Photo credit: Tanakawho

I’ve been fascinated by a discussion going on over at Miss Britt’s blog about male and female roles in housekeeping, errand running, and the other necessary minutia of daily life. If I have read her post accurately, she is deeply frustrated by the unequal division of labor* responsibility in her household but definitely isn’t willing to give up her marriage over that. Nor is she willing to stay with things the way they are.

I can sympathize with that unbearable tension and the choice between two unpalatable alternatives.

In my case, I’ve been married three times, so you might either consider me an expert or a complete idiot on marital issues. That’s fine; you might be right either way. :o) But here’s my experience.

First hubby: We were fresh out of college; what did we know? We both did what we could. We didn’t have much, so it wasn’t a huge chore keeping things relatively clean and straight. We divorced because of unrelated power issues. We each wanted the other to change, and he was the first to recognize that neither of us was willing to transform enough OR to meet in the middle.

He wanted me to stay a size 7, to never use a credit card, to be available for on-demand sex all the time, and for him to be the benevolent but absolute ruler of the house.

I wanted to stay skinny but was having trouble doing so, had just $500 on a credit card, was tired and less interested in sex once I was working full time and also because I was tired of being hounded for it, and — most of all, I didn’t sign on to get a boss when I inked the marriage certificate. So we had power struggles — often involving the sheets – but our fights were seldom about the housework.

Second hubby: He did his fair share of the housework but would do almost no child care unless I overwhelmingly guilted him into it. He had his reasons: I’d deliberately chosen to stop taking birth control pills because I was about to hit 30 and had always wanted a baby. (He’d said he did want children soon while we were dating but had either changed his mind or made his feelings more clear after we were married for a bit.) He wasn’t ready, and I knew it. Not my finest hour, admittedly. He loved our daughter once she arrived and he warmed up to being a daddy, but throughout my pregnancy and in the difficult early days of a wailing baby with constant earaches and frequent colic, he always referred to her as “your little project” and told me to deal with her needs while he rolled over to go back to sleep. It was a lonely and sobering time. We were separated before her first birthday. He wasn’t a bad guy. We both eventually recognized that our marriage had been a bad choice.

Third hubby (perma-hubby!): He does far, far, far more than his fair share. It didn’t start out that way. I stopped cooking for the family when my mother moved in with us many years ago, because she’s highly critical of my cooking while she gushes about anything he puts on the table. I got tired of getting pissed about that every night, so I threw in the dish towel. He’s more diligent about the laundry than I am, and we both try to squint and ignore the dust bunnies until they are Harvey-sized. We lurch into motion with the Windex and 409 when company’s coming over. One of the compensations of having an older parent live with you is that they do some of the chores too; Mom does the ironing and loads the dishwasher. And there are various assigned chorse for our children (oops, now it’s down to just “child”). I tend to be the one who launches into the big household projects – cleaning out and packing up my departed teen’s room, painting my youngest daughter’s room to look like a pink castle, and other oversized tasks like that, although he has some big projects that are all his, too — like pool work and mowing. He is the maintainer who makes sure we have milk in the fridge and that we pick up the clothes from the cleaners before they get donated to charity. And you don’t have to tell me what a gem he is; I know just exactly how lucky I am. All I can say is that his mama raised him right. He’s conscientious and unselfish, and I should do more than I do. He kind of lets me get away with doing less.

What I’ve learned over the years: For my part, as I’ve gotten older I’ve become (1) more able to identify and (2) more able to communicate what I will tolerate and what I won’t. I started speaking up late in my first marriage, and I tried unsuccessfully to change my second husband. Picking the right time and the right battle are hard things to learn.

But learn them I did. That’s why I was able to educate second hubby right after our divorce, when he decided to once again be late for picking our daughter up for visitation. (I was seldom able to make plans until he showed up because who knew if/when he would.) That night was the start of a new me: When he arrived an hour late, I had a babysitter in place and was whistling while I worked to paint my living room; I told him he could either visit with his daughter there at my house as long as he wanted OR he could pay the babysitter for a full night’s work if he wanted to take our baby off with him, because why should the babysitter’s income suffer? And I wasn’t going to put my schedule at his mercy anymore.

He was the world’s most astonished slack-jawed men when I added, “We’re not married anymore, remember? I don’t have to sit around and wait on you.” And to his credit, his clue-o-meter hit 10 that day, and he was good about showing up and actually being on time after that. Even better, his daughter grew up knowing him as a man who took the time to be with her and who didn’t take that time for granted.

I’m just glad I don’t have to fight that kind of battle all the time. And I’m a little heartsick that some nice people do.

Your Turn

So what’s the division of labor (or responsibility) in your house? If it’s not equal, are you both happy with who’s doing what? Do you divide the chores equally, or by whose has the most free time, or by who the mess matters the most to? Does your spouse do some of the chores as a “favor” to you, or are they truly shared? Are there other ways that a power struggle manifests in your relationship? And how did you get to the status quo – was it easy or a steep learning curve? Dish!

* Corrected “labor” to “responsibility,” per Miss Britt. It’s a subtle but important distinction. Thanks, Miss Britt, and I’m sorry I got it wrong the first time!  :o)