Household work: can men become true equal partners?

“Mommy, Daddy never forgets to run the dishwasher.”

My 5 year-old peers over my shoulder at the dirty plates after hearing my “darn it!” discovery. Once again, I forgot to run the dishwasher the previous night. 

“Uh-huh,” I mutter. Why don’t YOU try doing all the damn things around here?! I’m tempted to bark back at my kid. 

This past summer, my husband needed crutches for about 7 weeks after a knee surgery that required more recovery than we’d anticipated. Some surprise complications at the halfway mark meant I had to (mostly) solo parent and nurse my patient longer than we’d hoped, too. Strict instructions for “no weight bearing” meant he couldn’t even bring a dish from the table to the counter.

Now, we’re not the first family to experience a small crisis like this – a bump in the road that created more child care and household responsibilities for one parent. Compared to deployments, job losses, and serious illnesses that some families grapple with right now, it may seem downright insignificant. 

But for us, it was revelatory. 

After all, I have a few friends and co-workers who, after divorcing their spouse, felt that their child care and household responsibilities were about the same. Their former partner hadn’t ever pulled their weight or shouldered the true responsibilities of parenting and running a household. After that partner was gone, life wasn’t drastically different – at least not the daily chores and mental to-do lists. There were fewer hands and watchful eyes, but mostly the tasks kept pace just as they had before.

Meanwhile, my husband’s surgery and recovery period illuminated just how involved he is in the day to day operations of our household. Because I now found myself saluting those single parents, thinking how do they do it all? 

IS YOUR PARTNER A SHARER OR A HELPER?

In Facebook chats and small groups of women at the playground or bus stop, you hear the same refrain over and over from exhausted moms*: my husband just doesn’t notice when the house needs to be picked up. He’s pretty good at helping, but I need to give him specific instructions or he doesn’t do anything. 

Notice the word “help”?

When you evaluate your partner’s competence level for “helping” around the household, like a boss issuing a performance review, one thing is clear: YOU are in charge. Everyone around you is a helper. This is the part that’s really exhausting. 

And it doesn’t matter if you work outside the home or not. According to the WSJ, married working mothers spent 178 minutes a day on household and care work during the pandemic; 30% more than working fathers. (Wall Street Journal, May 2021)

While yes, men stepped up their contributions to child care and household chores during the pandemic (I mean, there was nowhere to hide!), UN Women reports that women all around the world are still doing more. And when we do get our kids to help, we rely more heavily on our daughters to pitch in. (UN Women 2021) Cringe.

NO, WOMEN AREN’T INHERENTLY GOOD AT MANAGING THE HOUSE

Women and girls doing the majority of domestic work just makes sense, many think. They’re just better at it. 

But are they?

In Darcy Lockman’s All the Rage, she dubs this idea the “naturalistic fallacy” and simultaneously debunks it. Because here’s the interesting part – when people think that a characteristic or trait (or even an ability to clean a toilet) is sex-based or inherent, they are less likely to try to change it. Not surprising, given what we know about how gender stereotypes can impact a child’s interests and career aspirations. For adults, this leaves us with a lot of unhappy, exhausted mothers believing (or reluctantly accepting) that their partner “just isn’t good at it.” 

Lockman details the research to support the impact of our beliefs about “natural, sex-based traits” in both directions. A 2008 Iceland study showed that beliefs by men and women that women were just better parents were linked with more traditional division of labor at home. But a 2007 U.S. study found that “the rejection of essentialist beliefs about women’s natural ability to parent was related to the opposite – a life in which both partners cut back at work and split child care in half.” (Lockman).

Let’s take the dishwasher example. After my husband’s surgery I repeatedly forgot to run the dishwasher each night, which had always been his job. Why couldn’t I remember? Aren’t women great multi-taskers? Didn’t I have a “gut instinct” about what needed to be done? Couldn’t I simply see the mental household to-do list more clearly?

Part of the answer is that I was overwhelmed as I tried to shoulder the entire household during his recovery. And forgetful in my attempt to “do it all.”

But the bigger truth is… along with packing lunches, stocking our paper goods, bathing our 5 year-old, and a whole slew of other chores and caregiving duties, I simply didn’t have ownership over getting the dishes clean. It wasn’t my job. And having a female reproductive system did not help me notice that task any better. 

CAN MEN TRULY BECOME EQUAL PARTNERS AT HOME?

Put bluntly, can people change? In spite of these barriers: the naturalistic fallacy, women’s guilt, and our fear of judgment, we cannot place chief responsibility on women to create a new partnership dynamic. Can men truly begin to “notice” what needs to be done, plan it, identify any potential barriers, and get sh*t done?

I say yes, and here’s why:

One last visit to my dishwasher forgetfulness. For the first 3-4 weeks I forgot several times per week. Each time I forgot, I faced the consequences – very few clean glasses and an appliance with a stinky smell that kept getting worse throughout the day. Plus a semi-judgmental 5 year-old who gleefully pointed out my mistakes. No one swooped in to save me, or to fix my oversight. 

This is easier said than done, of course. Most of us aren’t willing to let our houses and children fall apart in the process of trying to develop new habits. It’s uncomfortable, even if we know our houses and children won’t really “fall apart.” Perhaps more importantly, society trains women to believe that we will be judged for our dirty houses and unkempt children. Because we will be judged. We’re also trained to believe that any shortcomings diminish our value as women, wives, or mothers.

Guilt stifles our ability to equally share the parenting and household duties, too. I experience twinges of guilt regularly – when I admit that I don’t know the size of my daughter’s diapers or when I tell my friends I hadn’t personally bathed my child in over 2 years.

Slowly, I’ve come to reclaim the guilt as facts, as information. It’s evidence that equality in partnerships is possible, even if it feels distant. Shortly after my husband’s surgery, I began telling everyone about my previous lack of bath/shower duty. Why? Even though it sometimes made me feel like a clueless parent (“bad mom” is a prohibited phrase around here), if we don’t discuss what’s possible, norms will never change. The “helper” partners will never become true “sharers.”

So what happened with the dishwasher?

You’re dying to know, right? Well, as the summer weeks passed, the dishwasher became part of my nightly repertoire. My brain had to shift and change, to re-learn and re-shape itself. Thankfully brains are really cool and CAN learn new things.

It doesn’t happen overnight, though. Despite the popular idea that you can build a new habit in 21 days, science says it’s more like 66 days (shorter for some; longer than others.) No wonder the dishwasher thing didn’t stick after the first three weeks!

But good thing my husband is off crutches, because winter is coming and I really don’t want to learn how to use the snow blower. After all, who’s got 66 days to spare? 

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*Note: while TOB strives to be gender inclusive, most of the research done on the division of labor within households focuses on heterosexual relationships between men and women.

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