How to Divide Labor
50/50 is a cool idea, but!
This one is going to be a quickie because it’s the last week of school and then we travel—Chill Mom Summer™️ Part 2 commences late next week. I could write 80,000 words on the history, present, and future of domestic labor (and I sort of am, for the next book) but let me give you the surface-version tl;dr of what I’ve learned so far, below:
I was talking to a friend—also a mom, also a writer—about our division of labor problem, back when it was more of a problem. I work from home, and my husband works in an office. He’s here in the morning, and he’s here for dinner and beyond, but I’m staring down the house and its attendant duties all day. I love to cook, even during lunch, just for me, which means I use a truly unreasonable number of dishes and pans every day. Also the laundry is right there, and I can see what the kids need, and also I’m here to oversee all repairs etc. This obviously means that I spend way more time than anyone else in this house on domestic tasks, and you would be guessing correctly if you thought I used to be furious and resentful about it. Not just furious at the idea that I was doing it all myself, but furious that I had let myself get trapped in some kind of semi-tradwife cycle under the guise of a “flexible schedule.” Perhaps you relate?
However, after many years of working on this—including all the work I did as I was writing my upcoming book How to be Less Useful—we’ve got a good balance going. Now I’m only intermittently mad, and only when things get waaay out of balance, and we know how to re-set the dials. But this balance we’ve achieved is nothing what I thought it was going to look like.
I guess I had this vague idea when we started a family that we’d split a long list of tasks down the middle. But our schedules, whereabouts and availability are drastically different, and what exactly am I meant to do logistically, leave a giant pile of cruddy dishes in the sink until he comes home? Present him with a long list of the stuff he wasn’t around to do during the daytime? Doesn’t seem exactly fair after he’s worked a ten hour day himself. So I thought about it a lot, and here’s the rough path that led us to today:
I acknowledged that I married a kind man, one who would do anything to make me happy, and is invested in the betterment of our family life.
We started to understand what baggage we had unintentionally brought into the marriage and could stand to change. Not to get too deeply into background (this s all in the book), but we were both raised in households where our moms managed the bulk of the domestic labor, while our dads provided the bulk of our financial stability. I, as eldest immigrant daughter, was wordlessly recruited into this lifestyle, and I’m only just starting to unwind all of that learning.
It is an actual fact there there are habits, information and skills that I have—years of training in the household arts, so second-nature they feel like breathing—that he simply does not, because it wasn’t modeled for him every second of every day, or expected that he’d take it all on. Here is where I could rail on about the patriarchy, but even toppling the patriarchy won’t make it come to our house and neatly make up for this gap in information. We had to do it ourselves, in a manner that didn’t unduly burden either of us.
