I have a split life. I work part-time (10 hrs/week), I am a SAHM part-time. I homeschool my kids and attempt to run the household. Work is the easy, fun part of my life. Today I bought $800 worth of geography books!
Heh. My brother has been unemployed for some time. He’s spent it fixing the Black Hole, aka a house in the ass end of nowhere that they inherited from her family, and being the SAHP when his mother-in-law wasn’t around to kick him out (“go fix the house!”).
His wife was starting to feel resentful that he wasn’t bringing in any money, never mind that he supported her for many years or that the work he was doing in the Black Hole would have cost a ton of money if done by contractors.
Then they went on a weekend trip with a couple where the husband doesn’t lift a finger around the house. “That’s women’s work!”
My nephews got a double bearhug from their mother for answering “it’s PEOPLE work!” and my brother is back in the sunny side of life.
When I was married I:
- Read goodnight stories to the kids and put them to bed
- Prepared their lunches and snacks for the following day
- Got them up, dressed and fed in the morning and made sure they got on the bus in time
- Most nights barbecued the meat for supper
- Took the garbage and recycling out
- Cut the lawn
- Cleaned the pool
- Shoveled and plowed the snow
- Tended to flowers and gardens
- Cleaned the bathrooms
- Vacuumed the carpets
- Did the grocery shopping
- fixed all broken items and did routine oil changes, etc.
- Drove the kids to dance and soccer
She did the following:
- Laundry
- Dusting
- Prepared meals, apart from the meat portion most nights
- Swept the kitchen floor and entrance ways.
That’s pretty much it.
I’m separated now and don’t even miss any additional help. She was useless.
Oh, ok, so the kitchen cleaned itself, the dishes put themselves away, the beds made and changed themselves…
I cleaned the kitchen too.
The beds are part of the laundry that I mentioned. But BFD. How often does one wash bed linen: Once a month, once every two months?
ETA: I walked the dog too. Fuck.
:eek:
You probably didn’t mean it to come across this way, but the way you stated that implies that people who rent aren’t family members. As a life-long renter who came from a stable family and continues to have a stable family with a spouse I find that a tad offensive.
A lot of people regard my stay-at-home spouse as a slacker, but he is disabled and he does, in fact, do what he can. He used to be able to contribute more but the older he gets the more issues he has.
A lot of it is different expectations. Person A has too high expectations, and so ends up doing “busy-work” to match their expectations, wheras person B has more reasonable expectations, keeps it to a reasonable level. A then resents the “lazy” B whereas B is annoyed by the meddling A.
I never imagined how great it could be for my wife to stay at home, mostly because before we got together I never even considered being in that traditional of a relationship.
Personally I think talking about putting dishes away or making the bed are really missing the point, although I do appreciate her doing those things. What really makes it great is that the partner without a job has the flexibility to take on annoying things life throws at you, without ruining either of your leisure times.
For example, I was really busy at work last December. We talked a little bit about Christmas presents but she did the shopping for everyone - I only bought presents for her. Of course that was a lot of extra work for her to take on without any help, but I was working long hours on the job too. We both did our parts and overall we were both a little bit stressed but both still enjoyed the holiday a lot.
When I get home from work, one of us makes dinner and then we play with our son until bedtime. After he’s asleep the rest of the evening is leisure time. Rarely having anything we “have” to do after 6 PM is a pretty decadent luxury that’s hard to accomplish with 2 full time partners.
I do think in a perfect world, we would both work half time and both do half the non-career life obligations. Unfortunately that’s extremely hard situation to get into.
I had taken it to mean “people who share a roof because they are related to each other” vs “people who share a roof because one or more of them is renting from the other.”
I am in Household B. It was not always like this. We both completed college and both worked in our fields for a time. When my daughter was born, we both still worked. But after we relocated to another city and my son was born, my wife became a stay at home mom. This was a good situation for the early childhood years. I cannot imagine how hectic our lives would have been if we were both working full-time then.
But now, the kids are teenagers. They don’t need to come home to mommy and fresh-baked cookies. Yet, my wife has become semi-retired now. Any suggestion about her returning to full-time, or even part-time employment is met with an angry retort. She “works” 2-4 hours a week for the city, which provides her with some pocket money for lunches with her friends.
She does not want to do household chores any more, and has essentially outsourced the stuff she should be doing to the kids (by making it part of their allowance arrangement). Dusting, cleaning bathrooms, taking out the trash, vacuuming, laundry - all done by the kids now. While it is important that they learn these life skills, I have to ask what she does all day.
I know what she does - she reads her Kindle 4-6 hours each day. Sure, she cooks a meal or two per week, but then quickly dashes upstairs for the nightly bath and leaves the clean-up to the rest of us. We eat out or order in 2-3 nights per week, I cook about once, and we just fend for ourselves the rest of the time. I am also tasked with the manly outdoors chores, as well as any car related tasks. I also get to do my own laundry more than half the time.
The kids have busy schedules of their own with school and sports, and I work 40-50 hours per week. The one who has the most time here does the least. I know I am partially responsible for enabling this behavior, but every time I try to broach the topic of the unfairness of it all, it leads to a negative confrontation, and nothing gets resolved.
To Anaamika’s point - in addition to regular chores, we also have some projects that need to get done around here. But, there is always “tomorrow”. She has an endless supply of tomorrows.
Sorry for the long scree; this topic hit a nerve with me this morning.
My friend mocked me once that I had “allocated” time for one of my hobbies. By this I don’t mean “7:00 to 7:30”, work on beading, but “after dinner, I’ll spend half an hour or an hour and make some stuff.” I wanted to, but didn’t, ask him what he had gotten done that day. I knew what he had gotten done. He’d spent the entire day on the Internet, surfing around idly.
Meanwhile, I had gone to my eight hour job, come home, made dinner, did my exercise, and was spending a little time on the computer before I went to do some fun stuff.
Allocating time is how I went back to school full time while working full time and still managed to have a little fun!
In answer to snowthx and others, I know my SO would love to work from home and be home all the time. I am not really a big fan of this proposal. Sure, he’d make wonderful meals - cooking is one thing he never shirks from. But I can’t even imagine how messy the house would become. As it is I am the one who does most of the cleaning because it bothers me more.
I did think the “renter-oriented” comment was a bit weird. I’m a renter; what in the world does that have to do with my family? I have a family, too!
…Especially if the “A” is nothing but a big-nosed scumbag meddling neighbor with Nothing to add but BS judgement and Class A Ignorance.
void if that’s not You, of course.
This was exactly how I took it.
The point is that people in room-mate situations have even less “community spirit” amongst themselves than family members do. So natural shirkers have even less guilty feelings about shirking and the doers have less power of moral suasion over them. So Type B is more common among roommate-based households than blood relative-based households.
Whether the accomodations are owned or rented is totally NOT the point.
QN Jones isn’t talking about homeowners versus renters. They are talking about families versus roommates. They just chose the wrong phrase.
nm double-post.
I was kinda in “Situation B” with my partner, but it happened over time.
My ex was somewhat of a control freak. For example, whenever we would cook together, he’d always have to take the lead. The one time that I said I wanted to be “head chef,” he went to the living room and just watched tv. Normally, it’d be a situation where one person would take care of the proteins and main dish, while the other would do prep work and the sides. Instead, he decided to catch a rerun of the Simpsons while I was juggling three dishes in a small kitchen. Also, whenever we’d talk to friends, he always used the singular pronoun when discussing things that we’d done. (“I cooked last night”, “I did our laundry”, etc.)
Also, apparently, I am unable to load a dishwasher properly, because he would always go behind me and rearrange things - not because he needed to add items, but instead just to do it. I’d bring up my annoyance at this behavior, but it usually fell on deaf ears. (For some reason, the “I” instead of “we” thing really went all over me, because it made it seem like I did nothing to contribute to the relationship)
Eventually, I started doing less and less, because I knew that he’d go back and correct it anyway. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
Well, *were *you loading the dishwasher properly? Because sometimes I have to rearrange things after I see that one of my roommates has put knives & forks in pointy side up, nested spoons together, put bowls in right side up, etc.
When I lived in a B Household, there were three of us – just friends – sharing one house. I and Roommate A worked and then came home and handled 100% of the chores. All of them. We only asked Roommate B to take care of the yard – which meant mow the lawn a couple times a month. He wouldn’t do it and tried to badger one of us into doing it. I have a personal, strict no-mowing-lawns policy; I just don’t do it.
Eventually, after several confrontations, Roommate A and I just split and found other accommodations. We had just signed a second year-long lease, so we wrote letters to the landlady (who lived in another state), explained the situation, and asked how she planned to handle return of deposits. And then we lived in fear for 9 months to see if Roommate B would trash the place or default on the lease and cost us our shares of the deposit.
He did not trash the place, and apparently found other roommates to keep house and pay the $1100/month rent for him. When the lease was up, the landlady split the deposit return evenly three ways and sent each of us individual checks, as promised.
So we handled it by moving out and stiffing the guy on paying the rent for him – made it his problem instead of ours.
I used to have Household B. Recently kicked the slacker out. Strange how now that he’s had to move in with his mom he suddenly found a job.