Are we edging closer to 50/50 at home?
Yes, says writer Stuart Heritage
My wife, Robyn, is always telling me what her mum friends talk about. Primarily, it involves slagging off their husbands. ‘They never clean up,’ they say. ‘They barely change any nappies.’ ‘They wouldn’t be able to find their way around a kitchen if you fitted it with a GPS.’ On and on it goes; an endless round of exhausted, frustrated griping.
‘The worst thing,’ my wife says, ‘is that I can’t join in, because you’re in charge of all that stuff.’ Which is an exaggeration, but does make me sound like an excellent husband, so I’m not going to argue.
When we met, my wife had an office job. Every morning she’d go to work, while I stayed at home and wrote things. And because I didn’t have a commute or any co-workers to pretend to be friends with, I had more time to take care of the house. Throughout the day, I’d take breaks to do laundry and, when she got home, a freshly prepared dinner would be waiting for her. I’d make a tremendous 1950s housewife.
We both work from home now – she is also a writer – and, although our set-up has nudged closer to 50/50, I’m still responsible for plenty of household duties. We have two kids, Herbie, five, and Ned, three, and I probably do the bulk of the childcare, the school runs and grocery shopping. And it goes beyond physical graft, too. I’m also in charge of most of the invisible jobs; I’m on the school Whatsapp group, I took control of the Google Classroom while we
home-schooled, and I remember birthdays and what time everyone needs to be anywhere. In fact, the only household job I shy away from is the bins, and that’s because I’m colour blind and don’t realise when I’m putting out the general waste bin (black) or the recycling bin (very dark green).
Most of my friends also strive for a 50/50 household split, and the leading theory is that we’ve been shamed into action by our own dads. For example, even though both my parents had jobs (my dad was a plumber, my mum worked part time in a shop), the entire running of the house fell to Mum. She cooked, cleaned, did laundry and the household accounts. Throughout their marriage, my dad had never even used an ATM. He had to learn how cash machines work, like an alien, after she died. The whole operation rested on her shoulders, and it exhausted her. Seeing our mums ground down by the sheer weight of responsibility has caused something of a deliberate generational split. It seems unthinkable to dump everything on a partner like that, so we’ve decided to become equal participants.
Now, having said that, I don’t do so much around the house because I’m a big-hearted superhero – my wife suffers from chronic illnesses, so a lot of tasks, from the organisational to the physical, tend to sap her energy very quickly. Which is fine. We’re a team, and part of being a team is taking up the slack when a member falls behind.
But there’s still a balance to be met, and when that goes out of whack, things can go wrong quite quickly. When her illnesses began to flare up last year – leaving her bedbound and unable to work for several months – I suddenly found myself lumbered with the whole kaboodle. I was doing all the childcare and household chores, as well as making sure we had enough money to pay the bills. It never stopped, from the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep.
The worst part of it wasn’t the endless, tooth-grinding stress, or the fact that I could barely get through one task without watching a dozen more pile up in front of me. It was the realisation that this is probably what it was like for my mum. And my friends’ mums. And thousands of women around the country still. Just endlessly toiling away on a million nothingy never-ending chores that don’t give them a second to themselves. And that’s a rubbish way to live. If our situation hadn’t been down to illness, and I was simply expected to do it all because that’s how things worked, our marriage would have ended in a very abrupt divorce. No wonder all her friends hate their husbands.
‘WE’VE BEEN SHAMED INTO ACTION BY OUR OWN DADS’