Round table: home management & family life

Someone passed me this article today: Women Aren't Nags, We're Just Fed Up 

In it, the author discusses her challenges talking to her husband about the division of labor in their home. He feels he's happy to do anything she asks; she feels that she doesn't want to have to project manage their life at all times. 

She gives an example, of where she asked for him to find a cleaning service as a gift for her for mother's day, especially one that could tackle deep cleaning the bathrooms. He took this as "I want a clean bathroom", and so after calling just one agency ad quoting their prices at her, he decided to gift her with cleaning the bathrooms. What she wanted was someone else to deal with the hassle of asking around for recommendations, comparing prices, vetting cleaners, and setting up a schedule. She wanted someone to handle the management of the task ; he thought of it as doing the task.

She uses this story to tackle the broader issue of the emotional labor women are expected to take on constantly and without notice: not just getting things done, but making sure they get done. Keeping the running list of what is needed at the grocery store, what the requirements at the school are, when the doctor's appointments need to happen - not just making dinner, but thinking ahead to what is needed to make sure it's possible to make dinner every day for the rest week. Women end up either micromanaging the household work (giving their partner or kids a list of all the tasks needed to be completed in order to do a larger project- e.g. "unload the dishwasher to make space for dirty dishes, then load the dirty dishes, then wipe down the counters") or just giving up and doing it themselves . 

She stresses that she knows none of this is intentional, or done from a place of malice or sexism. It's just habit, ingrained and invisible, one which she sees repeated in her kids: her son proudly announcing and expecting praise for minor routine chores, and her even younger daughter taking it for granted that her chores are expected of her and not praiseworthy. 

So the discussion points for this round table are: do you and your partner (or if you had a partner) split chores and the management? If not, do you want to change anything? What, if anything, can be done? How do you establish routines and boundaries that run contrary to the programming of your entire life? 

And what can we do about this in the larger sphere of life? These same patterns repeat not only in the home, but at work, where women often end up taking on office management tasks and related emotional labor, even when it's explicitly not their job to do so. The old cliche used to be the women being asked to get the coffee - but even today, women are the employees who end up being responsible for remember people's birthdays or retirements and getting a cake or all of these little things.

Edited to add this link to a comic on the subject of the "mental load"  from a suggestion in the comments!