Not a Wasted Word

So I was formulating a response to one of the comments yesterday, and I realized I had too much to say in that space. The reality is there is no one reason that our relationship has ended up in this place, but instead there are multiple mitigating factors that have resulted in our specific, and historically gender divided, dynamic. I want to write about them today, with the hope that those who have achieved what I have not, might have more specific advice for ways we can move forward, given our specific circumstances.

Transportation. We have one car, and I take it to work. That means that if something has to happen in the middle of the day, I can do it a lot more quickly and easily than my husband can, even though I work a lot farther away. It took me 30 minutes to drive up and pick up my daughter for vision therapy on Tuesday, but it would’ve taken longer for my husband to take a train and two buses to get to her. And then he would’ve had to walk a mile to the appointment, and then get a bus back home. It’s just a lot easier for the one with the car to run these kinds of errands, and I always have the car. This makes it really hard for my husband to take the kids to things during the weekdays.

Jobs. My job has a schedule that makes it easier for me to pick up the kids, because I am technically allowed to leave work much earlier than my husband. The reality is is that I would rather pick up my kids at 4 or 4:30, and have them spend less time in aftercare, then have my husband pick them up at six. It doesn’t really make sense to me to make their lives harder, and saddle them with longer days, just to make our marriage more equal.

Also, my husband takes our son to day care a little later, so that our 2-year-old won’t have such a long day there, which means he gets to work later, which means he needs to leave later.

Another complicating factor is that we both work in the public sector, which means that taking time is especially difficult for both of us. While it is easier for my husband to leave work, in that he doesn’t have to arrange coverage and make sub plans, he does have to request those hours days or even a week in advance. So something as simple as taking our daughter to vision therapy requires a week of planning. And then of course he has to get her and arrive at the appointment without a car, which means he would have to ask for a lot of time off.

Dispositions. Another thing driving our particular dynamic is that my husband is an introvert who would much rather stay at home, while I am at extrovert who would much rather go out and do something or see someone. The idea of taking our daughter to a birthday party is painful to him, while I kind of enjoy chatting with other parents. This would be the case whether our children were involved or not. My husband hates small talk at parties, especially when he doesn’t know the people he is talking with, whereas I don’t mind it, and sometimes even enjoy it. And my husband would always rather stay home with the kids and play with them in that space, while I would always choose to take them somewhere because I feel the hours move faster when I’m out.

Also, my husband is just really bad at getting things done. He admits this. He frequently talks of his proclivity to sit on the couch and wait for someone else to fix his problems, while it is my proclivity to research and fix them myself. He has shown this through his own inability to manage self-care and his failure to do other things that are important to him. He didn’t get his teeth cleaned for eight years. By the time he went in he had to get them cleaned in quadrants, and each quadrant had to be done twice. He has quite literally never seen a doctor since we have been together, with the exception of his vasectomy (which I had to initiate even though he wanted to do it more than I wanted him to, by speaking with my gynecologist about it.) If he cannot do things for himself, even when he believes they are important, it is hard to think he will be able to do them for our family. And while I understand that I can give him more responsibilities, and let him learn from his mistakes, I’ve watched him not learn from mistakes that only affect him enough times to be wary of that course of action. Let’s just say that I truly believe that if I didn’t file our taxes, they wouldn’t get filed (or would be filed with expensive errors).

{I am so much better at getting things done that the one area we have avoided gender norms is in home maintenance–I am the one who does all the repairs in our family. My father-in-law has given me power tools on a number of occasions, but has never given his son anything of the sort. I am always the one to build furniture, fix something that is broken, install or hang things. If it needs to get done around the house, I am the one to do it.}

And while I do know that not all marriages look like this, I stand by my belief that women are raised to think and behave in certain ways, and men are raised to do think and behave in others, and those thought patterns help reinforce historical gender norms. It is true that some couples have completely turned these gender norms on their head, but the fact is we hear about these couples because they are the exception not the rule. Even in a situation where a mom does more because she works from home a couple of days a week, gender norms are at play: Women have traditionally sought out more flexible hours and schedules to accommodate their families, because gender norms dictate that they should be the parent to do that. Whereas most men have not felt compelled to ask for that time and space to raise their kid because it hasn’t been expected of them. Heck, I have a schedule that better accommodates my family because I’m a teacher–historically a woman-dominated field–so I am positioned by gender norms to do more simply by the job I chose. I’m not saying that every couple let’s gender norms dictate the division of labor in their marriage, but I think it does end up having some effect.

{Seriously, read this and then tell me what you think about the messages women receive in our culture today.}

Having said that, it is defeatist to hide behind gender norms and use them as an excuse not to make changes in my own relationship. Which is why I am publishing this post, and asking for those who have managed to avoid the gender norms trap, to help me make pragmatic changes in my own relationship.

I know I play a part in this dynamic myself. The reality is, the only marriage I have intimate knowledge of, the one I grew up in, played out in exactly the ways mine is now. My husband has a similar relationship as a model, as well as a mom who continues to enable his “I’ll just sit around until someone fixes it for me” mentality. And while I see other couples doing it differently, I don’t know how to emulate what they are doing.

I use the word “never” when I write post like yesterday’s, because my husband and I have been together for 10 years, and this has been a continuing issue. I still remember, quite bitterly, our first foray into couples therapy, where we took painstaking efforts to more equally divide labor. This was before we had kids. And every week we would we would return to our $200/hour therapist, and nothing would have changed, and she would tell me that I just needed to keep trying. And I got so frustrated that nothing changed and she kept saying the same things and it kept having the same effect (none) and we finally just stopped going because it was getting us nowhere. My point is that we have a long and storied history of me wanting hime to do more and him not doing more.

Having said that, I will concede that when I look back, I see that we are moving in the right direction, it’s just that we move at a glacial pace. I do want to keep trying, because I do believe we can change, but sometimes it feels like I am swimming against a strong, swift current, and it’s exhausting to be providing all the forward movement only to make such meager gains. It’s so much easier to be swept away with the current, and just do what I need to do to get shit done.

So that is a REALLY long post (sorry!) better explaining our specific circumstances. If you have any suggestions for how I can help us divide things more equally, I’m all ears.

My husband and I have had some difficult talks lately, and things between us are getting better. I think he’s really starting to see the disparities in our contributions to the family and he’s not only stepping up to do more, but he’s not bitching about it. In fact, I haven’t heard one prolonged, overly dramatic sigh in the past few weeks.

But I’m realizing that it he will never do so much that our contributions are equal, and that he’ll always have fewer responsibilities, less stress and more time to dedicate to his own personal pursuits. These disparities are written into the expectations of men and women in our society, and I just know that we will never be able to shake those deeply held, but often unrecognized beliefs. Just like there will never be an article written about the challenges of being a working father, my husband will never be our family’s default parent. He will never even understand the weight I carry as the default parent, or comprehend how torn I feel between the contrasting obligations of my job and my family. He is just never going to get it.

And I’m so envious of him for that.

It’s the little things, but they add up to something massive. He would argue that he doesn’t make certain assumptions but it’s clear that he does. Like how it’s assumed that I will be home in the evenings, probably because I pick up the kids, so I’m there before he is. He never thinks twice about leaving work late or stopping for a drink or staying out for a concert. When we both have something we want to do I’m left scrambling for coverage–and while he’ll sometimes offer to cancel his own plans so I can go out, it’s clear he feels he’s doing me a favor. I get to work later than I want to and have to leave earlier than I want to, and when I need to take time on the weekends to catch up, it ends up feeling like some favor he’s doing me. It feels like his time is his, first and foremost, and my time is mine only after everyone’s needs have been met.

It is there, in the fact that he’s never taken the kids to a doctor’s appointment without me, or held them when they’ve gotten a shot, or taken them for a hair cut, or attended a parent conference. I am the one who has to figure out how to make those things happen, even though I work during the hours they usually have to take place.

Yesterday, to take my daughter to vision therapy (there were no appointments available this past Saturday and next Saturday so I had to make one on a Tuesday) I had to ask for multiple favors at work to orchestrate an insane patchwork of coverage so that I could get part of one period covered, all of another period covered and someone to dial me into a Google HangOut so I can “attend” the staff meeting at home after the therapy appointment. Sure, my husband says he can “help” with these kinds of appointments if I “give him enough time to move things around,” but that never seems to be the case when one of the kids actually needs to be somewhere. It always ends up falling on me.

He has so much more time and space to dedicate to his own interests, while I struggle just to manage the tasks that are absolutely necessary. I try to put aside time for the things that are important to me, but at the end of the day I just don’t have the time, energy or space to dedicate to them.

If I’m going to be away from home I need to prepare things before I leave and manage the fallout when I return. I wonder the whole time if things are going well and what kind of mood my husband will be in when I get back. He never announces that he’s just taking the kids somewhere, to the zoo or to meet up with a friend. I’ve never been offered time alone at the house, or an afternoon to myself. He gets those things all the time, because moms meet up with their kids. But dads don’t. (At least the dad in my family doesn’t.)

It’s just hard to manage this life, and it’s even harder when I see my partner having a fundamentally easier time of it. It’s even harder when I feel like he doesn’t even recognize that he has it easier than I do, because he has so little comprehension of what it all entails. I honestly don’t think you can truly appreciate what someone is going through if you haven’t experienced it yourself. You just can’t. I couldn’t appreciate what my mother sacrificed raising us until I understood the subtle intricacies of the contrasting obligations of moms who work outside the home. Sure I had a vague sense of how much she did for us and how challenging it must have been, but I couldn’t really appreciate it until I was living it for myself.* And I believe the same is true for my husband–he just can’t understand the unfairness I perceive, and the envy and resentment I sometimes feel, when he has never been positioned in the less privileged circumstance.

The reality is my husband belongs to the most privileged demographic on this planet, and no amount of education, empathy or enlightenment can correct for that kind of distorted perception.

Growing up, I didn’t think much about gender norms or appreciate how hard women had to work in altering them. If anything, there was a part of me that believed women should accept the roles they’d been occupying since the birth of humanity–what is so bad about creating and nurturing life? Now I am frustrated that by the simple fact that girls are taught to sacrifice their own wellbeing to provide for others, while men are taught to expect their needs will be met (or at least that they will be able to meet those needs). These messages are subtle and yet so ingrained, it’s almost impossible to remain cognizant enough of them to alter one’s expectations.

I know I’m not the only woman out there who is so completely disillusioned by the realities of being a woman and mother today. I don’t know which is worse, how far we still have to go, or the fact that as a society we’re actively taking steps backwards.

And where does that leave me? Riling against a reality I cannot change? Being angry, envious and resentful isn’t the answer–it’s not my husband’s fault that we think this way–but I’m honestly not sure what is. Again, I’m left doing the hard work of figuring out what I should work to change, and determining what I need to accept. While my husband just needs to not stay out too late at an event that is personally fulfilling for him.

At least I didn’t do his dishes.

*I’m not trying to invalidate anyone’s experience, and I know there are so many experience that I, myself can’t appreciate for lack of living it. I also recognize my own privilege (second only to my husband’s) and realize that so many people have it so much harder than I do as a direct lack of that privilege. Right now I am only trying to comment on my marriage and what I perceive as an inability on my husband’s part to understand my experience.