(no subject)

[glorious_spoon]

 I just picked up Gemma Hartley's Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward. It's like reading dispatches from the Twilight Zone. 

My thoughts so far:

If I was married to her husband, I would probably have smothered him with a pillow long ago. What's almost more incredible is the fact that she describes him as liberal, progressive, and otherwise above-average as a parent and spouse, despite the fact that he's apparently incapable of the most minimal degree of household competence. This is someone who sent his child off to school without lunch or any of his school supplies, and apparently needs his wife to remind him to pack his own lunch if she's going to be out of town, FFS. That's not competent fatherhood!

I don't honestly hang out with this particular subset of progressive women--the 'Lean In' culture, the supermoms, the ones who have it all and do everything and maintain a show home despite the presence of kids and spouse and a stressful full-time job. I didn't actually even realize that it was still a thing until I discovered that like half of my daughter's friends' parents thought that my spouse was a single father because, as the one of us who doesn't work full-time, he does the vast majority of school-related things. It would never occur to me to assume that I ought to be handling that, too--he's a goddamn adult! They're his kids too! He can get them dressed and pack their lunches and take them to school and daycare and check backpacks and make sure homework is done and all of the other million little details that you have to worry about with kids. He works 25 hours a week. I work full-time. Of course he takes over more of the parenting and household duties; why in God's name wouldn't he?

...but apparently he's a goddamn unicorn in that respect.

Comments

[breathedout]

This culture is always so wild to me when I somehow brush up against it. It doesn't happen often, since I'm a child-free lesbian, but when it does I'm always like ???? Grown men being commended for "babysitting" their own children?! What is this world we live in!

[glorious_spoon]

It's fascinating to me since both my spouse and I grew up in blue-collar families that are...... not the most progressive, and no one would accuse him of being a leftist activist, and yet.

[out_there]

Eh. I work in a non-profit, so we're heavily skewed female but the guys in our office are all competant fathers who will pack lunches and pick up kids if it's more convenient for them than their wives (ie. They'll pick up two days a week, their wife will do the other days because she's working part-time).

But to a weird extent it seems to depend on financial equality. Where the husband is earning a lot more than the wife and working much longer hours, the parenting workload falls on the wife. If both parents are working and bring in close to the same amount, it gets split more equally.

[glorious_spoon]

I do think that's some of it; I honestly suspect that part of the reason the division of labor worked out the way it did in my household is that I got pregnant right around the same time I got a well-paid professional job with benefits (while my spouse's job was... none of the above), so it didn't make sense for me to put the brakes on my career to do the baby thing. But I also see it in a lot of households where both spouses work full-time, so IDK.

[sholio]

I am always so baffled at people who treat this as "eh, that's just how things are!" Like my mom just takes it for granted that she has to drop whatever she's doing at 4:30 pm so my stepdad can have dinner at 5:30 and otherwise he gets pissed at her.

It is true that my husband and I tend to divide the chore load along fairly gender-typical lines, but that has everything to do with it simply working out that way due to me being home all the time (it's much easier for the person who works from home to cook dinner in between doing business emails, as opposed to the person who was at work all day having to get home and start dinner), and our areas of interest - I loathe being forced to do home maintenance and I'm terrible at it, whereas he has an aptitude for it. And we both have a general understanding that if it's bothering you enough to complain that someone needs to do it, then you can damn well pick up a hammer/a frying pan, and do it yourself.

... I mean, I also feel like it needs to be understood that if you don't normally do something, it's going to be hard for you the first time, even if it's a relatively simple thing. If you haven't ever made lunch for someone else, you aren't going to be fantastic at it right out of the starting gate, so I also tend to get annoyed at the "I went out of town for a weekend and my husband was useless at taking care of the kids" people because, you know, if he's suddenly coping with a bunch of tasks that are entirely new to him, OF COURSE he's going to have a learning curve, just like I kind of suck at plowing the driveway because I only do it once a winter whereas my husband (who started in the exact same place; we were both newbies together) is damn good at it because he does it 90% of the time. Which is why, if it's normally your job, the onus is also on YOU to give clear instructions and make sure the other person knows what needs to be done, and when, and how. But really both of you should have experience at doing any vital household task.

[glorious_spoon]

The second point is one of my big issues with this book (and with a lot of the Discourse I've seen on this topic, tbh). Because that's definitely a dynamic I've seen a lot, especially with parenting. I mean, on the one hand, fathers should be proactive in taking care of their kids (when my daughter was born, I literally zonked out and let my spouse deal with all of the screaming/soothing/diapers for like three days straight). But yeah, if you're not the one who's home with the kids all the time, you're not going to know what the routine is without being told.

I mean, my spouse does the school drop-off every morning. Last week, I had to drop our daughter off and he had to explain to me where the drop-off point was, because I'd never done it before. I still genuinely don't know how to operate our riding mower, and like you I'm pretty terrible at plowing. It's just that when you do something all the time, it sort of seems like it should be obvious--but for the person who *doesn't* do it all the time, it often isn't.

...that said, yeah, everybody should be able to handle the basics.

[harpers_child]

One of my cousins is married to a guy who has to be left super detailed lists on how to take care of his child when she goes out of town for work. Like she can't just tell him "feed the kid at 6", she has to tell him "feed him x, y, and z at 6". Because otherwise he doesn't know what to feed the child he lives with.

I personally would never put up with that shit, but she wants to have another kid with the guy. IDK.

[glorious_spoon]

I find that whole thing honestly baffling. Largely because I'm just barely capable of looking after myself; my spouse and I have a running joke that the two of us put together make one competent adult. I can hold up my end of the household, but there's no way I could carry everything on my own.

[doughtier]

I don't have anything much to say, except that you've apparently chosen a very good unicorn.

[glorious_spoon]

:D he is a Quality Unicorn

[minoanmiss]

Yeah, this..

*does not make any riding jokes*

[glorious_spoon]

XD I was resisting very hard.

[doughtier]

And here I was, avoiding making horse jokes ... :) There are, apparently, 2 types of people.

[rosefox]

until I discovered that like half of my daughter's friends' parents thought that my spouse was a single father

lolwut

We don't get people commenting on this because J doesn't generally do daycare pickups, and when he does dropoffs it's alongside X. But the two of them split mornings and I take evenings, and when X and I went out of town for a weekend we left J zero instructions other than "don't break the baby". In a world where none of us needed to work, J would almost certainly be the primary caregiver; he's the most nurturing of the three of us by far.

J's last company offered very minimal parental leave, and one of his managers was still planning to cut the leave short and come back right away. J actually scolded him to go spend more time with his child, and can still wax quite exasperated about it, years later. He has no patience for men who think parenting is a burden.

[glorious_spoon]

I mean, why on earth would he be picking up and dropping off his child and helping her with her homework if he had a wife around to handle it?? /sarcasm

Yeah, that's kind of the thing that gets me; he's by far the more patient and nurturing of the two of us, and I have the more stable, well-paying job, so the division of labor we have makes perfect sense for our family. But people get really boggled about it in weird ways.

[sciatrix]

I was part of a huge emotional labor discussion a few years ago in which I just stood there, jaw dropped, while women in relationships with men detailed the sheer level of abdication of responsibilities their partners engaged in. And I thought about it, and my dad is just as bad to my mom about it; he's only really stepped up in the emotional labor necessary to maintain a relationship with me after I've totally cut my mother off, and I still catch her trying to engage in some of the basic relationship managing stuff even though she herself is totally toxic to me, does not appear to like me in any personal way, only really has criticism to convey, etc.--it's just, she's the female head of the household, so it's her job somehow to try to arrange vacations and shit. (I mean, I'm not vacationing with her any time soon, but--it really is pervasive.)

It's so interesting. My best work friend is also a straight guy whose wife is currently pregnant, and I'm curious to see how he reacts to his kid being born this winter. (I expect him to step ably up to the plate--there's a reason he's my best friend in my field--but occasionally he and I run into big cultural clashes from my most-of-my-friends-are-also-queer-women-and-enbies perspective vs his what-do-you-mean-flannels-and-subarus-are-associated-with-lesbians perspective.)

[glorious_spoon]

It really is just absolutely pervasive in absolutely shocking kind of ways. Like: yeah, my family of origin is like that, but I guess I always kind of thought it was just my parents specifically? My mom is a very nurturing person and my dad is... not, but I also grew up in a kind of freewheeling hippie subculture where a lot of the households I knew--and thus my models for How Grownups Are--were poly, or queer, or otherwise nontraditional. And then I got married fairly young, well before any of my friends did, and it wasn't until I was in my late twenties that I kept seeing this same dynamic replicating itself over and over again with all the women in relationships with men.

And even a lot of the men who weren't otherwise appalling just sort of checked out when kids started arriving. Which on some level I get, since babies are Exhausting, but it just seems so astonishingly selfish to just decide to dump all of it on your partner that I was shocked to see how many men I knew--otherwise decent men!--who were happy to do exactly that.

[cadenzamuse]

A toast to our unicorns? I am fairly certain I wouldn't have married and fostered/adopted children with Spouse if he weren't more competent at both householding and parenting than me.

[glorious_spoon]

Cheers to that!

[chickentimeschickenways]

Your experience is reassuring to read, honestly. The trouble with mostly hanging out in advice-oriented spaces online that are occupied by largely AFAB folks, a significant portion of whom are partnered with dudes or who have had previous experience being partnered with dudes, is that I tend to hear all the worst versions of that sort of relationship, and not a whole lot of the good versions.

I sometimes wonder if that is a drawback of the culture in certain internet spaces that are otherwise very supportive. . . the toxic relationship model gets a lot more airtime than the okay-functioning one, and therefore it seems way more inescapable and unavoidable than it maybe actually is.

[glorious_spoon]

I do think that's a thing. There are a couple of communities that I've had to pull back from for exactly that reason... like, on a case by case basis, they're very positive and supportive for people who need them, but the overall effect is of continuous dysfunction.

[chickentimeschickenways]

"the overall effect is of continuous dysfunction" --> YES EXACTLY

[flamingsword]

I married my husband specifically because we get along so well and we both do our own chores. My women friends sometimes have these troubles with cis dude spouses and girlfriends, and I think it is absolutely a signal of disrespect for women and non-men to not do your fair share.

[glorious_spoon]

It absolutely is. Or just like... immaturity and selfishness. I have a hard time believing that people can actually be this oblivious to the hardship they're causing their SO, but it seems that some people genuinely are.

[umadoshi]

So many het marriages sound like absolute horror shows even before kids are a factor, and after that...yikes. (Most of my local cishet friends who're married/in long-term relationships are in pretty solid partnerships, so I know there are plenty of dudes out there who're holding up their end, but still. Meep.)

[glorious_spoon]

Yeah--I think that frustrates me so much about a lot of this kind of thing I read is this sense of inevitability. Like, yes, if you're a woman married to a man, you have to resign yourself to being a 24/7 life manager for a grown-ass adult for the rest of your marriage. And that isn't true, but it's so pervasive in some subcultures.