Apr 6, 2023·edited Apr 6, 2023Liked by Corinne Fay
God. We all have a chicken nugget and/or vet story, don't we? Mine is The Yogurt Story. (My therapist and I refer to it thusly all the time.)
My older kid, then an only child, got a yogurt in his bag for daycare every day. Yogurt was one of the few things at that time we could reliably count on him to eat because toddlers are weird. We had enough yogurts to last the week, but not to get past Friday. I had a work event on the Wednesday evening, so my husband was in charge of dinner. What did he give our son (among other things)? One of the two remaining yogurts in the fridge. So I went to pack the lunch bag on Thursday morning and discovered there was only one yogurt left - but there were two days of daycare left in the week. To this day my husband doesn't understand why I was so upset about that. No one is going to die! Everyone is going to eat! It will be fine! Okay, yes, but now I need to figure out when I'm going to make an unplanned trip to the supermarket around my full-time (then entirely in-office) job plus the normal child/dog care and then after I've mentally rearranged my entire schedule I'll have to actually take the time and energy to go and, well, if I'm going to the supermarket anyway I might as well get whatever else we need now so there's making that whole list and and and and...
No one died. Everyone ate. It was fine. But I was exhausted by the situation, and my husband still cannot comprehend why which, honestly, makes it even more draining.
(Thank you for giving me the space to tell this story.)
These conversations will never not hit close to home. The thing is I was raised by parents with an equal partnership. But that is not the reality of my marriage, and so in addition to everything else it kind of feels like a betrayal of the basic principles I was raised with. In addition to gender, which is the primary factor, my husband's parents partially replicated what they grew up with in India, which is to say, they had a lot more hired help in the house than most people in the US, so that was an added layer of my husband just not growing up with the sense that there is work involved in home life. His mother was, like, getting a second masters degree and doing research to ensure that their home renovations were historically accurate, and there was a cleaner coming in twice a week and someone getting reduced rent on a room in their home in exchange for things like doing the dishes after dinner so the family could have time together, and there were often grandparents in residence who helped with a lot of stuff, or an older cousin who would help my husband with his homework.
We have gone through all these different attempts to get him to do something, anything, reliably around the house. And they never take, and what makes it so obvious that -- although he has read a lot of stuff about division of household labor and mental load and agrees that it's all terrible -- on some level he just does not consider this stuff his job is that he is pretty decent about things having to do directly with our kid. He changed more or less his share of diapers when that was a thing. He supervises piano practice because he took a lot more piano as a kid than I did. He sees that as his responsibility and he does it. He is much less keyed into thinking of things having to do with the physical upkeep of the home as his responsibility.
Now, where I can kinda sorta look at our lives and look at the sociological literature and reconcile things is that a lot of what you read about is the leisure gap -- the foundational case by Arlie Hochschild that women were working full time and then coming home and working a second shift while men use that for leisure time, which has been built on by so many scholars since. And I work 40-45 hours a week but my husband is a biglaw lawyer, so he works more like 50 and up, and he does not have more leisure time than I do in raw hours. So, you know, I usually spend some time cleaning after our kid is in bed, but typically my husband is billing time at that point. But the mental load thing is so significant. I am always feeling the pressure of about 10 different things and he really is not, and while he has read about it and would claim to know it's a thing, he doesn't *understand* the pressure it creates on me.
There is a great essay by Maggie Smith in The Cut this week touching on the toll of being the emotional/logistical manager, and its roll in her divorce. I am feeling it all so hard.
The chicken nuggets story. God. I feel so vindicated. Because these things are always so small they almost feel petty to get so angry about, don’t they? You’re that nagging shrew. It’s such a complicated and intense anger to untangle and attempt to address.
I’m a lot older than many of you and past these kid phases in my life. I sure could’ve used you Virginia! That said, the emotional load of running a home...the vet story...remains mine. My husband works full time and due to health issues I do not. And when he fully shares.... I’m recovering from surgery....he gets so exhausted.
That said, I bear SO MUCH responsibility, it is crazy. I so appreciate all of you and your work. Thank you. We’re gonna work on it using your books. Hugs and gratitude.
I think about these sort of things a lot. My late husband and I didn't have kids, but we met and married in middle age, so the mental load/emotional labor/inequal division of household tasks happened quickly rather than creeping in, despite our best efforts. Perimenopause, 3 years of Covid disruptions, ADHD (both of us) and his back issues didn't help matters.
He passed away two weeks ago after a month in the hospital. I am obviously heartbroken, grieving and still very numb. However, yesterday I realized that in addition to spending a lot less time tidying up, I don't have the cooking/groceries mental load any more. I still cook and am eating fairly similarly to before, but it's so much easier with one. The main course lasts for 3-4 meals, rather than 1 meal. Even though he cooked and helped with meal prep, it didn't offset all the added work.
The other thing that was weird was that in the middle of all my grief and self-blame, there's a part of me that feels like I could have prevented this. I was across the country taking care of my elderly parents when he had a stroke and it breaks my heart that I wasn't here for him. For a while I kept wondering if he wouldn't have had the stroke if I'd been here/he hadn't had to do all the household stuff on his own/I hadn't been grumpy the last week because my mom had been making me crazy. Even in my grief I was still parroting the societal notion that as a woman I am responsible for all the things.
I am so, so sorry for your loss. Sounds like there are a lot of understandably complicated feelings in there - I hope you have someone who can help you through all of them. Sending you love.
I’m so sorry for your loss and sending you peace and love. I know you know in your thinking brain but I’m telling your feeling brain: this tragedy is not your fault. I’m so sorry your husband passed away so suddenly.
I’m glad you pointed out that you’d include more queer perspectives now. I’m a non-binary agender bi person and my partner is a bi/pan not entirely cis (still figuring out terminology) man. We’re both disabled and non-monogamous. We’ve been together for about 4 years. He’s been with his wife 20. They have 3 kids. There are 2 other queer family members in our group too. So basically it’s a bit like being a step mom without there being a divorce. Everyone gets along swimmingly.
My partner and I live separately and he is the primary caregiver. He takes care of 6 people’s food and basic needs every day. When a kid needs something, they almost always go to dad. Never to me, I’m behind the scenes, but sometimes to their mom especially for the oldest who doesn’t have the same relationship with my partner because he’s a stepdad. Anyway, my partner does an amazing job at this stuff. It’s truly breathtaking and impressive. At the same time, it totally replicates a ton of the ways in which he is always carrying the mental load and has a lot of pressure on him to be a perfect parent. Less from a middle class Instagram perspective and more from a “I can’t do this all because my body won’t cooperate as a disabled person and I’m poor so a lot of the solutions to that are inaccessible or fill me with shame for using because they’re expensive” perspective.
I think too that it’s important to recognize that my partner and I both have ADHD as does most of the group and I’m autistic. We have very different manifestations of this. I’m a hyper focus champion and planner and my partner is much better at doing everything spontaneously but not great at planning. He has less general anxiety about doing things but more perfectionist shame about not living up to expectations. I think it’s so important to understand that he takes such good care of us but sees this as a minimum and is terrified of disappointing us. This sounds a lot like the way we talk about socializing women. So I feel like it is a combination of how we socialize caregivers (regardless of gender) and the trauma of being the primary person expected to be responsible for such important things. There are different kinds of pressures and traumas for people with primary breadwinner responsibilities too, I know, as I’ve dealt with that all my life. And I experience a bit of a mental load overload trying to make things easier on us financially and as get longer term things done that are harder for my partner to plan (but my partner is very dedicated to learning and always reacts like he wants to be a good teammate per that example). I find this important because from an assigned gender at birth perspective each of us should have the opposite experience. What is even more challenging is that there is virtually no space to talk about this as a society because caregiver and earner traumas and experiences are so heavily gendered! Doesn’t it make so much sense why I’m agender?! (Gender? No, thank you.)
Anyway, my point is that women do most of this work, and I think it’s incredibly important to talk about that. And to go beyond the advice given here about how to make relationships egalitarian we also need to talk about the constraints of class, disability and gender (and so much more!). We have to deconstruct gender and trauma to understand that these are related and not incidental.
First, I have to admit I chuckled about the raw cauliflower thing at end. I’m not even slightly British (been in US my entire life) but I’ve seen and consumed raw cauliflower in crudité platters for decades.
But on the equity in household labor issue, I love this interview in most respects. The thing that makes me sad and angry is how generations of heterosexual cis women have to keep rediscovering this. Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the year I was born, and informed a generation of (white, mostly upper-class) women about “the problem with no name”. Alix Kates Shulman published “A Marriage Agreement”, an argument that couples should make a literal contract about how to divide chores and responsibilities, in 1969. Judy Syfer’s “Why I Want a Wife”, from the inaugural issue of Ms. magazine in 1972, was reprinted in anthologies for student writers well into the 1990s (hell, it probably still is). I read Arlie Hochschild’s study, The Second Shift, when I was in grad school, which is also when it was published (1989). Rhona Mahony’s brilliant “Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies, And Bargaining Power”, which offered pragmatic solutions as well as explanation, came out in 1995.
These are just the tip of the iceberg; ie, essays and studies I can recall off the top of my head, and I’m sure I’ll think of more after I press ‘send’ — I am, after all, a retired professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies. (I did Google a couple of dates and how to spell a few names.) But it’s surely enough to make my point. None of this new, and a global pandemic hasn’t changed it. Maybe as more women elect not to marry men, and/or not to have children, heterosexual cis men will begin to care. Or maybe they’ll turn to the likes of Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and incel groups.
I am the person who really doesn’t love cooking in our house. my husband is a high school soccer coach and when he’s in season I have to take on more cooking and childcare bc he doesn’t get home until 7-8 pm. He does all our grocery shopping and will buy a lot more easily prepared foods but it’s always tough to get back into it for me (August-October and February-May are boys’ and girls’ seasons).
I’d be curious to see disabled and neurodivergent perspectives included in these conversations as well. I’m an autistic woman and have a lot of executive functioning difficulties. Whenever I read pieces like this I always feel equal parts “I could never be married to a neurotypical man” and “I could never be married to a neurotypical woman.” I did stop to ask myself, “wait, equal parts?” Because that doesn’t seem fair. But yes, equally, I think because as someone who had never, since early childhood, been able to meet the functional expectations of being female, I always experienced my behavior being more actively policed by other women--even if the expectations themselves are rooted in misogyny. So conversations along these lines always trigger a very strong and conflicted emotional response.
KC Davis touches very lightly on these issues in How to Keep House While Drowning, but in a way that felt more survivable for me: prioritizing equal rest over equal tasks. And yes, of course we both rest while the house is a wreck because we lost the fight to live up to neurotypical standards a long time ago and we both just want to survive (and carve out our own, unique, invisible-to-most-people path to joy).
I do think the issues are just as present in neurodivergent relationships, and the solutions just as slippery to nail down--they just fall into a very different dynamic reaching toward a very different set of solutions.
I am familiar with one couple who handle this by each parent being 100% responsible for one child apiece. Obviously this only works if you have an equal number of parents and children. I do not know her well enough to ask for more details -- there are so many things I wonder about! Like, don't the kids complain *constantly* that one of them is getting treated one way and the other another way and it's NOT FAIR, MOM & DAD! But I guess it sort of works for them.
God. We all have a chicken nugget and/or vet story, don't we? Mine is The Yogurt Story. (My therapist and I refer to it thusly all the time.)
My older kid, then an only child, got a yogurt in his bag for daycare every day. Yogurt was one of the few things at that time we could reliably count on him to eat because toddlers are weird. We had enough yogurts to last the week, but not to get past Friday. I had a work event on the Wednesday evening, so my husband was in charge of dinner. What did he give our son (among other things)? One of the two remaining yogurts in the fridge. So I went to pack the lunch bag on Thursday morning and discovered there was only one yogurt left - but there were two days of daycare left in the week. To this day my husband doesn't understand why I was so upset about that. No one is going to die! Everyone is going to eat! It will be fine! Okay, yes, but now I need to figure out when I'm going to make an unplanned trip to the supermarket around my full-time (then entirely in-office) job plus the normal child/dog care and then after I've mentally rearranged my entire schedule I'll have to actually take the time and energy to go and, well, if I'm going to the supermarket anyway I might as well get whatever else we need now so there's making that whole list and and and and...
No one died. Everyone ate. It was fine. But I was exhausted by the situation, and my husband still cannot comprehend why which, honestly, makes it even more draining.
(Thank you for giving me the space to tell this story.)
These conversations will never not hit close to home. The thing is I was raised by parents with an equal partnership. But that is not the reality of my marriage, and so in addition to everything else it kind of feels like a betrayal of the basic principles I was raised with. In addition to gender, which is the primary factor, my husband's parents partially replicated what they grew up with in India, which is to say, they had a lot more hired help in the house than most people in the US, so that was an added layer of my husband just not growing up with the sense that there is work involved in home life. His mother was, like, getting a second masters degree and doing research to ensure that their home renovations were historically accurate, and there was a cleaner coming in twice a week and someone getting reduced rent on a room in their home in exchange for things like doing the dishes after dinner so the family could have time together, and there were often grandparents in residence who helped with a lot of stuff, or an older cousin who would help my husband with his homework.
We have gone through all these different attempts to get him to do something, anything, reliably around the house. And they never take, and what makes it so obvious that -- although he has read a lot of stuff about division of household labor and mental load and agrees that it's all terrible -- on some level he just does not consider this stuff his job is that he is pretty decent about things having to do directly with our kid. He changed more or less his share of diapers when that was a thing. He supervises piano practice because he took a lot more piano as a kid than I did. He sees that as his responsibility and he does it. He is much less keyed into thinking of things having to do with the physical upkeep of the home as his responsibility.
Now, where I can kinda sorta look at our lives and look at the sociological literature and reconcile things is that a lot of what you read about is the leisure gap -- the foundational case by Arlie Hochschild that women were working full time and then coming home and working a second shift while men use that for leisure time, which has been built on by so many scholars since. And I work 40-45 hours a week but my husband is a biglaw lawyer, so he works more like 50 and up, and he does not have more leisure time than I do in raw hours. So, you know, I usually spend some time cleaning after our kid is in bed, but typically my husband is billing time at that point. But the mental load thing is so significant. I am always feeling the pressure of about 10 different things and he really is not, and while he has read about it and would claim to know it's a thing, he doesn't *understand* the pressure it creates on me.
There is a great essay by Maggie Smith in The Cut this week touching on the toll of being the emotional/logistical manager, and its roll in her divorce. I am feeling it all so hard.
The chicken nuggets story. God. I feel so vindicated. Because these things are always so small they almost feel petty to get so angry about, don’t they? You’re that nagging shrew. It’s such a complicated and intense anger to untangle and attempt to address.
I’m a lot older than many of you and past these kid phases in my life. I sure could’ve used you Virginia! That said, the emotional load of running a home...the vet story...remains mine. My husband works full time and due to health issues I do not. And when he fully shares.... I’m recovering from surgery....he gets so exhausted.
That said, I bear SO MUCH responsibility, it is crazy. I so appreciate all of you and your work. Thank you. We’re gonna work on it using your books. Hugs and gratitude.
I think about these sort of things a lot. My late husband and I didn't have kids, but we met and married in middle age, so the mental load/emotional labor/inequal division of household tasks happened quickly rather than creeping in, despite our best efforts. Perimenopause, 3 years of Covid disruptions, ADHD (both of us) and his back issues didn't help matters.
He passed away two weeks ago after a month in the hospital. I am obviously heartbroken, grieving and still very numb. However, yesterday I realized that in addition to spending a lot less time tidying up, I don't have the cooking/groceries mental load any more. I still cook and am eating fairly similarly to before, but it's so much easier with one. The main course lasts for 3-4 meals, rather than 1 meal. Even though he cooked and helped with meal prep, it didn't offset all the added work.
The other thing that was weird was that in the middle of all my grief and self-blame, there's a part of me that feels like I could have prevented this. I was across the country taking care of my elderly parents when he had a stroke and it breaks my heart that I wasn't here for him. For a while I kept wondering if he wouldn't have had the stroke if I'd been here/he hadn't had to do all the household stuff on his own/I hadn't been grumpy the last week because my mom had been making me crazy. Even in my grief I was still parroting the societal notion that as a woman I am responsible for all the things.
I am so, so sorry for your loss. Sounds like there are a lot of understandably complicated feelings in there - I hope you have someone who can help you through all of them. Sending you love.
I’m so sorry for your loss.
I’m so sorry for your loss and sending you peace and love. I know you know in your thinking brain but I’m telling your feeling brain: this tragedy is not your fault. I’m so sorry your husband passed away so suddenly.
I'm sorry for your loss. It must be very hard right now. Thinking of you.
I’m glad you pointed out that you’d include more queer perspectives now. I’m a non-binary agender bi person and my partner is a bi/pan not entirely cis (still figuring out terminology) man. We’re both disabled and non-monogamous. We’ve been together for about 4 years. He’s been with his wife 20. They have 3 kids. There are 2 other queer family members in our group too. So basically it’s a bit like being a step mom without there being a divorce. Everyone gets along swimmingly.
My partner and I live separately and he is the primary caregiver. He takes care of 6 people’s food and basic needs every day. When a kid needs something, they almost always go to dad. Never to me, I’m behind the scenes, but sometimes to their mom especially for the oldest who doesn’t have the same relationship with my partner because he’s a stepdad. Anyway, my partner does an amazing job at this stuff. It’s truly breathtaking and impressive. At the same time, it totally replicates a ton of the ways in which he is always carrying the mental load and has a lot of pressure on him to be a perfect parent. Less from a middle class Instagram perspective and more from a “I can’t do this all because my body won’t cooperate as a disabled person and I’m poor so a lot of the solutions to that are inaccessible or fill me with shame for using because they’re expensive” perspective.
I think too that it’s important to recognize that my partner and I both have ADHD as does most of the group and I’m autistic. We have very different manifestations of this. I’m a hyper focus champion and planner and my partner is much better at doing everything spontaneously but not great at planning. He has less general anxiety about doing things but more perfectionist shame about not living up to expectations. I think it’s so important to understand that he takes such good care of us but sees this as a minimum and is terrified of disappointing us. This sounds a lot like the way we talk about socializing women. So I feel like it is a combination of how we socialize caregivers (regardless of gender) and the trauma of being the primary person expected to be responsible for such important things. There are different kinds of pressures and traumas for people with primary breadwinner responsibilities too, I know, as I’ve dealt with that all my life. And I experience a bit of a mental load overload trying to make things easier on us financially and as get longer term things done that are harder for my partner to plan (but my partner is very dedicated to learning and always reacts like he wants to be a good teammate per that example). I find this important because from an assigned gender at birth perspective each of us should have the opposite experience. What is even more challenging is that there is virtually no space to talk about this as a society because caregiver and earner traumas and experiences are so heavily gendered! Doesn’t it make so much sense why I’m agender?! (Gender? No, thank you.)
Anyway, my point is that women do most of this work, and I think it’s incredibly important to talk about that. And to go beyond the advice given here about how to make relationships egalitarian we also need to talk about the constraints of class, disability and gender (and so much more!). We have to deconstruct gender and trauma to understand that these are related and not incidental.
First, I have to admit I chuckled about the raw cauliflower thing at end. I’m not even slightly British (been in US my entire life) but I’ve seen and consumed raw cauliflower in crudité platters for decades.
But on the equity in household labor issue, I love this interview in most respects. The thing that makes me sad and angry is how generations of heterosexual cis women have to keep rediscovering this. Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the year I was born, and informed a generation of (white, mostly upper-class) women about “the problem with no name”. Alix Kates Shulman published “A Marriage Agreement”, an argument that couples should make a literal contract about how to divide chores and responsibilities, in 1969. Judy Syfer’s “Why I Want a Wife”, from the inaugural issue of Ms. magazine in 1972, was reprinted in anthologies for student writers well into the 1990s (hell, it probably still is). I read Arlie Hochschild’s study, The Second Shift, when I was in grad school, which is also when it was published (1989). Rhona Mahony’s brilliant “Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies, And Bargaining Power”, which offered pragmatic solutions as well as explanation, came out in 1995.
These are just the tip of the iceberg; ie, essays and studies I can recall off the top of my head, and I’m sure I’ll think of more after I press ‘send’ — I am, after all, a retired professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies. (I did Google a couple of dates and how to spell a few names.) But it’s surely enough to make my point. None of this new, and a global pandemic hasn’t changed it. Maybe as more women elect not to marry men, and/or not to have children, heterosexual cis men will begin to care. Or maybe they’ll turn to the likes of Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and incel groups.
I am the person who really doesn’t love cooking in our house. my husband is a high school soccer coach and when he’s in season I have to take on more cooking and childcare bc he doesn’t get home until 7-8 pm. He does all our grocery shopping and will buy a lot more easily prepared foods but it’s always tough to get back into it for me (August-October and February-May are boys’ and girls’ seasons).
That’s 7 months. You are still the primary food preparer even if you don’t consider yourself a cook.
I’d be curious to see disabled and neurodivergent perspectives included in these conversations as well. I’m an autistic woman and have a lot of executive functioning difficulties. Whenever I read pieces like this I always feel equal parts “I could never be married to a neurotypical man” and “I could never be married to a neurotypical woman.” I did stop to ask myself, “wait, equal parts?” Because that doesn’t seem fair. But yes, equally, I think because as someone who had never, since early childhood, been able to meet the functional expectations of being female, I always experienced my behavior being more actively policed by other women--even if the expectations themselves are rooted in misogyny. So conversations along these lines always trigger a very strong and conflicted emotional response.
KC Davis touches very lightly on these issues in How to Keep House While Drowning, but in a way that felt more survivable for me: prioritizing equal rest over equal tasks. And yes, of course we both rest while the house is a wreck because we lost the fight to live up to neurotypical standards a long time ago and we both just want to survive (and carve out our own, unique, invisible-to-most-people path to joy).
I do think the issues are just as present in neurodivergent relationships, and the solutions just as slippery to nail down--they just fall into a very different dynamic reaching toward a very different set of solutions.
I am familiar with one couple who handle this by each parent being 100% responsible for one child apiece. Obviously this only works if you have an equal number of parents and children. I do not know her well enough to ask for more details -- there are so many things I wonder about! Like, don't the kids complain *constantly* that one of them is getting treated one way and the other another way and it's NOT FAIR, MOM & DAD! But I guess it sort of works for them.