I sit and try to understand where my ideas of housework come from. I think, like many of us, that housework is a chore. Something to be performed against will, and often for other people. An opportunity at amassing resentment, frustration, and dissatisfaction.
I am wasting all this time.
With dishes. With laundry. With making the bed, or fixing up a meal. Don't they know I'm too good for this? I'm too special. I'm too creative. Let someone simpler concern themselves with such things.
Chores have a way of seeming like a simple thing, but can spiral you down quite a toxic thought process. But is that because I genuinely dislike the activity, or is it because I associate it with something inferior? Following he suffragette movement and the sexual revolution, housework saw a downward slide, not just in performance, but in reputation. The dishes and cooking dinner are getting a bad rep ~ have you noticed? Largely because they're trapped between two equally toxic thought mechanisms ~ on the one hand, you've got the men who still put housework down as "the woman's business", and then you've got the feminists telling you not to touch that shit with a ten-foot pole.
Traditional Costume Street Art in Dublin.
Recently, I was at the grocery store and watched, in awe, as this couple before us went about their shopping at the register. The woman (crooked back and deeply lined face) unloaded the shopping into the cart along with her stick-thin 12-year-old daughter, while the man sat, belly jutting out, talking loudly on the phone, doing jackshit. Until, that is, the deciding moment came, and he started unrolling from a wad of bills. That was his job, just like it was the women's job to heft around the heavy sacks of food and bottles and whatnots.
A couple interesting things stood out. One, he looked much younger than his woman, though I doubt it was an age difference. It was a daily work difference. She was clearly the primary house-carer. She cleaned, she arranged, she cooked, she hefted heavy groceries. They'd taken their toll. Another was that the dude was sporting this Under Armor top, all stripped to show off his pecs and bulging muscles and everything. I wondered... why? Since you're gonna let that poor woman do all the heavy lifting.
That toxic shit needs to crash and burn in a ditch.
But so does the uber-feminist discourse that causes most women to fly into a rage at the slightest perceived insult on the homefront. Have you done it? I know I have. I once went off my head at my boyfriend. I don't remember what for. Letting me do dinner all alone. It was his house. It was early on in the relationship, and I ain't gonna be nobody's housewife.
I recognized it, in retrospect, as going back to earlier unprocessed shit, but also to this deeply ingrained idea that anything remotely resembling traditional gender roles is to be shunned and called out.
Right. But who does the housework, then?
Your house is your temple.
I'm borrowing here. I've been meaning to read John Kim's books for forever, and recently got to it. He's a therapist, and such a fun, genuine dude. And in one of the books, he talked about housework. I think it was in I Used to be a Miserable Fck* (which is aimed at dudes, to get them to be men). And he said that (a) you gotta stop seeing it as the woman's duty, or like you're helping her with the housework when you sweep or whatever.
And (b) that you gotta start treating your house as your temple. With remote work, and all this social distance that's got nada to do with the pandemic, we spend a lot of time inside our houses. That's alright. That's cool. But that's all the more reason to treat 'em nice. And to hopefully treat the people who inhabit them with us nice, also.
The objective truth is someone needs to do the dishes. I suppose you could scoop them up and dump them down the trash chute, and just get new ones. But then, you might get to arguing who should do the scooping, and why. So that's the reality.
Everything else is a matter of perspective. Let's say it's your turn to do them. So you are presumably going to do them. Now, you can do the dishes bitching about it in your head all the goddamn time, or taking it as your contribution to your temple (shared or solo, per case). It's unlikely that it's just you doing the work, so personally, I try to watch that sort of "I do everything" thinking, and nab it. Maybe you're doing the dishes, but someone else cooked, or did the laundry, or made the bed, or dusted. It's unlikely it's really just you doing it all.
When someone cooks for you, they are saying something. They're telling you about themselves; where they're from, who they are; what makes them happy. ~ I love Bourdain.
And if it is, could it be that your partner is busy doing other, equally important tasks, not for the temple, but for your tribe?
I've always felt men got the shitty end of the stick in recent decades, when being a stay-at-home wife became anathema, and being the primary breadwinner, as a male, a faux-pas. In a sound, well-intentioned effort to shine a light of gratitude and respect on the women who stood home, took care of the house and the baby, we've somehow knocked the men down several pegs. Is it so inconceivable that we might occupy the same peg here? That the woman's housework and mothering may be just as valuable as the man's bringing in dough? Just as implies the men's work is valuable, too, remember. Far too often, you get this equality talk, which for some women, seems to just be knocking down the value of men's contribution. That's unfair. I can't imagine it was very easy to support the family and have all that pressure on you, either.
So maybe you are doing more housework than your partner, but maybe your partner facilitates the buying of necessities, paying the bills. That's obviously no excuse to be like our friends at the supermarket, and not lift a finger on stuff that's not "your turf".
Objectively, we work best when we work as a team.
Housework beats meditation for me. Every time.
It may be because meditation is still early days for me, and I struggle with it quite a lot. I actually have an hour-long meditation/breathwork thing scheduled for later today Doubt I'll survive. But I'm seeing that's also okay, because the benefit of meditation doesn't come from sitting cross-legged and chanting or whatever.
Meditation is used to keep you in the present moment. To keep your barging, overwhelming thoughts at bay. To keep you focused on your breath, your body, your here and now. For me, that's housework. I love folding laundry right after I wake up, even before my coffee. It lets me look out the window, see the light, the people, the whatever's going on right now. It lets me feel in my body without galloping away with my thoughts.
Doing the laundry or cleaning my space, again, work to give me a purpose. A purpose that every feminist fibre in my body yells against. Until I tell it to pipe the fuck down, this isn't about gender roles. It's about being of use. It's about acts of service. It's about contributing in some way to something larger than yourself. Family. Community. Our shared existence.
This shift in mindset has revolutionized how I feel, too. I no longer walk around irritated by having my schedule crammed with crap. That's nothing to do with living with someone. I used to be the same when I was living alone abroad. Instead of seeing it as a chore, I saw it as an act of service to myself. As an opportunity to be here, and to honor the space where I live, sleep, and eat.
And in doing that, a wonderful opportunity to honor myself.
I'm off to clean the space.
