Labour of love

WENDY SYFRET HAS A CONFESSION: SHE’S A FEMINIST WHO LOVES HOUSEWORK.

Whenever I see my boyfriend pick up the vacuum I think: to him, it’s just a vacuum. Watching him unload the dishwasher, take out the bins or wrestle with a load of laundry, I marvel at the simplicity of his tasks. In theory, we perform these actions the same way: leaning for wall sockets, selecting the pots-and-pans cycle, separating lights and darks. For him, it’s housework. Something we do to maintain a domestic space and happy relationship. But for me, these mundane, repetitive and achingly familiar duties are heavy with history, politics and power.

For a woman, a vacuum is never just a vacuum – especially when it’s being manoeuvred around the feet of another person. It’s a symbol of oppression, tradition and even control. A totem for the way our lives were once (and for many, still are) supposed to be lived: in devotion to the wants, comforts and desires of others.

Laden with that context, my boyfriend and I approach housework differently. He does it as needed, if something appears amiss, or occasionally when I ask (although he usually doesn’t require the invitation). I approach housework like a first-year uni assignment, locating divisions of work, trends in patterns of performance and time spent on certain tasks. Phrases like “the second shift”, “unpaid labour” and “mental load” are used as I invite him to examine our relationship through these lenses (then debate who has to clean them). I do this because I’m a feminist, and understand that our home, lovely as it is, is a historical battleground where I must resist gender tropes that have left so many women before me wrung out, resentful and ignored.

There’s just one problem: I actually really love housework.

To me, the vacuum’s sway is soothing, the dishwasher’s symmetry rewarding, and the washing machine’s whirl gratifying. I wasn’t conditioned to feel this way – my mother and sister don’t share my tastes. To them, chores are something to be endured. An echoing necessity they must drag themselves through day after day. Gazing back a generation, I have no real memories of my grandmother doing housework – happily or not. She avoided it long before it picked up its second-wave feminist baggage, rightfully choosing to play tennis and gossip over cleaning the oven. No man I’ve dated has ever pressed it onto me or made me feel it was my birthright to fulfill. No, my affection for housework isn’t learnt, absorbed or coerced. It’s all my own.

Ironically, I see these chores as a ballast to the parts of my personality that are driven, ambitious and exacting. As someone with a brain that tends to spend a lot of time and energy overthinking things (like, say, my use of the vacuum) cleaning the house offers an unlikely reprieve.

When I clean and clear mess, my mind is wiped like a coffee table. In contrast to most activities I find myself entangled in, these repetitive actions are straightforward. Housework is made up of approachable, easy-to-understand, predictable tasks that are always done the same way and warrant the same result. I don’t need to carry them out perfectly for them to be completed and marked as a success. I’m not graded or judged for them. They will never be posted about on Instagram or recounted as a glowing anecdote at a party (unfortunately, they will sometimes appear in an article). Chores, on the whole, are empty-headed – but somewhat mindful – acts. Inevitable, unchanging and bluntly rewarding. They allow me to escape the clutter in my home and my head. Maybe a vacuum can just be a vacuum after all.