Hours vary, but may include some short sleep breaks.
***Please note: This is an unpaid position.***
Speak to any first-time mother and she’ll generally tell you that her expectations of parenthood (gentle scheduling, easy nap times, a sweetly decorated nursery and a swift return to sexual intimacy—and function—with her partner) were vastly different to the reality (in which a tornado tears through her home daily, the nursery has become a storeroom because the baby only wants to sleep attached to her breasts, and hearing her partner say ‘I’m tired too’ in response to her ‘I’m fucking exhausted’ becomes the world’s most foolproof contraceptive because the thought of having sex with such a clueless wanker makes her want to eat her own face and, besides, who wants to bone when you’re worried about pissing yourself?).
If you’d asked me about the gender politics in my relationship before I’d fallen pregnant, I would have told you that we had that shit locked down. We managed to live reasonably independent lives while still maintaining emotional intimacy and connection. Neither of us ever asked for ‘permission’ to do anything. I would sometimes plan a week or two away for work here or there with barely any warning, and the thought of having to explain myself or my absence was a completely foreign concept. We did fight about the distribution of domestic chores (I wanted him to stop leaving his cereal bowl by the sink as if it were my job to clean it), but we also fought about security (he wanted me to stop leaving doors unlocked so our home insurance wouldn’t be rendered invalid if we were broken into). These arguments were more like the ones you might have with a housemate, though—one whose domestic footprint hasn’t yet been magically erased by the fact they poke their junk at (or in) you every so often.
(Sidenote: Isn’t it incredible how many cis men think sleeping with a woman earns them special She Can Do My Washing privileges? My dudes, your dicks ain’t made of diamonds.)
Like an ignorant fool, I assumed little would change once our communist bloc of two became a picket-fenced trio. But the funny thing about babies is that they can’t actually do anything. They haven’t even figured out that they have opposable thumbs yet, so the days of picking up after themselves are still a long way off. So if the introduction of a baby brings with it a whole new level of workload to a house, who takes responsibility for that?
For example, I always considered it non-negotiable that I would never wash a man’s clothes, and my partner certainly never expected me to do it. But what did it say about the dynamic of a feminist partnership that the responsibility for laundering our baby’s clothes always seemed to fall to me? In that first year after becoming parents, some of our biggest barnstormers started because I found myself washing and folding yet another load of tiny leggings and singlets that my partner had just stepped over or walked past without even noticing.
‘Why is this my job?!’ I’d rage at him. ‘This is your baby too! We need to be equally responsible for making sure he has clean clothes to wear!’
If laundering onesies challenged our relationship, then the issue of sleep-ins almost detonated it completely. Many a morning passed by with me insisting on having an argument discussion about the fact that I seemed to be expected to wake up with the baby every day. Fuelled by lack of sleep and feminist outrage, I reminded him that ours was supposed to be an equal partnership and that I shouldn’t have to wheedle and bargain every time I wanted to sleep while he did the morning shift.
‘You’re not my boss!’ I yelled at him. ‘I shouldn’t have to feel like I’m a nervous employee calling in sick to work!’
I want to stress that things are greatly improved now. My partner is a wonderful, loving father who splits childcare responsibilities with me roughly equally. Our son sees him washing and folding laundry, doing dishes, cooking food, wiping benches and changing more nappies than can possibly ever be counted. I have no doubts at all that the kind of masculinity he’s modelling is of a gentle, supportive and nurturing kind. I feel extremely lucky to be raising a child with someone so patient and beautiful. But it took showdowns and arguments from both of us to get to this point, because the division of gendered labour is just so damn insidious and deeply conditioned. In the first two years of my son’s life, I was probably tempted to walk out of my relationship (or kick my partner out of it) at least once every couple of weeks. It was hard work trying to inject equality into a circumstance in which inequality is so consistently represented by society as the happy norm. Navigating these new boundaries put a huge amount of stress on our relationship, so I shudder to think what inequality is being accepted in relationships where these conversations aren’t a regular occurrence. If I learned anything at all after becoming a parent, it’s that resentment is a well that can always hold more liquid but can never be fully drained.
I’m far from the only woman who feels this way, nor is this inequality only present during the breastfeeding and nappy years. As I prepared to write this chapter, I issued a call-out for testimonies on one of the online mothers’ groups that saved my life after my son was born. This is a group mainly populated by progressive women aware of the damage done by gender stereotypes and their impact on our children. I’d be willing to bet that most of the group’s members consider themselves feminists. Yet not only did my questions about domestic frustrations and gender inequality yield a huge response, almost all of them featured one chief complaint: the expectations placed on them by their male partners to carry the mental load.
In 2017, a French cartoonist who goes only by the name of Emma depicted this form of domestic labour brilliantly in You Should’ve Asked. This essay-length comic lays bare the expectation that women become the ‘household managers’ for men who may be happy to perform household tasks, but who require delegation from their wives or girlfriends to be prompted into action. These are the same men who genuinely love and adore their children, but who still ask their partners what they should feed them for lunch. The men who know when their favourite football team will play, but not when their child’s next vaccinations are due. Who understand that growing children frequently need larger shoes and clothes, but never take the initiative to buy them.
These men aren’t bad people, and they’re probably unaware of how uneven the workload is in their family. If you were to ask them, they’d almost certainly say the balance was more or less equal, ‘give or take’. But this is because they haven’t been conditioned from the outset to absorb the kind of boring, repetitive mental labour that is considered not just the domain of women but our area of special expertise. It spawns from the same conditioning that sees women acting as ‘the glue in men’s conversations’, as journalist Tracey Spicer calls it. In this framework, women don’t lead—we facilitate. So it is that we facilitate the smooth running of a household, whether or not we want to or are even particularly good at it. If a household is a living organism, women’s work is the fascia that connects all those muscles together.
There are other influences at play here, and they touch on what one mother reminded me was the tendency for us to sometimes assume, even to our own detriment, that we’re superior at these tasks. Not long after Emma’s You Should’ve Asked was published, the writer Cerys Howell criticised what she (and others) have referred to as the ‘cult of motherhood’. Howell was writing in The Guardian about her postnatal depression, in an article titled ‘I deleted my baby apps when I realised how much they fetishise motherhood’. She observed that the vast majority of these online motherhood communities ‘assume mum-exclusive care’, noting that fathers were often only mentioned ‘as a subsection, like a type of buggy’.
I don’t share Howell’s disdain of these groups, but I agree that women in Anglo, often middle-class communities seem determined to prove our competency as highly skilled Professional Mothers, the modern, ‘empowered’ version of the 1950s housewife who can suddenly do and have it all but with less easy access to gin and Bex. My theory is that ‘instinctive’ child rearing and domestic management live in the miniscule realm of
things women are allowed to boast about being good at, because it suits the patriarchal order for us to aspire to greatness within this unpaid and grossly underappreciated skill set. Men may be best at running the world, but women are best at running the house—or at least this is what we are supposed to satisfy ourselves with.
When you combine this with the element of competition—that is, the endless competition women are constantly forced into with one another, the one that plays out in the Mummy Wars, the media critiques and the irritating persistence of querying whether or not we can really ‘have it all’—the situation just gets worse.
Around the same time that Emma’s comic was published, Harper’s Bazaar published an article by Gemma Hartley about women’s emotional labour in the domestic sphere, poignantly titled, ‘Women aren’t nags—we’re just fed up’. In reflecting on the example she and her husband were setting for their children (one girl and two boys), Hartley wrote:
I find myself worrying about how the mental load bore [sic] almost exclusively by women translates into a deep gender inequality that is hard to shake on the personal level. It is difficult to model an egalitarian household for my children when it is clear that I am the household manager, tasked with delegating any and all household responsibilities, or taking on the full load myself. I can feel my sons and daughter watching our dynamic all the time, gleaning the roles for themselves as they grow older.
Hartley’s just one of many women in heterosexual partnerships who feel obliged to ‘manage’ not just the workload of the home she shares with at least one other adult, but also the way her home is perceived by other people. I’m speaking generally here, but I’ve rarely, if ever, encountered the same level of domestic embarrassment in my male friends in hetero partnerships as I have in my female ones. They don’t give the toilet a quick once-over to check for rogue floaters, nor do they apologise for presiding over a living room that actually looks lived-in. As the women trained to pick up after them exclaim in exasperation, ‘It’s as if they don’t even see the mess!’ A convenient form of myopia, you’ll agree.
To be extremely clear, I’m talking about families and partnerships which are not that bad. No wonder women feel compelled to host award ceremonies when their partners occasionally ‘help’.
Lucky us.
It’s difficult to get analytical data on the nitty gritty of what’s happening in homes across Australia, but I feel confident saying that they’re built on some deeply sexist fault lines. Not surprisingly, it all starts with how much involvement we expect men to have with their kids from the very beginning.
Anecdotally, it seems there are a lot of men who consider a nine-hour day spent at work plus a bit of playtime with the kids afterwards to be the extent of their contribution to family life. They leave the kid-wrangling in the mornings to their partners, get home as dinner’s being prepared (when they might also complain a bit about how messy the house is because, ‘What do you do all day?’) and then relax in front of the TV or computer while Mum does bath-and-bedtime. The weekends are for sleep-ins (his) because—as their exhausted wives or partners rage to networks of similarly disenchanted women around the country—‘he says he’s tired’. Afternoons are for sport, and evenings are for winding down after sport. On the rare occasions that he parents solo, it’s called ‘babysitting’. When he empties the dishwasher or vacuums the floor, this is referred to as ‘helping’.
In case you weren’t already full to the eyeballs with annoyance about those two particular depictions of fatherhood and male domesticity, let me remind you that:
1. Men who look after their children aren’t ‘babysitting’. They aren’t doing a job that’s been outsourced to them. They aren’t being paid the pitiful salary given to the mostly female workers oppressed by the feminisation of their industry. These are their children. What they’re doing is called ‘parenting’.
2. It isn’t ‘helping’ to do a handful of chores in a house you live in. ‘Helping’ is when you go around to your mate’s place for a working bee or provide the answer to a hard crossword clue. It isn’t ‘doing less than your equal share and patting yourself on the back for being such a Good Guy’. Everyone, no matter what their gender, needs to stop framing men’s contributions to the domestic workload as ‘helping’. All this does is position that workload as belonging to women, with anything done by men an unexpected act of generosity that deserves acknowledgment and praise.
In another essay for The Monthly, titled ‘The wife and times’, Anne Manne recalls a recent period during which her husband assumed primary domestic care responsibilities while she finished writing her book. She was annoyed to discover that some people found this arrangement ‘amazing’. As she wrote:
My husband taking over the care role seemed a reversal of the proper order of things, like a waterfall suddenly flowing upwards. In earlier times, when I took on that role, under more exacting circumstances with small children to care for, reactions ranged from condescending to dismissive. I cannot recall a single instance of tears shed in sentimental gratitude.
When we say men ‘babysit’ their kids and ‘help out’ around the house and heap praise on them for doing so, we’re perpetuating the mindset that these things are outside the scope of the job description of Father and Husband/Partner. The flipside of this is that child-rearing and domestic work are maintained as the responsibility of women—obligations for which we can occasionally (but not too often!) seek assistance from men, whose paltry contributions inevitably end up being hailed as worthy of a ticker-tape parade.
Gosh, isn’t it nice to be with someone who gives you some time off every once in a while? And you’re just so lucky that he helps you around the house without complaint!
Baaaaaaaaaaaarf. Christ, the bar is set low for men.
But domestic and parental gender inequality is even more insidious than the bugbears of ‘babysitting’ and ‘helping’. In a lot of partnerships, it isn’t uncommon to find women who feel obligated to trade privileges or services with their partners in order to nab some ‘time off’. He ‘babysits’ his kid for a few hours so she can go to a cafe or get a pedicure or a massage or some other form of pampering (it’s always pampering, because this dynamic relies on women feeling that ‘time off’ is a reward and not actually something they deserve) and in exchange he gets to go out on an all-night bender with his mates.
Very, very rarely does this negotiation happen in reverse. Of course, there are exceptions, but generally speaking men don’t feel pressured to make sure their home and parenting duties are suitably covered in order to blag a few hours by themselves.
When a friend of mine was struggling with a child who wouldn’t sleep, she and her partner spent a weekend at a sleep school. Aside from my friend’s partner, there were no other men there. As she told it, some of the other mums adopted a teasing tone and asked what she’d had to do to ‘drag’ him along.
‘Uh . . . nothing?’ she replied. ‘It’s his kid too.’
The thought that a man might take active responsibility for participating in the tedium of sleep school seemed shocking to these women. In response, another mum described how she’d had to agree to let her husband have a weekend away playing golf in exchange for her entering the program.
‘But that makes no sense!’ I shrieked at my friend when she recounted this later. ‘She’s not getting a weekend at a spa! She’s taken her baby with her to try to teach them how to fucking sleep! He’s getting two freaking free weekends, and he’s had to do nothing!’
While it seemed unbelievable to me, I also recognised how frighteningly true this situation is for a lot of women in Australia who are charged with taking care of men and children. The comedic trope of the woman rewarding her partner with sex because he slightly reduced her domestic workload (by ‘helping’, naturally) is popular for a reason.
One of the most revolting things I’ve ever seen was a photograph labelled ‘Daddy’s Sticker Chart’. After being posted by Karen Alpert—who writes th
e parenting blog Baby Sideburns and whose Facebook page has over 300,000 followers—it quickly went viral and has been popping up around the place ever since. The chart lists seven different household chores, and it’s important that I list them all to properly demonstrate how very little is being asked of the husband in this joke.
1. Wash dishes
2. Put toilet seat down
3. Change blowout diaper
4. Bathe the rug rats
5. Pack the kids’ lunches
6. Vacuum car seats
7. Clean up throw up [vomit]
After each chore listed, the chart has six spaces for stickers. Six stickers earns Daddy a reward, and here’s where things get extra gross. These rewards range from receiving ‘a 12 pack of his favorite beer’ to ‘no nagging for a week’ to ‘1 get out of the dog house free card’ and ‘don’t have to go to some annoying kid’s bday party’. But the reward that’s shown with all the stickers already filled is the lucky last, ‘Clean up throw up’. This is the one where Daddy’s ‘help’ nets him, wait for it, a BJ!!!!!!!!
Yes, I’m aware that this chart was almost certainly posted as a cheeky joke. But the system of chore-for-reward actually does play out in loads of heterosexual homes. This isn’t just bad for the women who almost always end up with the short end of the stick when it comes to the domestic workload (and, evidently, bedroom duties), it’s also really destructive to the expectations being formed by the children looking on. It’s bad enough that children are conditioned to see women as the providers of unpaid domestic labour. It’s even worse that part of this socialisation involves learning that sex is just another job women are required to do.
Boys Will Be Boys Page 6
