On not quite halving it all

Hurrah for Lisa Belkin, who writes a very rare NYT piece on shared parenting that isn't stupid or condesceding. Very, very worth reading.

Gender should not determine the division of labor at home. It’s a message consistent with nearly every major social trend of the past three decades — women entering the work force, equality between the sexes, the need for two incomes to pay the bills, even courts that favor shared custody after divorce. And it is what many would agree is fair, even ideal. Yet it is anything but the norm.

She talks a lot to Francine M. Deutsch (whose bookI swear I've blogged about but can't find the link; in any case, I recommend it highly), and Deutsch helps her spell out what these articles all too often fail to say, that

Choices are made in a context. It is rare that you choose something you have never seen. So men who do more around the house than their fathers and spend as much time with children as their neighbors feel that they are doing their share and their wives feel grateful to have such involved partners. That is why the single-most-predictive factor of how equal a couple will be, Deutsch says, is how equal their friends are.

Messages, loud and soft, direct and oblique, reinforce contextual choice. “A pregnant woman and her husband,” Deutsch says, “how many people have asked her if she is going to go back to work after the baby? How many have asked him?”

Looked at through that lens, what seems like an external institutional barrier to equal sharing becomes something else entirely. He makes more money than she does, so of course she should be the one to step back her career; she has a more flexible line of work than he does, so of course she should be the one to work part time. Those may seem like choices, but they have their roots in social norms.

I will admit that, much to my surprise (and dismay), my own marriage has turned out to be far less equal than I ever expected. I am the primary parent, by a long stretch--and even when I was working and Mr. B. was staying home, I made a lot more effort (despite crushing depression) to spend time with PK during the week than Mr. B. does now. Part of this is that my daily work schedule was a lot more flexible than his is, and that I was able to do things like take PK to work with me, which he can't. Part of it is that he was and is more likely to take PK out to the park or the beach for most of the afternoon on a Saturday (I'm more likely, these days, to plan a "family outing" for all of us). But part of it is that I'm a lot more invested in the parent role than he is.

There's a bit in the article about one couple deciding to get a dog as a practice child, to see if they'd both be equally invested in taking care of it, which was a real eye-opener to me: my god, the cat (and now the mice) has *always* been primarily "mine," how could I not have realized that it would be the same with a child? Hiliariously, though, I didn't; in fact, I didn't realize that my doting cat mama personality would transfer so easily to a human child, and when Mr. B. would point out (as he did) that of *course* I'd be a doting mama, look how I was with the cat, I would say stupid shit like "cats are different than kids." Which assuredly they are--but I'm the same person.

Anyhoo. As I said, the article is very worth reading for feminist parents, parents-to-be, or maybe-someday-parents of all genders. It even gets into the research on gay and lesbian parents (there's more on lesbians than on gay men, hint hint to any clever graduate students reading), which reveals one absolutely fascinating piece of information for all straight women who bitch about husbands not doing housework.

Lesbian parents, gay parents and heterosexual fathers all look the same on paper when it comes to cooking and cleaning — they all report doing between 6 and 10 hours a week.

In short, women, your husband might be right when he says that your standards for housework--as opposed to childcare--are too high.

I will say that I think that Mr. B. and I are pretty damn equal in terms of housework. Which is why our house is basically a huge mess most of the time. When I was the working partner, he said (initially) that he would keep the house perfectly! And I doubted it, I argued that housework had never been his big priority and what made him think that would change suddenly? He argued that it had never been "his (primary) job." So we tried. And, in fact, I was kind of right: our house, when I was working and he was staying home, was usually a lot messier than it had been when I was a grad student and he was working full-time.

But. Because I was in the position where housework was explicitly not *my* job (and because I was seriously depressed), I learned to fucking ignore it. After twelve years of living together, I finally learned to really lower my standards. And that has stuck with me, even now that I'm the stay-home mom. Yes, it bugs me--it bugs him too--that our house is a mess. And yes, we still fight about it (the one lingering bit of sexist crap around the housework issue is that he thought, for a long time, that he was doing more than I was; I think we've fought that issue out to the point where he realizes that's not true).

Interestingly, the messiness of the house actually bothers me, now, a little less than it does him--at least when it comes to inviting friends in. I've decided that fuck it, the mess is my Feminist Statement that keeping a beautiful house is Not My Damn Job, so I invite people in (with a little tummy-tightening and a warning that we do not keep a clean house) and let them deal with it. Mr. B. has a lingering housing complex that makes him freak out about this, and if he knows that people are coming over he goes nuts cleaning, often staying up all night beforehand. (Knowing this, I often don't let on if I've invited someone in for coffee on the spur of the moment.) And we're currently at a point where the combination of his housing complex and our mutual feeling that we "should" both be tidier means that we usually do a half-decent job of keeping, at least, the dining room table and living room reasonably presentable, so that having people step in (and being able to set the table for dinner) doesn't mean that dirty dishes and piles of mail and computer equipment need to be cleared away before anyone can sit down.

That's housework, though. With kids, we're less evolved. I've reached the same conclusion as one of the lesbians Belkin interviews:

“You need a rabid N.G.P. — nongestational parent. The N.G.P. has to push if you are going to get an equal relationship.”

That's it exactly. If you're straight, and you want equal parenting, the man has to want it more. Feminism needs men, which means we *all* have to get over our gender essentialism.

It looks like pace the religious right, gay marriage might actually save us straights from ourselves yet.