I was recently catching up with some friends who brought up the 'weaponised incompetence' of their male partners and husbands. I've come across the term before but on this particular occasion a chilling thought descended: that I might be an incompetence-weaponiser too, and that it's only being a woman and having a husband who is pretty chilled out that has allowed me to escape the label.
I've always thought of myself as someone who is a bit rubbish at a range of practical and common-sense type stuff. Other people have tended to think of me this way too. For example, in the last week alone I have stubbed my toe and bruised my legs in several places just in the course of moving furniture and boxes about; burnt something I was cooking due to intention; started making several cups of tea for myself and others and forgotten the task part way through; deep cleaned most of my bathroom but somehow forgot to even touch the sink; spilt about 3 drinks; broken two glasses whilst washing up; gone to a supermarket where they didn't have what I'd been asked to get despite having been specifically told to go to a different supermarket where they had it (I just forgot / spaced on what I'd been told)... Oh and almost broke a blind at work because I was too rough with it and got it tangled (luckily everyone else had gone home and I was able to sort it out without exposing my incompetence to the world). It's been a fairly standard week in my world.
In my defense, I have always been this way across a wide range of contexts. I was like this as a kid (always spilling things, breaking things, failing to follow instructions, falling over, inadvertently covering things in pen ink that I somehow always had on my hands... think Mr Bean the Movie and the Whistler's Mother painting). Even very simple stuff seemed to get away from me - I remember with horror my first day of secondary school when I asked to go to the toilet in a lesson and couldn't work out how to use the door knob. Cue mockery from the teacher and 29 fellow students. It took ages to live it down. I was like this when I lived with flatmates and when I lived alone. There has always been a catalogue of mild disasters. I was 26 when a flatmate revealed to me that my tights were always laddered because I'd been putting them on wrong all my life...
I also don't think that, as an adult at least, I shirk most of the basic duties of life. I cook and clean and tidy and work hard to keep my toddler DD happy and, thus far at least (touch wood), physically safe from my winds of destruction. As a kid I was often lazy and avoided things I found difficult - so much so that my poor lovely mum often despaired of me when yet another chore was messed up and yet another thing not done properly. As an adult I get that practising can make things better and that some stuff just has to get done. I at least try to learn new skills, am pretty open to feedback when other people can show me a better way to do something, and try to adopt compensatory strategies for the clumsiness and thoughtlessness.
I also think it helps that I'm lucky enough to have people around me who get me, are patient and don't mind explaining the bleeding obvious to me from time to time in a way that doesn't feel too awful. I grew up with parents who got visibly and instantly angry if they noticed that something hadn't been done to their standards, so perhaps it's understandable that I used to shut down and go 'fine, I can't do that. I'll never be able to do it. I'm not trying again.'
But there is a case for the weaponised incompetence prosecution too. I do still avoid some types of task - my DH still ends up having to take responsibility for flat pack furniture and anything involving power tools, and although we split the cooking day to day? he's always the one who takes over the meal if we have guests round. I am implicitly not trusted with finer cuisine. And whilst I do most of the cleaning and laundry-putting-away ans paperwork-and-drawer organising and various other things, I tend to do it painstakingly slowly in an attempt to minimise mistakes... which sometimes leads him to step in because he can see a better way. Whilst I don't think I'm being rubbish as part of a deliberate strategy to make him do stuff for me, that nonetheless seems to be the end result some of the time. If my DH were someone with higher domestic and life organisation standards (and let's face it, we would never have married if he were), he would probably be taking over loads more things out of frustration with me. Maybe that would put me in the exact same role as my friends' supposedly lazy shirking husbands.
Where does incompetence end and weaponised incompetence begin? Which fits me best? And is there a chance that some of the blokes (and it is almost always blokes) who get accused of weaponising their incompetence are a bit rubbed like me?
(To pre-empt possible queries: yes I've been diagnosed with ADHD and dyspraxia. I'm mindful, however, of the danger of this becoming an excuse. What is innate and what is within our power to improve with the right levels of motivation and support is an interesting question.)
YABU - you sound suspiciously like you're weaponising your incompetence and protesting too much.
YANBU - you sound like you're mostly just incompetent (feel free to insert a more compassionate alternative framing of the issue here).