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agonyaunt2022-09-28 11:40 am
minoanmiss) wrote in agonyaunt2022-09-28 11:40 am
Entry tags:
Care & Feeding: My Wife is a Total Slob...
... And Her Justification for the Mess Is Absurd
Dear Care and Feeding,
My wife and I (together for 5 years, married 3) are expecting our first child, a daughter, in February. My wife is incredibly beautiful, talented, sexy, intellectual, fiercely loyal, basically perfect except…she’s a HUGE slob. We often joke that she’s a “slut” in the original sense of the word, i.e. a bad and lazy housekeeper. If I don’t want to live with grimy bathrooms, a sink full of dishes, and tumbleweeds of cat hair blowing everywhere, I have to clean, which I don’t mind doing, if that’s the price of being with her. I was single for over a decade before we met and had all but despaired of falling in love or having a family.
The only thing that irritates me is when she justifies herself by claiming she’s fighting back against centuries of unfair domestic expectations of women, or that being a female “art monster” (a creative artist who neglects everything except their work) makes her rare and special. Her parents are a doctor (dad) and lawyer (mom) and she grew up with nannies and cleaning ladies. I grew up with a hard-working single mom and got used to pitching in from an early age. She’s entitled to her own choices, but I hope I’m not being out of line by NOT wanting her teaching our daughter that it’s cool and feminist to be a slob. How can I instill basic housekeeping skills in our kids, without getting into a verbal war about the historic imbalance of household responsibilities?
— The Art Monster’s Male Maid
Dear Male Maid,
I don’t think that rejecting all domestic work is an inherently feminist choice, but I do know that the reality for women is that “having it all” often also means “doing it all.” Even when both partners work, in heterosexual couples, women in the relationship are more likely to have primary responsibility for doing the laundry, cleaning the house, and preparing meals. Your wife may legitimately feel that she has to choose between her own creative work and the domestic work it takes to keep a home running. She also may simply lack the required skills.
Whatever the case, she’s made it clear she’s not interested in learning them, so it’s really up to you to decide how to move forward. An equitable division of labor is ideal for most, but that balance is unique to every couple, depending on careers, children, finances, etc.
As someone who made it to my late 30s before I even learned how to cook a grilled cheese, I do think it’s important for children of both genders to learn the skills they’ll need to take care of themselves and their homes as adults. But can’t you be the person to instill those lessons in your kids? After all, there are lots of families where one partner does the bulk of the domestic tasks, and when that partner is a woman, I rarely hear any outcry about who will teach the children. Or might you hire a housekeeper, if you have the resources? This is obviously a pretty privileged option, but when it’s feasible, paying someone a fair wage can be a lot easier than fighting about it in perpetuity.
And if you haven’t, I also think you need to have a serious conversation about expectations around the division of labor when it comes to childcare and the work of parenting. The workload at home is about to increase exponentially, and if you can’t agree on the best way to manage it, you’ll likely end up resenting each other, which would be worse for your future child than a sink full of dishes.
Dear Care and Feeding,
My wife and I (together for 5 years, married 3) are expecting our first child, a daughter, in February. My wife is incredibly beautiful, talented, sexy, intellectual, fiercely loyal, basically perfect except…she’s a HUGE slob. We often joke that she’s a “slut” in the original sense of the word, i.e. a bad and lazy housekeeper. If I don’t want to live with grimy bathrooms, a sink full of dishes, and tumbleweeds of cat hair blowing everywhere, I have to clean, which I don’t mind doing, if that’s the price of being with her. I was single for over a decade before we met and had all but despaired of falling in love or having a family.
The only thing that irritates me is when she justifies herself by claiming she’s fighting back against centuries of unfair domestic expectations of women, or that being a female “art monster” (a creative artist who neglects everything except their work) makes her rare and special. Her parents are a doctor (dad) and lawyer (mom) and she grew up with nannies and cleaning ladies. I grew up with a hard-working single mom and got used to pitching in from an early age. She’s entitled to her own choices, but I hope I’m not being out of line by NOT wanting her teaching our daughter that it’s cool and feminist to be a slob. How can I instill basic housekeeping skills in our kids, without getting into a verbal war about the historic imbalance of household responsibilities?
— The Art Monster’s Male Maid
Dear Male Maid,
I don’t think that rejecting all domestic work is an inherently feminist choice, but I do know that the reality for women is that “having it all” often also means “doing it all.” Even when both partners work, in heterosexual couples, women in the relationship are more likely to have primary responsibility for doing the laundry, cleaning the house, and preparing meals. Your wife may legitimately feel that she has to choose between her own creative work and the domestic work it takes to keep a home running. She also may simply lack the required skills.
Whatever the case, she’s made it clear she’s not interested in learning them, so it’s really up to you to decide how to move forward. An equitable division of labor is ideal for most, but that balance is unique to every couple, depending on careers, children, finances, etc.
As someone who made it to my late 30s before I even learned how to cook a grilled cheese, I do think it’s important for children of both genders to learn the skills they’ll need to take care of themselves and their homes as adults. But can’t you be the person to instill those lessons in your kids? After all, there are lots of families where one partner does the bulk of the domestic tasks, and when that partner is a woman, I rarely hear any outcry about who will teach the children. Or might you hire a housekeeper, if you have the resources? This is obviously a pretty privileged option, but when it’s feasible, paying someone a fair wage can be a lot easier than fighting about it in perpetuity.
And if you haven’t, I also think you need to have a serious conversation about expectations around the division of labor when it comes to childcare and the work of parenting. The workload at home is about to increase exponentially, and if you can’t agree on the best way to manage it, you’ll likely end up resenting each other, which would be worse for your future child than a sink full of dishes.
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It IS something you have to learn how to do, though - and it can be hard and embarrassing to admit, as an adult, "I need to be taught how to do this thing everybody else can do".
Especially when it comes to things like "How OFTEN do I clean the bathroom?" and "Okay, but WHAT PARTS of the room am I supposed to wipe down?" and "Do I have to clean the walls? Do I have to dust the top of the fan? How often do I do these things?" and "Exactly how much time do I need to schedule to declutter the living room?"
"Washing a dish" and "scrubbing a toilet" is easy. All this other stuff is not so easy if you weren't raised doing it, and it's easy to be flip about it, I guess, but....
Listen, I was raised in *literal squalor* after my father died due to a combination of factors. Actually, our house wasn't all that tidy before he died either - both my parents had executive function issues like you would not believe. This is not precisely the same as being raised with two parents and a housecleaning service, but it did make me pretty unable to do basic maintenance of cleaning. I can emergency clean with the best of them, if you don't mind everything being tossed out, because god forbid the plumber comes in and sees the house like this - but cleaning regularly? God. It's not easy! And snotty comments like yours are exactly the sort of shame-inducing thing that make it harder to ask for help, so maybe keep it to yourself.
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It's a skill. It has to be learned. You being a jerk to everybody who didn't learn that skill and finds learning it as an adult to be difficult is not okay, just because you personally think that this woman is "spoiled".
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But I also do stand by my original comment that simple things like washing dishes, which the LW says she doesn't do, are not in fact, difficult to do, even if you have never done them before. I think it's highly unlikely that she can't figure out how to do it.
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If you learned from someone else and you've been doing it a long time, it seems easy, but if you just put someone in front of a sink who's never done it before and say "clean the dishes"??? They are going to be lost. I mean, they can probably figure out "wipe things with soapy rag" but that's not really the same thing as knowing how to clean dishes well. And if you've got executive function issues, every one of those "what is the right way to do this?" decisions that isn't routine for you yet is going to drain your executive function down a little bit farther until you can't anymore. (Double so if you know there is someone watching who will criticize you because it's easy and you're messing it up. My mom still says I'm doing it wrong because I have massive sensory objections to putting my hands in a sink with dirty water with hidden slimy things floating in it.)
That's not an excuse for LW's wife - they have been married long enough that she should have been able to say "please teach me how you do the dishes, show me how to help" and learn his way in just a couple nights, except for like, cast iron - but saying "Washing the dishes is easy even if you've never done it before" helps nothing.
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I got a seriously nasty electric shock from wiping down a lightswitch with a cleaning product (I was wearing rubber gloves and rubber soled shoes, but the cleaning product was conductive).
And just look how many people accidentally make themselves sick by mixing bleach with other cleaning products while cleaning which creates chlorine gas!