This is an old post from a previous blog...
In my growing-up house, my Mum did all the housework except during a brief period when she went out to work and left my long-term unemployed dad to do the house-jobs. She didn’t approve of his methods and I think she just ended up doing everything. The work at home and away from home.
In my growing-up house, my Mum did all the housework except during a brief period when she went out to work and left my long-term unemployed dad to do the house-jobs. She didn’t approve of his methods and I think she just ended up doing everything. The work at home and away from home.
My husband and I have a good relationship. There’s no real hierarchy when it comes to getting stuff done. I’m not a fan of answering the phone, so he does more of that and he always picks up the takeaway on the, now rare, occasions we have one but other than that there aren’t a lot of ‘he-jobs’ and ‘she-jobs’- we can both turn our hand to most things. This is what you should expect in a modern family.
That said I do get quite a kick out of being the one who can more readily spot when a room needs sprucing up and I really like sitting with my family to eat food that I have cooked. I just like it. It makes me feel happy. Not in an “I’m the woman, it’s my job” kind of way, but just in an “I’m Sarah, and this feels nice” way. I've probably appropriated some areas of the work in the home as my own, and although he can 'help', it's really me who is the foreman.
There’s a particular kind of zen that I feel when I’m mindlessly moving around the house doing jobs; carrying washing, cleaning toilets, wiping surfaces. It just makes me feel different.
I recently started working full-time. I’ve been a part-timer for as long as I can remember, but at the beginning of this year I knew that it was time for me to leave the job I had had for 8 years and move on to something new. I’d risen to a high (ish) level in the charity I worked for and was well-paid (well enough to live in a terraced house without a garden on the south coast) so I knew I would need to take a pay-drop. Weighing everything up, I decided it was worth it.
I took a full-time job at a local university and the extra hours mean that I take home almost the same amount of money each month (and I now have a pension and less work-related stress).
My husband is a PhD student and a teacher. He’s a couple of years into his PhD and since I began my full-time job he has not been picking up teaching hours so that he is around for the kids before and after school and to write the hell out of his PhD. It’s going pretty well. Recently, he’s been referring to himself as a ‘house-husband’ which makes sense because he’s been picking up a lot of the housey things to do which I used to do more of.
The thing I have found the hardest to relinquish prime responsibility for (because it makes me happy) is the washing. I really love washing- particularly when you can dry clothes on the line. There’s a special pleasure in that. I think I hang the wet clothes on the line the right way- but I do it differently to him. I think I might’ve tried to indoctrinate him at one time, but now I just leave him to it and sadly mourn the loss of this ‘nice thing to do’.
A few weeks ago, when my husband was loading up the washing machine, I noticed that he was putting the liquid detergent in the wrong slot in the detergent drawer. I was shocked. The compartments are clearly marked 1 and 2. 1 for the thing which goes into the wash first, 2 for the thing that goes in second. Washing liquid first, conditioner/softener second. We’ve had the same kind of washing machine for years. I couldn’t believe that he had been washing the clothes incorrectly all that time. He said he would check the instructions some time, just to be sure.
This morning, halfway through my to-do list, sat at my desk a couple of miles away from home I read this email…
I'm afraid the detergent does go in section 2.
X
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