Day 21

Another day, another writing. Tonight, I bring you an essay. I’ve been thinking about this topic on and off for, oh, about 30 years now…since the incident that inspired the jumping off point for the essay occurred. Time to write about it. No sense waiting another 30 years.

THE WOMAN MYTH

 There are things that need to be talked about, things that need to be said. There are voices saying some of these things, but the voices speaking against them seem to roar louder. So I keep shouting, hoping to be that tiny little voice that finally breaks through all the din and gets the message through. If I’m not, if it’s you instead, I’m good with that, too. Tonight I want to talk about…housework. Child care. Yes, those age old topics that seem to be staples of the war between the sexes.

My upbringing included a share of the household chores. I don’t mind that; I think it’s good for children to learn how to do the things they’ll need to do as adults. But the situation always seemed sort of…wrong…to me. I had household chores. My sisters had household chores. My brothers…well, they did sometimes have to feed and water the livestock, but I had those chores, too. And household chores on top of it. My mother was a big believer in a separate role for women than for men, and that no good would come to women who stepped out of that role. I was expected to get married, have babies, and spend my life taking care of my husband and my children. What I wanted didn’t really matter in the equation, because I was a girl…and would be a woman soon.

I sort of humored my mother; it was always best to do that. I did my chores, I learned the tasks. But she knew I had no intention of living that life. I wanted to go to college. I don’t remember a single day of my life that I wanted the life she held in front of me like a carrot; college was my goal, at least by the time I was six. I presume I heard of it from somewhere. I don’t remember ever thinking of any future that didn’t include going to college, much to my mother’s horror.

So I enrolled in college. I didn’t date, for a myriad of reasons, one of the biggest being the fact that my mother convinced me that any man who asked me for a date was only asking so he could laugh at me when I accepted. I was shy, I was scared of dating, and I threw myself into my books. I was a good student, and earned the respect of my professors. I worked a nearly full time job after school, and I wasn’t really asking for more, at least not yet. Well, maybe a slight reduction in chores might have been nice, but that was not to be, at least not while I was living at home.

Then came the day that I met…him. The first man who asked me out that persuaded me to say ‘yes’. Why did I say yes? That first date was intensely uncomfortable, and I went to bed that night thinking, well at least that’s over. I never expected to hear from him again, but…well, I did. We started dating regularly. He asked me to  move in with him, and I did. He asked me to marry him, and I did. We had a child together. I was finally a woman in my mother’s eyes…and, unfortunately, in my own. I had drunk up too much of that teaching, no matter how I tried to shut it out. I finally felt like I was whole. But…I didn’t feel good. I didn’t feel happy. I grew more and more depressed, anorexic, suicidal, until finally I had to be hospitalized.

My husband and I had some joint sessions with my therapist, and out of those came the thing I would like to talk about now. Housework. When answering a question about what my husband hoped for out of my therapy, one of the answers he gave was that he was sick of having to do half the housework. The session continued without comment…until my husband left and I finished my usual session one on one. My doctor and I talked about that. He found it as peculiar as I did…and he didn’t even know at the time that my husband didn’t actually do half of the housework. He didn’t do one-tenth of the housework.

In seven years of marriage, he had gone to the grocery store once. He had done the laundry once, to prove to me I was doing it wrong. I made him pick the little lint balls out of his pants after he dried his dress pants with the towels. He cooked rarely, and washed the dishes infrequently. He never vacuumed, and he only made the bed every morning because he was still in it when I left for work. That’s right, I worked outside the home. Every day. I left for work two hours before he did, and returned two hours after he did. I made sixty percent of the income in the family…benefit of the fact that I had a college degree and he didn’t. And I did 99.9% of the housework. So why did he complain about having to do half the housework? This is a common phenomenon among men. Let’s pick it apart.

Studies have shown that men estimate the amount of housework they do much higher than women estimate the amount of housework men do. Of course, that could be perception. So studies have followed couples, and discovered…the women are right. They do most of the housework. Most of the child care. Most of the shopping. Most of the chauffeuring. Most of the sick care. This is true even when the woman is working as many hours outside the home as the men are. This is true even when the woman is working more hours outside the home than the men are.

Women come home from work and do housework. Men come home from work and help. Even the terminology used suggests men do not consider it part of the role they are expected to play, but some sweet little perk they give their wife. Because they are really such a hell of a guy. Studies further show that the worst of the household jobs are often left to women; that is particularly the case with child care. The men “babysit”, playing with the children. The wives are the ones most likely to change the diaper, clean up the vomit, and dodge flying food while teaching the little one to eat solid food. For men, it is babysitting, rather than engaging in a natural job as a result of being a father. For a woman, it is expected. It is just part of life.

My husband did not do half the housework, but he was sick of doing half the housework. Both of those equations are problematic. Why did he think he was doing half the housework when he did so little? Because perceptions are different when you are doing it than when you are watching it. And if you are one of those women, like I was, that make it look easy, then when your husband picks up his own socks, he will think he has done real work. For him, it just sort of happened. Oh, of course he could hear the vacuum running, and hear me open and close the washing machine, but none of that really registered as work. It was just…how things happened. So he perceived that he was doing as much as I was.

Perhaps for me the bigger problem is that somehow he had a right to be tired of this, and expect me to rectify the situation. Why? When we were both working outside the home, both with challenging full time jobs, why should one of us do more than half? What was working on his mind that suggested there was something wrong with him doing half the housework? I suppose, as a Baby Boomer, it could have been all those Leave it to Beaver episodes, presenting a middle-class utopia with a stay-home mother who was happy to be so, a wise father, and two mischievous boys. The perfect family, right? Or it could have been all the commercials that showed women washing dishes, doing laundry, cooking, and other caring things, all while looking sexy enough for any man. Or it could just be the general entitlement of growing up male, with the different expectations, the different roles, and the different toys.

We start learning young. Gender roles generally establish around the age of three. Yes, three. Not birth. I was not born with a vacuum cleaner in my hand, nor pearls around my neck. But I learned the lessons early, and when I got married, it was not difficult for me to fall into that role, even though I did not believe it to be any more my responsibility than his. I was part of the problem, because I accepted my role. I never questioned it, because…well, I don’t know why. I look back on that period with a great big question mark in my eyes.

But I refuse to take all the blame. Women are all too often blamed for the nasty ways they are treated. He is responsible for his own behavior, for not getting off his ass on Saturday mornings and helping me vacuum, helping me dust, helping me do the laundry. He is responsible for the imbalance in our lives, at least as responsible as I am, and probably more, because I could not control his behavior without becoming a nasty person I didn’t want to be. He could have controlled his behavior, and gotten up to help. I could have controlled my behavior by not doing any more than he was doing, but we would have lived in filth and no one would have eaten, so it seemed counter-productive at the time.

I still see this happening. The women I know…friends…colleagues…students… still take on the bulk of the housework while the man sometimes agrees to help. I have also noticed that the “help” is often accompanied by effusive thanks from the woman, an eternity of gratitude, followed up by telling her friends and family how wonderful he is, because he “helps”. In other words, he does a portion of his share, but not because he regards it as his share. He sees it as a gift for her, not a function of being alive in the world and needing to take responsibility for his own well being.

I have also heard a lot of men complain about being asked to “help”. It is evident that men feel their role is to bring home the bacon; it is her job to cook it. That has not changed in the slightest with the advent of two-income households. As for child care? If someone has to end their career for the sake of the children, who will that be? Oh, yes, you may know a family where it was the father. And that will be the one you will remember. All the cases where a mother left a good, satisfying job to stay home with children will not thrust themselves to the forefront of your mind. That should make you pause and think. The case of the father doing that is so unusual, you remember it. Without any prodding, you remember. The other cases, the mother quitting? Just background noise.

So my husband (ex-husband now) did little in relationship to the household, but perceived himself as doing at least as much as I did…and somehow perceived that there was something wrong with that. It would be funny…but there are way too many women who did not escape that situation, who still foot the bulk of the household work and child care even while working long shifts to pay important bills. The news has given a lot of play to the “mommy path” about career women deserting their fields for the more satisfying work of caring for others, their loved ones. What they don’t tell you is what a tiny percentage of women this comprises, and they don’t report on the ones who are miserable. The media continues to feed us what I like to call the “woman myth”, and we continue to believe it, even when we think we don’t.