Have ordered Wifework....slightly concerned about the after effects

[TheProvincialLady]

I hadn't encountered Wifework before lurking on the feminist boards, but it sounds so interesting that I have just ordered it from Amazon and I'm really looking forward to reading it. But at the same time a little concerned about what I will actually DO with the enhanced knowledge that I am a Wife.

I willingly gave up work when I had the DC. We both discussed this and it was what I had always thought would be the best thing for the children. 5 years later, we have two children and I work a few hours a week (and really enjoy it). But I am now basically responsible for all the housework, all of the time. And getting the children ready. My husband does help, but he is not responsible and I'm not sure how this happened. It affects my choice of job but not his, the hours I work but not his, etc. Before children I still did more housework - partly because our standards are somewhat different - but also because he was raised to do nothing in the way of housework and has an underlying belief that it gets done anyway.

Anyway, a slight resentment of all this has been bubbling under the surface for some years now I suppose, and now it is all about to come to a head when I read Wifework. As the children get older I want to work more hours outside the home and so DH and I will be more equal in that respect, and I can foresee a battle over the housework and the children. So how can I approach this in a constructive way?

I posted this on the feminist board because I value your opinions and would be interested in any theoretical stuff as well as practical advice. Thanks.

Nagging = progress-chasing

Sorry, I'm just coming back to this having spent the rest of yesterday with a sick bug - urgh. I'm just catching up on it now.

LRD I would love to chat about the book. I got my copy from Amazon for about £2.50 so if you haven't already got a copy they are cheap to get hold of.

custardo, I've been nodding to all of your posts.

provincialLady - I have ordered mine on Amazon too, so it should be around before long. Thanks - it'd be great.

what i find remarkable from the outsider perspective is how women can continue to find someone attractive who doesn't take responsibility for themselves

Well lots of them can't - the relationships board is peppered with threads from women trying to cope with exactly this problem.

If you have to 'be very very harsh' or 'kick lazy arses', that's work too - in fact that can be really exhausting. If you decide to wait it out for your partner to do what they're supposed to do without nagging being reminded, you risk living in squalor and that will reflect badly on you whether you choose to take on that responsibility or not. I don't think there is an easy solution and even if you sort it out once, it'll probably need renegotiating at several points in your lives together - new baby, new job/back to college, unemployment, DC reaching the age where they can do their share, DC starting work, DC leaving home, retirement, ill-health ... all can change the balance of what needs doing and who has the time to do it.

Ah nagging.

Nobody ever "nags" unless they have to. If you are having to "nag" you are being forced into it by the slacker. The slacker is doubly at fault, for slackness, and for forcing their partner into the hideous position of "nagging."

Actually it's not just the fact that the living in squalor reflects badly on you that's an issue. It's the fact that you are living in squalor. It's horrible to live in squalor. It's stressful, you lose things, things get broken, you're always late because you can't find things, etc. etc. Even if you take a fierce approach to a disapproving MIL's raised eyebrow and are unaffected by her disdain for your kitchen and don't give a shit what people coming in to your house think of it, what about your comfort and convenience? Who wants to live in discomfort and chaos the whole time? That for me is a bigger issue in a sense - keeping your home in a reasonable state that everyone in the house is comfortable with, is about being kind and considerate to the people you live with and love. And I have serious reservations about people of either sex who don't care that the people they live with are being made unhappy by the squalor of their surroundings. If you care about someone, you try to make bloody sure that you don't add to something that makes them edgy and uncomfortable by your behaviour, don't you? Surely?

Couldn't agree more, HereBe.

I posted this a while back on sgb's flylady/hoarding thread -

Not doing this work is a giant two fingers up to society's expectations of women. Trouble is, it's an extreme form of protest which does us harm - we just end up living in filth, nobody else steps in to pick up the slack and it will always be our fault. It affects our social lives and can have other, more serious, consequences.

At the other end of the scale are women who cannot cope with the tiniest amount of clutter or dirt in their homes (see e.g. bog brush threads). They're no happier than us filthy slatterns. I see a lot of parallels with our attitude to food. Starve or binge? Clean obsessively or hoard shite? I think it's just not a very healthy battleground.

Just as we need to develop a healthy, easygoing, enjoyable attitude to food, so we need to develop the same with our homes because we spend a lot of time there and more than anywhere else on the planet, we're supposed to feel comfortable there

This is why I find the 'oh, just don't clean if he won't' argument deeply flawed. My DH does reach a point when he's no longer comfortable living in the house in the state it's in. We can both agree my parents' place, where there were mice in the bedroom and kitchen and food left uncovered then eaten despite said mice, was not clean. And we could agree that his mates' house, where they washed teatowls and the dishcloth once every couple of months, was also not clean. But, beyond that, I'm not honestly sure when he'd consider our place so much of a pigsty it was horrible. Not because he never does anything, but because it's pretty hit-and-miss.

If I don't clean up, the person who loses out is me. Not him. But he caused at least half the mess.

(He is getting chunks of this thread read out, btw, and he's heard it.)

'Who ARE these great big men-babies who don't play fair?

And why on earth do women live with them?'

In my experience two reasons: sheer exhaustion and the fact that things often only get bad after children arrive. The worry about the impact of splitting up on the children makes many women stay I think. In fact, towards the end of Wifework Maushart talks about it being worse for the children's wellbeing in many cases if the parents split up (not saying this is my opinion necessarily):

'The truly awful news of the post-no-fault divorce era - and it is news we have tried our dmandest to deny - is that marriage is good for kids. ...all the evidence suggests...that even a tense, or empty, or conflicted, marriage between biological parents is probably better for children than the most perfect divorce.'

She goes on to argue in her own relationship (which ended in divorce) had she known about some of the research she cites showing the impact on children, she would have tried harder to negotiate changes, to seek help etc. Obviously she can't know what would have happened. She talks about 'suffering through' marriage for the sake of the children.

TBH I found the book quite unsettling and ultimately really depressing as all it did was help me to better articulate the issues and then left me with the suckerpunch of, but if you leave you are going to damage your children.

I don;t know what you do when you've tried very hard for years to negotiate changes with your partner and got nowhere. Eventually make a choice to stay or leave, but with it put in the terms of 'stay, suck it up and it will be better for your children' or 'leave and you may be happier, but your children won't' (and the implications of selfishness etc) it's an impossible choice to make.

The other thing about leaving the mess, is you simply can't with small children involved. It is not fair to make them live in squalor - it does affect them and with babies you have to at least know they can't pick up six day old mouldy banana from the floor and eat it when you're not looking.

Ok, so if you say to your partner, look, you work x amount of hours per day, and I work Y (more!), and you can demonstrate it calmly and irrefutably, and then point out that clearly it is unfair, what do they say then?

Sorry, Lenin, that was a general question, not to you!

Not just cleaning, but over all. If you lump in all the stuff necessary to make life work: earning money, childcare, cleaning, food etc etc, and one person spends demonstrably more time not sitting down than the other.

How can the sitting down one not say, yes you're right, it isn't fair and as I am an adult and I care about you deeply, I will get off my fat arse and do my share?

That's the bit I don't get. I would feel towering rage and resentment and not be able to speak to them.

Let alone have sex with them.

It all comes down to whether you are friends or not. Kindness, fairness and communication.

It does come down to all of those things, but privilege does make us blind to our own unfairness sometimes.

Re: hours/sitting down/etc - you've all seen a million threads on here that say variations on a theme of 'but looking after children isn't real work, it's just sitting in a park or having a coffee with friends or playing trucks' - so then the WOHP can argue that it's fair for them to have all the sitting down time in the evening since their day was 'real work'.

Which is always funny to me, because I work as a lawyer, and there's so much sitting down and wasted time and small talk it's unbelievable! There's waiting for court hearings, there's the acres of downtime you get in a mediation (you put an offer, the other side goes out for an hour to discuss, etc), there's networking. But because it's paid, and it's stuff you wouldn't be choosing to do if it weren't part of the job, it counts as exhausting.

And then there's, as i said, the emotional work and the management work, which can be accomplished sitting down with a cup of tea, but still take emotional energy and actual time.

There are times that I actually accomplish being Superwomen. You know - I work competently, and my house is clean and my clothes ironed and my meals planned and my child interacted with in wholesome ways and my husband sexed and my body groomed (oooh, that's another one, I can't remember if Maushart talks about this, but the sheer time and cost that a woman puts into her appearance compared to a man, and it's not only invisible but written off as her 'pampering' herself, like having all your pubic hair ripped out is a jolly way to spend an afternoon) and the thing is that it is absolutely a fulltime job. Like, I mentally schedule in 'I'll plan tomorrow's activities while I'm in the bath'. My sitting down 'leisure time' is spent menu planning or on the internet looking for bargains for DD's clothes or sourcing cheap furniture for the baby's room. Etc.

Ok, so if you say to your partner, look, you work x amount of hours per day, and I work Y (more!), and you can demonstrate it calmly and irrefutably, and then point out that clearly it is unfair, what do they say then?

When I've had this conversation with DP* he has indeed said, yes you're right, it isn't fair and as I am an adult and I care about you deeply, I will get off my fat arse and do my share and then he has gone off to think up all sorts of brainy-arse 'systems' - spreadsheets, time/motion studies ... and it becomes some sort of Giant Project which never quite gets done.

*it's not currently an issue as I am underemployed and have far more time to sit on my arse than DP, even if I do it all. It's boring me shitless but it's 'fair' under the circs and I don't feel resentful. If and when I get more hours, I'll need to renegotiate [tired smiley].

hully, I reckon the problem is, unless you live in a very unequal or very simple set-up, it's not easy to demonstrate this stuff 'irrefutably'. To me that's a big part of the problem - this stuff is invisible work.

It's never going to be possible to make exact parallels between x that you do, and y that your DP does, and a that he likes and b that you like. And where do you start saying 'but you knew what my job was when we got into this and this is how it goes?'.

Tortoise - not literal sitting down time, we could call it rest time, perhaps.

Both partners have to feel things are fair, it doesn't really matter how they are organised within that.

lrd - we need one of pubgarden's dp's spreadsheets