Why do men like quarantine ... and women don’t?
“Why don’t you write about how dads are so happy to be home all the time, and the women are not,” a father suggested cheerfully, as his wife looked on with a blank stare. “The family dinners ... no commuting ... seeing the kids more — what’s not to love?!”
His wife glared at me, knowingly.
Why do men like quarantine ... and women don’t?
So, let’s talk about that one.
In a recent study conducted by the Census Bureau and reported by the New York Times, “Women were three times more likely than men to have left their job because of childcare issues during the pandemic.”
Women have also been absorbing twice the amount of household work as compared to their male counterparts during these challenging times. Why?
“Because women do everything,” my friend Sarah told me, bluntly.
“So, this is going to turn into one of those ‘Men are useless, I’m so stressed, life is so unfair’ rants?” my husband Ian asked me, rolling his eyes.
“MOM,” my 9-year old
George hollered, as he ran off the school bus. “A woman on the Supreme Core died — so now men have absolute power!”
OK, so clearly it is time to clear up a few matters in the Haft household. It’s been a long week.
“It is the Supreme COURT,” my husband Ian corrected George, “and they do not have absolute power. Claire, where are they getting this stuff?” he asked me, aghast, as if this was all my fault.
And there you have it. Why is the fact that George has misinformation my fault? Why am I to blame, why is it my job to fix it, why is this my issue?
“Because women do everything,” my friend Sarah told me, bluntly.
I calmly reminded Ian that we live in an era of fake news, and that it is our MUTUAL responsibility to clear up misinformation for our kids, not unlike the time I cleared up
Ian’s own confusion about weapons of mass destruction, years earlier. (That shut him up.)
“Women will have achieved true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was famously quoted as saying.
And so, upon the passing of Justice Ginsburg last Friday, I found myself looking blankly at my driveway ... and asking big questions this week.
How far have we really come as women?
And how was it possible that our 200-pound “teacup” pig had completely destroyed our front lawn?
Would RBG have been equally scammed, as I was, into thinking that fully grown teacup pigs remain as small as teacups, if she had had a teacup pig of her own while serving on the Supreme Court?
Why do I have a tea-cup pig, and ... why am I not on the Supreme Court?
The point is, despite the 1970s backdrop of my liberated childhood, where am I now? It wasn’t like I didn’t see my share of burning bras as a kid; I endured my mother’s impassioned Janis Ian renditions while I pretended to be Madonna rolling around with no seat belt in the wayback of our station wagon, just like the best of them. And yet COVID has reminded many of us women that “plus ça change … plus c’est la même chose.” So I find myself asking the driveway, “What would RBG have done?”
“During the pandemic, there is no question that women have worked harder than men,” my 81-yearold neighbor tells me, adopting her “what-iswrong-with-your-generation” voice. “Did you really expect things to be different?”
Well, yes ... I think on a certain level, I did.
It’s not that my husband hasn’t upped his game around here; Ian has really pitched in more since the pandemic. (A personal victory was when I found George’s underpants, which had been left under the dining room table, neatly tucked at the foot of the stairs for our “next trip up.”)
“Did YOU do that?” I asked Ian, in shock.
He had.
The problem is not that Ian doesn’t do housework; the problem is that he does it like a nimrod.
“Don’t you see? He’s trying to convince you that he shouldn’t do it,” a friend told me. “If he does everything wrong, he knows you won’t ask him to do anything anymore.”
Ha! Well, not THIS woman.
The fact that it took Ian two hours to fill out our Selma’s back-to-school questionnaire — because he had a nervous breakdown over the question “How would you best describe your daughter’s strengths and weaknesses?” — could be overlooked. In the end, he DID complete the paperwork (despite using the words “truculent” and “chimerical” to best describe our sixth-grader).
I could even be OK with the fact that every time Ian attempted to help the children with homework, they all ended up crying — and shouting that academics didn’t matter if they wanted to be a TikTok star like Charli D’Amelio.
But when I found dirty dishes plastered with congealed lasagna hidden in the back cupboard, well, then, my friends ... “Les jeux sont faits!”
“I was going to do them later,” Ian explained, pathetically.
There have been all sorts of studies proving that women have taken the brunt of everything during the pandemic, but “the part of the study that made us laugh out loud is dad’s perception of the time spent on doing housework compared to the actual amount of time he is helping out,” as reported by Amanda Mushro on TLCme.com.
“Whew,” Ian said, collapsing on the couch last Saturday. “That was brutal!”
His allocated task for the day had been to oversee our children’s clearing of the table. But by now, I had multitasked to the point of permanent ADHD-frontallobe damage; I was too tired to issue a response.
“It helps sometimes to be a little deaf in marriage and in every workplace, including the good job I have now,” RBG once remarked.
Ah, Ruth. How we will miss you, sister.
Claire Tisne Haft is a former publishing and film executive, raising her family in Greenwich while working on a freelance basis on books and films. She can be reached through her website at clairetisnehaft.com.