We Finally Found a Way to Divide Chores That Saved Our Marriage. Now I Have a New Problem.
Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.
Dear Care and Feeding,
When our child was born, we went from fairly evenly split chores to me doing most of them. I had FMLA and my husband “Josh” didn’t, daycare always called me instead of him, and then it became a habit. It left me miserable and cranky, at home and at work. This past summer, we sat down and talked it out. It wasn’t fun, but we agreed to try to rebalance the work. Josh takes on the planning and action for “his” tasks, and we both take on each others’ in a pinch. It took practice for both of us, but Josh is loving and competent and now everything essential gets done. It’s such a relief. Now, months in, I’m sleeping more. We’re having enthusiastic sex again. I haven’t stress-puked in over a month. I try to compliment Josh on being a good dad and a great spouse, and he also makes a special effort to notice the work I do. It sounds dumb, but the compliments do help. We feel like a team again and resolved the biggest conflict in our marriage. But it’s led to a new problem.
But I need help ignoring other people’s opinions about it. if Josh dresses our child in clean, weather-appropriate clothes that don’t match, I get a comment or a side eye from other moms when I drop him off at pre-K. If Josh vacuums but doesn’t sweep the hard-to-reach corners, my mom comments about my housekeeping. Our child complained to my sister-in-law about the vegetables in “Daddy dinner,” and now she won’t stop bringing it up. Lots of little stuff like this comes up, almost always from other women. How do I stop listening to it or feeling ashamed for how things don’t look “perfect” anymore?
Dear Much Happier Now,
Years ago, a close friend of mine was getting married and asked whether I had any advice, and I told her the first thing that came to mind: “Don’t always be the one to do the grocery shopping.” It was kind of a joke; what I meant, as I explained to her, was: Don’t be the one who does everything by default. That’s a recipe for unhappiness and/or exhaustion. (I’m still not the one who does the grocery shopping. Or like 95 percent of the cooking.)
Patterns can be so tough to change, even when you know you need to. I’m glad you took the tough but necessary step to diagnose the problem and make it clear that you needed something to change. I wish you hadn’t needed to do so in such desperate straits, but it’s great that you and your spouse were able to discuss and take the steps you needed to take for your shared life to feel better and more sustainable for you. That your household is humming along, your kid has two equally involved parents (and will grow up with that example in their dad!), and you two feel like a team again—these are all good and important things. Other people’s opinions about your marriage, family life, and domestic labor split, on the other hand, are not important at all.
Maybe that’s kind of easy for me to say, since I get very little judgment; people tend to just over-compliment my spouse for normal parent things he does. You know: he took the kids along with him to the grocery store—talk about the best dad ever! (He is an amazing dad, but I don’t need to tell you that no one has ever complimented me for bringing them anywhere, do I?) When he hears these things, he usually makes some comment about “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” and we both roll our eyes and laugh. Eventually I realized that turning other people’s judgment or ignorance into something of a joke, laughing with my spouse (or a like-minded friend), is how I acknowledge my mild irritation at these little remarks.
Sometimes I just need someone else to recognize how ridiculous other people’s default expectations really are, and then it’s usually pretty easy to move on. Is there a way you could share some of these comments with your husband—or vent to someone else about it, if you’d rather—and then stop thinking about or feeling bothered by them? Would even just acknowledging to yourself that they’re annoying, and that’s fine but ultimately not super important, help you get on with things instead of letting them derail your day?
Also, in case it helps: I would assume that at least some of the moms side-eyeing you at dropoff wish their spouses would take charge of the morning routine. Maybe your mother also wishes her spouse had done more of the cleaning. They might be assuming you’re “at fault” for mismatched clothes or dusty corners because they assume you must be doing everything by yourself—but isn’t that assumption, in and of itself, a pretty sad thing for them to be thinking, when you get right down to it? It would be so much worse if they were right and you were still doing everything. They can’t even imagine how well things are going in your house right now that your spouse is acting like a full parenting partner, but you know. So go ahead and feel happy and satisfied about that, and focus on those good feelings and your restored sanity: You’ve worked hard for it.
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