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agonyaunt2022-09-28 11:40 am
minoanmiss) wrote in agonyaunt2022-09-28 11:40 am
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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.
no subject
If your wife's political stance is "the idea of housekeeping we were both raised on is a relic of an oppressive definition of (white)(middle-class) femininity aimed at isolating women from the public sphere and creating unachievable classist standards, and it's not a moral failure if the dishes sit in the sink for two days" she's probably right, and it's not her fault if you can't let go of that standard. (It's great that your single mom was able to do it all, but I bet you she didn't have time or energy for any art other than her cleaning and her kids, and she was scrabbling *very hard* to do even that.)
I suspect it leans closer to the second one, if only because unless you married a much younger woman she must have been happily living with her own slobbiness for quite a few years before she met you (And also you don't seem to have any complaints about her *expecting* anything out of you.)
If that's the case, you need to figure out how much of the cleaning you do is stuff that's really necessary for you to be happy (and, of course, have a house that's safe for kids), and how much is just you adhering to a standard you've never really thought about, because you're probably going to end up compromising on some of that with a baby around regardless. And if some of it is just that you enjoy keeping a really nice house, that's what you explain to the kids - "Dad keeps the house because he likes keeping a pretty house and it makes him happy, Mom paints because she likes painting and it makes her happy".
If you and your wife just have really incompatible standards with how clean you like your space to be, you should (if you haven't already) work out some compromises on messes/perfectionism to be kept in private spaces and compromising in shared spaces because you value each other's comfort. That's something you'll definitely have to teach the kids anyway, because every kid needs to learn it, so get started now.
But I wouldn't worry to much about teaching your daughter that it's cool to be a slob. A, because it clearly *is* - you fell in love with her mother, after all, who is super cool - and B, because she will still be getting plenty of messages from outside the family about how girls are supposed to do all the cleaning.
As for imparting housekeeping skills - if you don't hate doing them, and you do them with the kids around, they will pick up on that when they're very young, and will want to help and to learn what you're doing. Let them - give them little ways to "help" as soon as they can show interest, and keep going as they get older. It will become "cool thing we do with Dad and that Mom thanks us for a lot" unless the two of you teach them otherwise, same as in a household where it's Mom doing most of the tasks.
no subject
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In my household now, we trade off who cooks and who cleans (both of us like to cook) and interior cleaning is....I won't say evenly divided, because husband cares more about specific standards than I do and also is not chronically plagued with migraine, so he tends to do more, but we do try to thank each other for doing the thing. But I think of the "average" het couple (at least as described in research I've read?) or think of certain of my male relatives and try to picture them even noticing how much work their female partners do, and come up blank.
no subject
(Although it's interesting because when I think about my aunts and uncles, there are certainly a lot of couples where the wife does way, way more of the work than her husband, and the husbands don't always pay attention, but if reminded of the work their wives do, they are generally performatively grateful about it! Maybe it's my grandma's influence - she was born in the 1920s but she was a Youngest Stepdaughter and had strong opinions about treating the people who do your housework well - or maybe it's a regional thing, where the local formulaic response to your wife complaining about housework is to say "And I am very, very grateful to you for doing it and I love you very much", sincerity variable.)