Don’t let yourself be the household maid
Full disclosure: I was either a queen or a pauper, or both, in my past lives. As a result, I have an aversion to domestic chores. The endless feeding machine, scrubbing pots, wiping floors, disinfecting the bog, scraping toothpaste splatter from the sink basin, the constant picking stuff up off the floor. I’m practically a quadruped at this stage, I spend so much time on all fours.
It never stops. It’s thankless. Nobody notices, unless of course you desist from participating in this lopsided gender slop bucket of duties.
Like Miss Potkin. She stopped, dear reader. She stopped. ‘Who will blink first? Not me,’ she wrote on Twitter as the delph built up into an unsightly pile by the dishwasher, two days after the unceasing dinner maker decided she’d had enough of
It’s a brave sort who lets the dirt build as an act of disobedience
cleaning up too. She was overburdened and under appreciated. As the days progressed the Twitter hit ignored the laundry dump and held firm as the sausage of death sat in its coagulated fat in the pan. One day, as if by magic, the dishwasher was miraculously stacked, but to Miss Potkin’s dismay it was not turned on. The sausage had disappeared but the greasy pan remained. The kitchen looked kind of clean but on closer inspection, the ‘swamp sink’ was full of miscellaneous bits and bobs and slippery dinner scrapings.
‘I am the only one in the house who has to drain it and clean the dirty plug thing and pick out all the onions and potatoes and I don’t know what else gathers in there. That’s my job apparently. No-one else’s job in this house.’
I say to my three boys all the time, ‘I’m not your servant. Who do you think is going to pick this up? The magic fairy?’ to which they respond ‘You!’ It’s a running joke, except I’m not laughing any more.
Millennia of ancestral baggage is simmering beneath the surface. Like Miss Potkin, I’m addressing my own role in precipitating these wonky gender roles. ‘Don’t just pick up after him and don’t pick up after a man in your household,’ implores feminist campaigner Jameela Jamil in that famous 2019 Tell Him speech from The Makers Conference which has resurfaced recently.
I listened and, like Miss Potkin, have had to face my participation in the unevenness of tasks at hand. It’s a brave soul who lets the dirt build as an act of disobedience. I have an advantage of sorts. French schools make kids clean up after themselves from the age of three. You make the mess, you clean it up. No ifs, ands or buts. Mollycoddling is met with derision. Still, chez moi, there’s an unspoken understanding I do the grunt work. I have to acknowledge my part in that dynamic. ‘Do not transform your wife into a maid,’ warns clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson to his army of male readers. Yes.
Thank you Mr Peterson. Or more to the point, ‘Do not let yourself be transformed into a maid, ladies.’ Set boundaries. Be firm. Be fair. Try not to let the rage burst forth, geyser style, one unsuspecting evening after dinner when you notice nobody is helping, again. If necessary, pull a Miss Potkins and whatever you do, don’t blink first.