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Measurable Brain Activity Keep the Faith or Keep the Peace? The Choice, alas, is mine I'm a feminist who is trying to raise a family and get along with the rest of my world, while keeping myself happy and I'm finding it a bit of a challenge to get everything done, find time for my family, and find time for myself. Something's gotta give, and frankly it's my sense of fairness and equality. I have always been determined not to be one of those subservient women who does all the housework while her husband lies on the couch watching tv and bellowing for a beer and I've managed not to become that woman but I'm not sure I'm happy with the one I have become. Before we had our son, my husband and I used to divide the housework. He did the dishes and the laundry, I did the cooking and dusting and we got around to the rest when we could. Of course at that time we were both working outside the house, or I was in school so we had equal amounts of flexibility and free time and it didn't really matter when things got done. When we originally thought about having a kid, we thought The Man would be the one to stay home since he has a higher tolerance for not going out than I do and because I had things to do out in the big bad world. Things changed. I decided that academics weren't really my thing after all, The Man got into business with his dad, we decided that breastfeeding was the best choice for our kid. These things, combined with the fact that my new career as a writer had inherent flexibility, led to me staying home with The Boy instead of The Man doing so. All of our pre-baby discussions about division of labour focussed on the fact that there would now be two full time and two part-time jobs in our household, childcare and sign making were full time, housekeeping and writing would be part-time. And since I would be taking on (at least the daytime) childcare and the writing, and The Man would be doing the signmaking, we would have to be fair about the housekeeping and, at the very least, divide it in two. This has not turned out to be practical, at all. The Man is gone from the house from 8am to 6pm, and I can do very little writing while home with a toddler (it turns out you can't instantly turn on the creativity when he goes to sleep!) so if I want to write I have to do it in the evenings. And The Man can't do a lot of housework when The Boy is around. I, however, have lots of time to enjoy The Boy's company, and I've had lots of time to figure out how to work around him. Staying home with a kid is tough but at least your time is flexible. So I end up spreading most of the housework over the weekdays, leaving weekends and evenings free for me to write, have family time or just relax. This means that The Man doesn't do a lot of housework, I do the lion's share and he does the hero tasks - cleaning the oven, washing the windows - the big tasks that only come up every few months. I'm conflicted about this. The situation is not exactly fairly divided, I feel somewhat put upon yet I can't blame The Man. I'm not doing things this way because he says so, or because he refuses to participate. This is just the system that works best. But I feel like I'm letting the feminist team down by not pushing for a more equal division of labour. I didn't want to be the woman who makes all the meals, keeps house, and is the primary caregiver plus having a part time job. I don't want to harken back to the women of the sixties who had to be making enough money to pay a babysitter before they were allowed 'time off' to go to work. Not that The Man has any such antiquated notions, it just feels like I earn my time to myself by doing most of the housework and the childcare at the same time. The Man doesn't have to earn his time off, he just consults with me about convenient times to do what he likes and then he goes to do them. So how do I deal? Do I keep the faith with feminism and divide everything equally? Or do I keep the peace and just keep doing what works? I get a feeling of accomplishment from toddler-wrangling and housekeeping at the same time and I'm teaching my son how to keep house. But I don't want him to think that housekeeping is something only Mommies do. But still, if I get that sort of work out of the way slowly over the weekdays, then we're all free to do what we feel like doing the rest of the time. It's not like it breaks me to do this work, I'm rather efficient and not too particular so I can have a pretty damn clean house in a few hours stretched over a week. If I didn't do it then, we'd both get to it eventually, but I really don't want to wait for eventually. And I have to wonder why I even make this a feminist issue. I mean , I know it all does come down to who does the housework but at the same time if doing it works for me, why bother to get into an intellectual quandry about it? Why not just do it until it stops working? Oh, because I always have to think long term, it's how I operate. When my son has a tantrum and I'm trying to decide whether to give in, I don't just decide based on what's easiest now, I try to figure out what will work best for the big picture. It's the same thing with the housework. I don't want to get stuck in the habit of doing (most) everything for the rest of my life, and at what point will it become so ingrained as to be impossible to renegotiate, impossible to imagine changing it? I don't want my kid to assume housework is women's work (and kids will genderize no matter what you say or do) and I don't want him to hear me telling his Daddy what else needs to be done in MY house or any of that sort of garbage. I want life to run smoothly, and the stay-at-home parent is in the best position to ensure that and when you combine stay-at-home parenting with my organizational personality, I am the best person for this job. The best person to juggle the details of life, the universe and housework with minimal stress and maximum efficiency. But I demand that my efforts be appreciated and acknowledged, this current arrangement is not going to become 'THE WAY THINGS ARE'. For right now, I choose to keep the peace overall and keep the faith however I can. But I reserve the right to shift the balance whenever things get too heavy for me. The Smartmouth Mombie struck again on August 20. 2004 © Christine C. Hennebury 2004 |
