I’ve been thinking about balance and ease lately, about how all the mothers I know are hopelessly stressed and how to change that (see Part 1). One problem is the unequal distribution of domestic labor. In 2017 in the United States, women with young children spent over an hour more per day on domestic work than men and over a half-hour more on “primary” childcare (feeding, bathing, etc.).
Almost all the couples in my little progressive Northeastern bubble are making some attempt to alleviate this disparity. I know men who move for their wives’ jobs, who stay at home with their young children because daycare is scarce and expensive, who shorten their working hours to be home at the end of the school day.
Is it working? If so, how?
Before I had children, I read an essay somewhere (anyone know?) about a first-grader who was told to draw a picture of his parents enjoying themselves. The kid came home with a diptych of his father watching TV on the couch and his mother washing dishes. I joked sometimes that my only goal as a parent was to make sure my kids avoided that impression.
It was an exaggeration, but perhaps not by much, and so it was with feigned lightness that I asked my three-year-old recently, “Hey, sweetheart, will you tell me what mommies do?”
“They do the washing machine!”
My heart sank.
“And what about daddies, honey?”
“They do the dryer.”
***
Maybe this is as much as we can hope for. Maybe finding equilibrium at home doesn’t mean that nobody is stressed anymore. Maybe it means that there are more men lying awake at night with the nagging sense they forgot to run an important errand, who get bad performance reviews at work because they keep taking time off for snow days, who love their children more than life itself and yet wonder what they might have achieved had the babies come along a decade later.
Or is there another way?