society, or even as late as the 1950s and 1960s–but I honestly don’t think it’s a professional or social necessity now. You don’t *have* to organize the photo album or send Christmas cards and so on. That may even go for some organizational or logistical efforts within the household. It certainly goes for *styles* of work. My wife and I tend to clash over the degree to which our daughter’s health needs constant monitoring or the degree to which she needs to be compelled to eat, and I happen to think I’m right–that the labor she invests in these things is actually counterproductive as well as time-wasting. We tend to disagree on other things, like where the dishes ought to be prior to being loaded into the dishwasher–she puts them in the sink, I put them on the counter. Her choice, in my view, actually makes *more* labor for me when I load the dishwasher as well as more labor when I want to use the sink for other purposes.
There’s also a keys-under-the-lamppost thing here potentially. You might notice when your Mom brings your Dad coffee and simply not notice at all when he brings her something. Much as the inequity in domestic labor is structured, so too is a certain kind of bemused/angry female critique of male behavior–it connects certain dots while not connecting others.
That being said, there’s still real structural inequity in the necessary domestic work of most households. There is in ours, I know–I have definitely slacked off with certain tasks over the nearly two decades we’ve been married. Not generally anything connected to child-rearing but a few things. The little stuff you mention we pretty well do equally–I do the photo albums, my wife does the winter clothes, etc. The big jobs–I do the cooking, and until recently, she did the laundry and most of the dishwashing. That weights to her.
Note “until recently”. My wife did something subtle the other day that I think was very smart–she simply stopped doing my clothes. No confrontations, no announcements, no nagging–no attempt to step into a kind of mothering posture where she was giving dictates. Also no negotiation, no “we need to talk”. Just quietly stopped doing it. So now I do my laundry. I think that was pretty effective. I think in some ways that real equity in household labors won’t come until women stop assuming responsibility for that labor being done, and stop positioning themselves as the moral leader of the household, looking disapprovingly on male malfeasance. In the wake of surrendering that position, a more honest accounting of the things that need doing, and the flexibility of styles in which they need be done.
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My husband and I have worked out a balance that satisfies us. But we have an unusually nice situation: he works fairly regular hours (unfortunately with lots of travel) and I stay home but have an au pair to help with my three kids. I realize how fortunate I am to be in this position.
I do all the daytime childcare tasks including pediatrician appointments, transportation to and from school and activities, arranging playdates, and so forth, with the help of the au pair. My husband will occasionally attend school parties because they exhaust me.
My husband often takes the kids out to museums on the weekends, goes to birthday parties (again because he’s more social than I), and did the preliminary research on private schools for our impending move to another state. He buys the birthday presents. He also takes pictures of the kids and keeps the photos organized because I’m not interested in doing that.
It’s a great balance for us but it only works because we are dividing the work between three adults.
I do have to agree with Timothy that some problems that may occur between husbands and wives are due to differing standards over getting stuff done. Problems can arise, however, when no one takes responsibility for getting something done as happened recently in our family when my husband and I didn’t pay any attention to our third grader’s homework routine. He got extremely behind, was in trouble with the teacher, and became very upset. One of us should have helped him establish a schedule up front. I think it probably should be my job to do that, because I’m at home.
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Sure, guys do more than they used to with the kids and around the house. When my husband is home, he reads the kids stories and puts them to bed. He does a lot when he’s really tired after a long day at work. (hug, honey.)
But with a few exceptions of some truly exceptional stay at home dads that I know, it’s the woman’s job to mastermind the schedule of life. To dole out the chores. To do the work that the guy doesn’t want to do. To remember that it’s Pajama Day at school. Even in situations where both have heavy duty careers, the mother still carries most of the work at home. These responsibilities make having a career and a family much harder for women.
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I agree with Timothy, too, and I’ve tried to take that attitude into our household. We did laundry separately, then we used to do laundry together, but now, on his suggestion, we’ve separated it again, which I prefer. I don’t do anything with his clothes, except occasionally provide feedback on whether the colors go together (he does the same for me). But who washes the dishtowels? Always me; they’d be disgustingly filthy otherwise. And the sheets? Usually me, at least with our bed; he usually does his son’s bed. I probably clean the bathroom a little more than he does, but trust me when I say that I have a very high tolerance for crud, so the bathroom often turns into a pit of filth before anyone cleans it. He vacuums more than I do, but mostly because my hair annoys him. But who’s more likely to leave dirty dishes on the counter or stove? Him. Who’s more likely to have clutter all over the apartment? Him. And I could go on. I think we have to have bunk apartments (which has always been my fantasy in any case)–kind of like Mary and Rhoda, you know?
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The division of work question has always been one of the most interesting–and most tedious–of the great feminist work/life debates. As I heard a lesbian scholar once say, “If I never have to listen to straight women complain about housework again, I could die happy.”
My sense is that this is as much about power and control as it is about men and women. Women historically have controlled the home and family because it was the one realm where they had power. Although women have been able to gain power in other arenas, they have been unwilling to relinquish control over the home and family. It comes from the very first moment of parenting, when mother chooses to breastfeed, thus controlling a significant amount of a baby’s life. That’s not to say that breastfeeding and bonding aren’t important–because they are–but points out that it does create an unintentional (or intentional) control dynamic where mom calls the shots and begins dictating the child’s life and routine.
When I talk to men about the housework, they note that they are more than happy to help, but that they are often chastised for “not doing it right” or “not doing enough.” The implicit message they receive is that home is their wives center of control and that they are expected to meet her standards if they are going to participate.
Thus, if the kid’s underwear is sitting on the table, it’s not that dad doesn’t care or is trying to make your life difficult, but it’s that he isn’t doing things mom’s way and complaining about laundry is another way to voice control.
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Timothy makes a couple of good points there. One is that there are often fundamental differences in how we weight the importance of things. There are jobs I get nagged about that I resent doing, because I consider them petty and unimportant, and not worth the effort. And yet if I were to nag about backing up her files, for instance, I’d be a tyrant…and yet when she loses a file I’m the one who has to go and try to resurrect it somehow. And then there are the things she thinks I’m being lazy about, but really make sense. I always just put my bathrobe across the foot of the bed, for instance, where it’s handy — she insists on hanging it up, and it’s always a moment of aggravation when I get up and have to go hunting for the thing.
The division of labor is also an important point. There’s that horrible children’s story we all get indoctrinated with: the one where the wife and husband swap jobs, and the wife sails unflappably through the husband’s duties, while the poor man is flustered and incompetent. I think that demeaning stereotypically ‘male’ duties is just as bad as trivializing ‘female’ work, and doubly so since we are seeing an increasing exchange of those traditional roles. I really wish you hadn’t titled this “retarded or freeloading”, since it perpetuates some ugly gender stereotypes. We guys aren’t all Homer Simpson.
We’ve been doing that reversal experiment in my family. My wife took a job last year that was three hours away; she lives there during the week and comes home on the weekend. I’ve got the kids, so I’m the one juggling a career and housework and taking care of the family. She’s the one struggling full time on a new and demanding job. We’re both stressed. But she’s getting her work done, and the house hasn’t degenerated into a pile of debris, and none of the kids have run away from home, yet.
Your initial anecdote is also a bit unfortunate. On weekends, guess who sleeps in every morning and expects me to bring her a cup of coffee in bed? And no, I don’t think it means that she is retarded.
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Sorry, PZ, didn’t really mean to piss off the guys. I just decided to write more controversial and one sided posts to get debate going.
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I agree with Dan, that part of the problem remains that many women are unwilling to relinguish control at home. Some women need to be the ones who control all decisions. I’ve seen people with three kids brag that there husbands have never changed a diaper. The men apparently aren’t capable of changing a diaper, although they can hold down well-paying jobs on Wall Street. After a while, some men get tired of women criticizing them so they retreat. And I guess some women get tired of things being done wrong, so they just do it themselves. This builds up their self-esteem — making them indispensable as the keeper of the home.
In our society we hold women up to ridiculous standards of perfection (thanks Martha Stewart). And a lot of stay-at-home women were themselves once competitive bulldogs at work. They bring this same ambition and drive to the home. But perfection at home isn’t always necessary (it’s not going to lead to a cushy office or promotion). Besides, with the repetition of chores at home, you’ll only burn yourself out trying to do it all by yourself — your way.
Still, I admit that I do a bit more than my husband because I’m based at home. And like others have said, he does his own laundry, but somehow I’m responsible for my laundry, my daughter’s laundry, my sons’ laundry, and additional linens and things. When I have a meeting in the city, it’s up to me to arrange for afterschool pick-up and childcare for the kids. I get the school notices and have to remember the Halloween cookies. But we rotate the cooking and I hate vacuuming so he does all of that. Most couples have to work on a balance within their own relationship, based on individual strengths, weaknesses, and time availability.
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Timothy’s comment is wonderful; it frames the issues in a really intriguing and helpful way, as the many follow up comments show. He’s right: it is important to think about how different spouses mark their territory through assuming control over certain chores or responsibilities (or simply how those chores are carried out), and also how those territories reflect on cultural expectations, before one simply (however accurately) insists “dads are freeloaders.” By taking possession of the laundry (which she most certainly does), Melissa asserts a certain amount of control over who wears what and when. Because such questions are important to her, and aren’t to me, her assumption of the labor of clothes washing isn’t an issue between us–though that leaves unexamined the degree to which her concern with questions of appearance is a gender-based expectation that she’s accommodated herself to.
General divisions as they presently exist in our household: I’m trash, breakfast, the bathroom, the yardwork and storage shed (again, something she doesn’t care about, and I do, so no conflict, except perhaps for the nagging feeling that I care because guys are supposed to care about the outdoors), the car (cleaning and maintenance), and anything which involves the kids–besides nursing our youngest–which occurs before 6:30am (which is when Melissa gets up; I’m regularly awake an hour or so before that). She’s vacuuming, dusting, laundry, dinner, dressing and organizing the family in general, and supervising homework and piano lessons (I’m not competant to do the latter, but should take more responsibility for the former). Not an equal division of housework by any means, but one that, insofar as I can tell, doesn’t result in any regular arguments or unspoken frustration.
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I have been a stay at home father for the past 4 years, since the birth of our child, so perhaps my view point is a bit skewed. As a man who has taken on all the traditional child rearing, house keeping, errand running duties, it’s more about the effort than the actual amount of work my wife does around the house.
Having been the only person to clean the bathroom for 4 years, when my wife does do it, if I’m away on a saturday, it is not the way I would have done it, but it’s the fact that she did it which appeals to me, and that I didn’t have to ask. Actually, because of the amount she works for her job I prefer if she did very little around the house so she can spend the time with our son and myself.
I acknowledge that I want the control around the house and with my son. This is my domain, I spend so much time here taking care of things, that I want them done a certain way. Whan I was a professional artist in my previous life I wanted the same control over my projects and clients. If someone tried to help and did things the way I would not have, it made my work more difficult.
My bigger concern as a stay-at-home father is returning to “real life”. I am currently in the process of applying to law school’s, not to become a “lawyer” but to work in public policy/government or perhaps academia. I wonder what the overall perception of people “out there” is concerning men who spend years raising a child. Will I be as appealing? Will they think that I do have a unique perspective? Do people think that I have just been hanging out, freeloading off my wife?
Just some thoughts.
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Okay, this debate almost always goes straight to “women control housework because they WANT to,” or “women have different/higher standards than men, and their standards predominate,” or something like that. And those things aren’t always the case. I do not chastise for “not doing it right,” for example, because I think there’s more than one right way to get something liveably clean. But I also don’t think that what he’s doing in our apartment is “helping.” We both live there, and we both work full-time–in my mind, that makes us both responsible for making sure the place doesn’t become completely filthy–and doesn’t have clutter on every available surface. (Some surfaces, all of the time, however, is pretty likely, given our inherent messiness.)
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Photo album is all my husband. He is obsessed with taking a picture a day of our son. He also has a lower tolerance than I do for clutter in the house and frequently goes through and cleans. I take care of the birthdays and social activities. And cooking. And thankfully, he does the dishes.
michelle
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My wife has a steady job with known hours. My job is usually steady, but every once in a while (say, every other month), I have to pull some late-nights in the office for a week. When that happens, the household responsibilities (pay bills, due laundry, etc.) all devolve onto my wife.
Then, the next week begins, and a tipping point has been reached. I’m at a loss. What has and has not been done? I don’t know. Are there bills that are yet to be paid? If so, where has my wife put them? Are there extra errands to be run because of household events that I’m unaware of? I don’t know. There is an informational imbalance, with my wife having all of the information. And the tags. She probably picked up my dry cleaning in that week I worked. Now the receipt is somewhere in her wallet, and I won’t notice and the dry cleaning will start appearing in my closet. Because it never occurs to us in the evening to go through her wallet to see if there are any dry cleaning tags.
Meanwhile, there is definitely a “higher standards” thing. Last week, my wife had a cold and the house got really messy. So one night, after she fell asleep, I cleaned up. The next day she was in tears for letting the house get so out of hand that “EVEN I” noticed. I wasn’t angry that the house was messy, but I definitely have a higher threshold for those things.
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My husband and I both work full time outside the home. My children from a previous marriage lived with us until recently (they are 14 and 18). It took a couple of years to ramp up, but he’s been an excellent parent, even achieving “mental parent” status (where they remember to think about the kids’ needs in advance). He’s taken them to the dentist and doctor, even gone on school field trips. He came with me to meetings with teachers. He stayed home with them when they were sick, at least half the time.
On housework, the division is somewhat unfair: he does most of it. I pay the bills, clean the bathroom, vacuum and dust, and mop the kitchen floor; he does all the laundry and the entire kitchen duty (loading and unloading the dishwasher, cleaning the counters, etc.) except mopping the floor. Note that my jobs are weekly at most, while his are daily. We hire out the yard work, as we both hate it and we chose to spend discretionary income on that. We plan the week’s meals together, then I shop, he puts away, and we take turns cooking.
He cleans well enough to meet my standards, and I’ve never felt the need to do it better myself–but that was work, learning to let go and let him do it his way. He waits on me hand and foot when I need it (sick or injured), and I do the same for him. Then there’s the niceties, like offering to get each other something when one of us is heading toward the kitchen, or picking up the slack when the other one has had a bad day. We have a fabulous, mutually supportive relationship.
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A lot of this imbalance is education, as well. My husband is always willing to do his share, but I have had to teach him about things like cleaning countertops (to avoid attracting bugs), how to use a mixer, basic cooking, how to tell when a toilet needs scrubbing, etc. He was simply never involved in these activities as a kid or young adult. He took out the garbage, helped out in the yard, and did his own laundry, but his mom did the rest.
Also, as someone pointed out elsewhere, there is a social-approval aspect. Women often feel that outsiders judge them on household cleanliness–because they do. Lots of women, myself included, who’ve had an unexpected visit from a friend when the house looked like hell have felt shame, deserved or not, at not having kept it clean. If women have “higher standards” it’s because we think we are being judged by those standards. If men have “lower standards” it’s because they don’t feel that pressure. It’s easy to make it sound like women are just being unreasonably uptight, but let’s remember, Martha Stewart isn’t aimed at men. It’s women that are somehow supposed to keep everything neat, clean, and cute, and men who are allowed to be sloppy in our popular culture. It’s a hard pattern to break, especially if you don’t want to just give up and live in filth “like a guy”. The middle ground between perfection and filthy pit isn’t discussed much.
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So if our fathers were basically “retarded” when it came to housework, and we are a bit better, though the burden is still borne disproportionately by women, will our sons be better still?
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I tried to get at some of these issues in a column recently, which if you’ll forgive me I’ll link to here:Looking for Enjoli. A lot of what I worry about has to do with what Kai calls “mental parent” status–and it’s not just about parenting. I’m the only one (it seems) who notices that we’re about to run out of toilet paper, or milk, and runs to the store for it. But again, the rest of the household doesn’t think “only two rolls in the closet” is “about to run out.” So I take ownership of that particular issue and don’t stress (too much) about how it’s only me doing it.
I still think that in addition to changing individual parents’ minds, we need to change policies. If most men took parental leave when their children were born, they might get indoctrinated into “mental parenting” pretty quickly. But if, as often happens, that’s just the moment when they ramp up their careers in order to accommodate their co-parent’s desire to stay at home with this new and fascinating infant, then they wll cede those responsibilities rather easily. After all, the job of running a household is hard mental work, involving all kinds of interrelated calculations–why would you take it on if you didn’t have to? But if you were at home during some crucial period when those responsibilities were being (implicitly or explicitly) negotiated, you might take on parts of it as a matter of course, and avoid conflict later.
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So if our fathers were basically “retarded” when it came to housework, and we are a bit better, though the burden is still borne disproportionately by women, will our sons be better still?
I’ve got two girls. Is it my socially responsible duty as a father to teach them to be slobs so that they won’t get caught in the “caring more” trap when they get married?
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I think that Tim’s right in that there are different levels, but I can tell you that responsibility doesn’t always fall along those lines. AD Spouse has different thresholds, but expects me to keep to his more exacting standards on a daily basis, while I tend to do most of the cleaning on Saturdays. I think in our case, gender and age have a lot to do with it — he’s at the beginning of the baby boom, I’m at the end. But I would also like to know how many of us are expected by our SOs to bear the brunt of the responsibilities because we are academics and have such flexible (which seems in my own case to translate to part-time, although I’m teaching 4 courses this quarter) schedules. It seems like a lot of the people weighing in are academics married to academics — but how much of our discussions are dictated by the perception that we don’t have “real” jobs by much of the non-academic world? And how much of our taking on extra responsibilities, at home or at work, is influenced by our own inability to separate home and work?
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I’m not really pissed off: I know women have been taken advantage of for a long time. I just don’t think promoting a destructive stereotype about men to oppose the previous destructive stereotype about women is taking us down a productive path.
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It seems to me that what some of the previous posters are talking about is emotion work (see the work of Arlie Hochschild): the work of paying attention to what needs to be done and seeing that it is done. This includes ‘educating’ your spouse about what needs to be done, asking your kids to chip in, etc. I think there is research somewhere that shows that even when the household division of labor is fairly equal, women bear the brunt of the emotion work.
In my life, my spouse (we are both academics) probably does most of the housework. He notices that the laundry needs doing, and he does it. Ditto the bathrooms, vacuuming, etc. I notice and do these things too, but he often gets to them before I do. We both buy birthday presents for our kids and their friends. I do all photo albums, and thank you notes are split based on who they came from (my friends/family, I do and he does his). We both notice when the kids need new clothes. I sort the winter and summer clothes, and reorganise the house when required.
I don’t think we are typical in our shared approach to both the actual work and the emotion work. I am very grateful that the burden of all the emotion work (and the housework!) does not fall on my shoulders, as it does on my mom’s and those of most (all?) of my friends. It is almost easier to do it all yourself than to have to convince others to contribute to household labor, even though that is not fair. I know that I would resent having to do it all, and I know that many women resent it, even while they put up with it.
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I sort out all the winter clothes. I buy the birthday presents because the one time I didn’t, I cried. I don’t write the thank-you notes but I generate them on the pc, type a list for ease of readability, and burp our envelopes, otherwise, no thank you cards would get sent and I would feel like a gnat around my thank-you-card conscious friends. I also handle all photo-related business.
I also strip beds, but I don’t always wash the linens. I make lists but I don’t always execute the items. I print the calendar out of where everyone is to go but I usually don’t take them. Because I’m not here at all two days per week and much of the time I am here, I am a mute subject, reading amidst their revelry.
Conversely, I’m missing in domestic action on day-to-day duties that must be performed to keep the household afloat, like laundry duty, required semi-weekly around here, making school lunches, cleaning of any sort outside of the occasional dishwasher duty.
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Karen’s point about the emotion work is exactly right. My husband does NONE of that. He doesn’t keep track of presents owed, even to his own family, or things that need to be sent into school. When he goes shopping, he can’t remember staples that the kids eat every week unless I explicitly write them down, explicitly and very specifically, i.e., this particular brand of cereal (and a BIG box). He doesn’t have any internal tracking of what we use and need on a day-to-day basis.
I think that being solely responsible for this sort of thing is more exhausting than it appears–and beyond the actual work involved. It feels like a burden, to have to be in charge of all of this.
On the other hand, my husband was much more of a neatnik than I when we married (we’ve both moved to a middle ground), which has greatly benefitted me, though we had many arguments in the beginning, before we had children. (When he didn’t want to leave a dish in the sink for two minutes. But he still wants to clean the kitchen before we eat dinner, which drives me crazy). He cleans up kid-clutter at the end of every day, a job which I despise. He vacuums every day in the family room, which is good because we have toddlers who eat crackers in there.
I cook, and usually shop. Because we both work, we have a service that does the bathrooms and general cleaning every two weeks. I do ALL the diapers–for our two two year olds. (For our first daughter, he used to do them. I don’t know what happened.) He does bills, a job which admittedly we both hate. I clean kid’s rooms, and organize STUFF everywhere (his cleaning mainly means putting stuff into containers without any organization.)Kid’s baths–me. Twins to bed–me. 6-yr old to bed–him. Laundry–me, or handwashables would be thrown in by mistake. Dishes–both of us.
But we still fight about who’s doing more. I feel overwelmed and in need of more support, and taken advantage of, but then we talk about it and try to find a common ground, so that we both feel supported and cared for. It’s been worth the struggles–I can’t believe how much we’ve both changed, since we’ve been married. It’s always very clear when my not-so-neat family members visit our mostly neat house (and I’m stressed as much as my husband dy the disorder), or when we visit my MIL’s house and my husband is expected to do nothing to help at all (and nobody is allowed food anywhere, except the kitchen).
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retards, au pairs, discretionary income, hiring out, etc
Reading around a little today, I happened upon a blog conference that took place last week over at 11D centered on work and family. I haven’t had the time to read through the entire conference, posts and comments, but this
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