metaphortunate | to-do list

Crossposts: http://metaphortunate.livejournal.com/61876.html

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No doubt you've seen that article going around about Why Mom's Time is Different From Dad's Time. I was thinking about that, and about why it is that, like, almost every goddamn woman I know is in therapy. And the men, by and large, aren't.

And then a friend of mine posted that link on FB, and commented,

"I'm here to tell you, though, that, despite my husband's *excellent* attentiveness and support, day and night, I don't think he could do any more to offset my emotional load.

...

What I do is all I can, and it will never be as much as my children, my husband, my friends and my clients deserve."

And I'm thinking:

When her husband does all he can, that's all he can do. That's just the way it is.
When she does all she can, it will never be as much as the people in her life deserve, she will always be letting someone down.

Is this why we're all in fucking therapy? Because I have to say: fuck that, fuck that, fuck it fuck it fuck it I am putting that idea down like the filth it is. FUCK. IT.

From that article:

Being compelled to divide and subdivide your time doesn't just compromise your productivity and lead to garden-variety discombobulation. It also creates a feeling of urgency—a sense that no matter how tranquil the moment, no matter how unpressured the circumstances, there's always a pot somewhere that's about to boil over.

Coincidentally, I had actually noticed that precise thing in myself the weekend before that article came out. I had pointed it out to Mr. E: that I am having a hard time enjoying the moments when things are good, because I am constantly feeling that they are about to blow up. Rocket is about to start crying. The Junebug is about to hit him with a spoon. It seems like a quiet afternoon, but Christ we'd better do like 15 loads of laundry if we want the kids to have clean clothes for Monday and if we want that to happen in time for a decent bedtime we have to start now.

Which is true….and it isn't. The thing about the laundry? Totally true. The thing about the Junebug hitting Rocket with a spoon? Not true at all. He never has. Never even tried. The thing about Rocket being about to start crying? Well, probably - I mean, babies cry, yes! But is it worth stressing about before it happens? Probably not, because babies cry, and we will deal with it when it happens! So, I think I am stressing too much!

So I am trying something different. I am trying to deliberately let go of that constant fight-or-flight vigilance that doesn't seem to help at all because I shouldn't be doing either. I am trying to notice and relax into the times when things are actually fine. I figure there are a few options:

1) It turns out that constant heightened stressed awareness is not necessary in order to maintain my mental tally of what needs to get done. If I let it go, there is no downside. Win!

2) It turns out that constant heightened stressed awareness really is necessary in order to maintain my mental tally of what needs to get done. If I let it go, things don't get done. They turn out to be relatively unimportant things. The house and our lives may get more disorganized, but we'll probably be happier overall. Qualified win!

3) It turns out that constant heightened stressed awareness really is necessary in order to maintain my mental tally of what needs to get done. If I let it go, things don't get done. They turn out to be important things. The kids suffer for it. Mr. E and I explicitly acknowledge that someone has to take on this constant heightened stressed awareness in order for these important things to get done, and it shouldn't be just me. We figure out how to share it. Win, at a cost, but win!

4) It turns out that constant heightened stressed awareness really is necessary in order to maintain my mental tally of what needs to get done. If I let it go, things don't get done. They turn out to be important things. The kids suffer for it. Mr. E and I explicitly acknowledge that someone has to take on this constant heightened stressed awareness in order for these important things to get done. We try to share it, but it turns out that it works best for just one person to maintain that tally. Whoever doesn't do it starts taking on more of other different tasks, so that the workload is more equal. Win!

I'll try to remember to let you know how it goes.

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This is smart.

We try to share it, but it turns out that it works best for just one person to maintain that tally. Whoever doesn't do it starts taking on more of other different tasks, so that the workload is more equal.

My household has only the first of those sentences down, alas. At least it has the work-through-stuff-for-better-data thing under its collective belt; that part seems to me a useful exercise regardless.

So you tried it, and found that if you didn't stress, stuff didn't get done? And your partner said "that sucks dawg, wish I could help but this Minesweeper isn't gonna play itself?" DDDD:

My partner said, "Sorry, I am super forgetful," which is something I knew before we'd even started dating, a decade ago...but it was still worth the experiment.

When we sit down and plan stuff together, we assign tasks, which works, but then I am still doing much of the planning because I'm keeping most of the tabs on results and follow-up. We've ended up with a (still sort of weird to me) delegating thing, whereby I do most planning and he sometimes picks up more than half the implementing when I say, "Okay, jump."

And of course what you describe is so common as to be the standard. And of course keeping the tabs on results and follow-up, in other contexts, is called management and is considered to be more naturally the realm of men than women since it requires leadership and responsibility.

True. In fairness, darkforge isn't and doesn't want to be a supervisor at his dayjob, whereas I do small-time project management at mine--but you're definitely right that it tends to skew the other way in terms of official duties and recognition.

For what it's worth, your "in order to maintain my mental tally of what needs to get done" phrasing made me think of one of the things that I've discovered about my own stress levels. Keeping a mental tally of what needs to be done really stresses me out, because I easily forget things without reminders, and I worry as a coping strategy for that. When I have a functional habit of using lists outside my head to keep track of things (this habit comes and goes), my stress goes down quite a lot.

Oh definitely. And I use Todoist heavily. But sometimes there is so much to get done that the task of organizing it and getting it all onto lists becomes a task in itself, and it seems higher priority to just dive into the other stuff.

almost every goddamn woman I know is in therapy. And the men, by and large, aren't.

I'm guessing that at least part of this is a function of men being more pressured than women to just suck it up and cope when anxious or depressed or overwhelmed. It's not manly to seek help for your feelings.

The constant heightened stressed awareness thing (CHSA?) is complicated by the fact that a lot of us learn it from being in abusive situations. CHSA is how you keep yourself safe when someone around you might explode at any moment. Women and people raised as girls are a lot more likely to be on the receiving end of such behavior, so we're a lot more likely to already have those paths in our brains when parenting time comes around. X and I call it "being a noticer". We're noticers. J is not--not that he's oblivious, just that noticing little things and anticipating stressors in that CHSA way isn't ingrained in every fiber of his being the way it is for X and me, because he wasn't raised by an adult with a scary temper the way we were. And it shows in a lot of household-related matters.

It's one of those double-edged sword things: you do want to be the sort of person who notices the tiny shard of broken glass on the floor before the toddler eats it, but you don't want to give yourself a stroke or a breakdown from nonstop overwhelming anxiety. I'm glad you're looking for ways to minimize costs and maximize benefits on that front.

Edited 2014-02-04 07:32 (UTC)

It's not manly to seek help for your feelings.

For sure that's gotta be part of it.

It can't just be the abusive thing, though, because I was never abused and I'm doing it.

Oh yeah, definitely not just that. But for some folks it's definitely a factor.

And when it is a factor it's like, times ten...

*been there/done that/t-shirt*

Also, just to comment on the post itself, sometimes I wonder if all men do this. That is, "forget". These same men don't ever forget to do the things that please them, and almost never remember to do anything that probably doesn't. In my case that includes his own laundry, and funny how the bathroom can smell so bad (like something I'm incapable of making it smell like) I can pick it up from the next room over and even the cat seems to be sniffing around in it strangely yet I'm the only one with a nose for that. Or the ability to dip the scrub brush into the toilet to make that smell go away - like, ever!

I've come to the conclusion that whether guys deserve the moniker or not that in general it's a Guy Thing. We have different ways of looking at life, period. Him: ha! The house didn't burn down while I slept so everything's alright. Since there's literally no fire for me to put out, let me turn on the TV and watch it for the next six hours. Her: I'm going to burn this house down and say the Board of Health did it after issuing a "Condemned Notice" if he doesn't help me clean it soon - I'll take "before" pics and the Board of Health will certainly approve of me burning it to the ground!

The guys I've been around don't notice dirt, disorganization or BO, and in fact will happily contribute to more of all three without any seeming awareness that they did. It doesn't matter if anything ever gets cleaned or put away or if the kid ever has a bath or that dinner doesn't magically cook itself (if it doesn't then why, that's what beer's for, it's filling and helps you sleep).

These differences are probably biological and not going away. That said, if a guy cares enough about how you feel he will make an effort but because the condition of the house, the kid or what's on the stove is not usually on his completely-differently-built radar, I don't think you'll ever get a guy to care about any of it as much as we will. He'll just care about it because we do, if that makes any sense.

Edited (typos/clarity) 2014-02-05 00:15 (UTC)

I do have a few friends who are male and have children and who not only were raised to help out but manage to do so without being kicked in the head all the time; for my part I'm not convinced that it's biological. It is certainly rather pervasive as a cultural phenomenon. (Add to the cultural possibility the fact that guys in different places have different senses of resting equanimity about housekeeping and childminding.)

It could be upbringing, too; I'm not sure about one of my exes but with the other and with my current guy their moms did everything because they were raised in households in which the man works, the mom takes care of the house, blah blah ad nauseum. So maybe it's not biological so much as conditioning/training/what their own eyes have seen and the messages those fed them in return. But pervasive/prevalent regardless of cause, which is admittedly not so easy to pin down? Yes.

Also, what is this rare and exotic creature you speak of, a man who does any housework without first being tortured for not doing it? My dad literally hired maids; my stepfather let my mom do everything house-related but he did pitch in to help take care of my little sis a little and as I've already covered not-so-in-depth, I've never had a man willingly/on his own/without prompting/nagging or reminding lift a finger to do much more than cook a meal for me or chop firewood.

I saw a Youtube video recently (maybe four weeks ago?) in which a man said he kept his house not just straight but also clean, neat and orderly. He was, to all appearances, single. There were no kids involved. And the video wasn't even about how he kept house, though as part of its topic that did naturally come up. And I was astounded. I was even more astounded when I saw how neat and orderly his house actually was (like, so neat and orderly I 'd be afraid to live with him because even I'm not that particular about exactly where everything should go - if stuff lands within say, five feet of its intended home, I'm usually pretty damn happy). It was a thing of beauty to watch, that.

Yes, prevalent, agreed.

It does seem that some men step up more when they're clear that no one else will do the work at all, ever, world without end, re: your example of a seemingly single man. But, like, two of darkforge's college friends split housework as well as childminding 40/60, if not 50/50; tv stereotypes aside, my male Korean cousins (in Korea, not the US) wash the dishes unbidden. One cousin cleans/tidies because he understands that his wife has the less flexible outside-home job of the two of them (and till recently, his father was their child's primary minder). It happens.

ETA darkforge = my (male) partner, which I'd forgotten to gloss.

Edited 2014-02-05 04:46 (UTC)

Here's a vote for it being upbringing, not biological at all, though very culturally prevalent. My husband was raised doing house-cleaning chores, and he can tell when something's messy/dirty/needs-to-be-cleaned in a way that I (female, not raised doing chores) can't until it's explicitly pointed out to me by him ("...what do you mean, what needs to be cleaned up? Can't you see the table is full of dirty dishes?"). I have the lack-of-dirt-radar that gets made fun of in men, and he doesn't have that. And he does rather more of the household management (and probably more of the housework period) because of it. My sister (also not raised doing chores) and her husband (raised doing chores) have the same dynamic. (She also has a much more demanding job than he does.)

Childminding tasks/management I do much more of, because both of us have no experience with it and I care rather more (and as you and I have discussed, thistleingrey, I tend to do all the social management as well), but I suspect a large degree of that is cultural as well. In the cultures I'm a large part of, it's almost always the woman who is "supposed" to do those things, and women socialization built around that assumption, so there's a large amount of social inertia against not doing it that way.

(thistleingrey, according to my parents Korea is a wasteland of gender inequality. I'm glad to hear their experiences are very outdated at this point :) )

(But their experiences aren't really outdated! It's only that the gender-related mismatches don't map to the ones in the US.)

So, okay, please do not take this personally because I am saying this not really to you, but to every single person, including my therapist, who has told me that these differences are biological and not going away.

OH MY GOD THAT IS SUCH HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORSESHIT.

Do you know what I just did at my job? I assisted my boss on a job walk! That is where we go through a completed project and make a note of everything the contractors need to do - which includes cleaning up all their mess and leaving the space completely clean and shiny for the client! The contractors are men! My boss is a man! I would not be at all surprised to hear that in his personal life, my boss subscribes to this theory that men don't notice dirt. However, I am here to tell you that when he is getting paid to do so, my boss notices the SHIT out of dirt. He notices EVERYTHING. When he is legally liable for it.

I am lucky enough to be able to pay a person to clean my house every once in a while! Know what? THAT PERSON IS A MAN. WHOM I PAY. TO SCRUB THE TOILETS. HE SCRUBS THEM. When he is done, THEY ARE CLEAN.

Men can keep things clean when it is in their interest to clean. In general, it is in their interest to rely on the fact that both women and men police women's cleaning.

Look, I'm not judging you. I'm here in the patriarchy with you. I know that we are in these relationships with dudes, and these dudes are good dudes, and we know what the options are, and we know that we are lucky to have these dudes, and YET it is not fair, the way things are set up, and these dudes, these good guys, they roll with it. They take advantage. And it is so infuriating. And who wants to be angry all the time? Who wants to be furious at the person they love, like, all the time? The person they love who isn't gonna change, because they don't have to? The person they love who's way better than maybe 95% of the other guys out there? And if it's a choice between staring at the fact that this person you love is just gonna let you clean their shit out of the toilets forever and will never pick up a toilet brush no matter how much they claim to love you...and deciding that no, no, it's biological, it's his basic nature, it's not that he doesn't care...I believe in self protection. I believe in whatever we have to do to get us through the day, I do. It's just that I also can't fucking shut up. I am okay with lying to myself but for some reason I feel the need to obsessively point out that I'm doing it.

I just...wow, ok. I mean, I was speculating it's their mindset around housework that's perhaps biological, not their actual day-to-day performance, so I'm sorry if I didn't make that more clear. My ex who did not clean with the mom who did it all? Was the cleanest, neatest, most organized thing you ever saw - at his job - which I only found out seven or eight years into our relationship when he took me to his work one day and I watched him being the very opposite of the disorganized and rather dirt-blind person he was at the house. It stunned me, watching him do what he did in a way that showed it was not only routine but simply automatic (he did it really well, too!), but it didn't change the fact that how much he cared was based solely on how much money he'd earn for it and no more.

So I suppose if I'd paid him $5 for every load of dishes/time he ran the vacuum for me/time I realized the bathtub was about to crawl away on feet not its own that a) I'd go broke fast and b) he'd make out like a bandit because money motivated him to do what he was well capable of doing just as well or better than me but did not do at home unless I literally (well, almost) lit some sort of verbal fire under his ass.

I hope you and others here won't mistake, or haven't already mistaken, my take on this issue - which was really no more than quick and instinctive - as me trying to roll out some edict or have everyone (anyone, even!) automatically react with any form of agreement. I was not seeking agreement nor disagreement so much as stating what I see as more than just a mere coincidence of similar behaviors spread across my lifetime of experience dealing with various men, so it was more like me "just making small talk"; I meant my speculation on the possible cause of what drives some men to look at housework, in particular, the way they do in no mean or harmful way.

Edited (clarity/more clarity/general cleanup) 2014-02-06 01:31 (UTC)

Yeah, sorry, I know I overreacted! I am frustrated at the whole situation, not at you.

That being said, I am firm in my belief that, whether or not there is any biological component, its effect can only be noise in the huge and overwhelming cultural component of the way we are constantly taught in ways subtle and overt that cleaning is women's work, that cleaning is low status and men are better than that.

Interesting about the scary-temper thing. I agree with metaphortunate that it can't be the only aspect, but I definitely notice more and am comfortable with carrying more bits than my partner in terms of our relative childhood expectations. (Shouty abrupt parent for me; distracted parent for him who never engaged him much in helping out.)

An interesting thing about that article: you don't have to have kids for it to be true. :/

A lot of the work women do doesn't look like work at all, because it happens in the mind: planning, worrying, or in some cases catastrophizing. It sounds like you've got a winning plan to relieve that, and I really hope it works out for you.

I do think it takes a lot of work for women to unlearn the "letting someone down" thing. For me, the person I'm worried about letting down is myself, but I don't know whether that makes it easier.

I hope it's a winning plan! You'll note that the weak part is that in Step 2 a miracle occurs! That is, I plan to...just stop doing it. We'll see how that part goes. I have thoughts about how to approach it, like noticing that I'm even doing it is the first step, and having deliberate other things to think about. But it's a habit to change, and that sort of thing happens slowly if at all.

My partner the cognitive behavioral therapist would say you're doing it right. (:

This isn't locked but just for safety, is it okay to signal boost, both on my DW and by emailing a link to others? And maybe on my tumblr?

Sure! I will be very happy if it is helpful to anyone.

Yeah.... let me know how that goes.....

*sigh*

I don't know how helpful my experience as a stay-at-home-parent will be, because I gather that a large part of how unequal the distribution gets is compounded and exacerbated by the fact that on top of working a full paid shift, a mom comes home and then takes the lion's share of housework and childrearing related things, whereas traditionally a dad doesn't.

I will say, though, that part of adapting to the role of homemaker was figuring out which tasks were absolutely essential, and figuring out which were flexible, which could be done "well enough." It's essential to eat, but a box of macaroni and cheese and carrots is "good enough;" I don't actually need to spend a great deal of time and effort preparing fresh, hot meals from scratch three times a day. (I tried that for a week or two. We ate really well, but I was a wreck by the end of it.) It's essential for me to spend time with my kids, but if that's having a laugh over the latest My Little Pony episode instead of building Legos, that's okay too. And oftentimes the things that must get done - say, putting the kids to bed - we try to do it together, or to at least do it in a relay, and in a way that works for both of us. As an example, morning-hating me sleeps in while Beau gets Lu through his toilet, into his day clothes, and into the kitchen for breakfast in time for me to wake up and actually walk him to school.

What I'm going for is, I think you've got a very good chance at getting either 1) or 2) as a result. Yeah, maybe the dishes will pile up a little, and maybe laundry will get washed and dried and then live in the hamper for another couple days before it gets put away. Personally I'm willing to make that trade for having more equitable housework and a little more downtime.

Oh god. I have apparently given an, er, EXTREMELY INACCURATE picture of my home life. For example, if the laundry gets folded any slower Mt. Cleanbutnotputawayo in our bedroom will topple and kill us all. Also, Mr. E does 90% of the cooking because he does 90% of the caring about the healthfulness of our food. What I am saying is that many observers might think I need to stress MORE about my household, not less.

Mt. Cleanbutnotputaway

That made me wheeze, a little. *solidarity fistbump*

And, well. Observers who think more stress is the solution can suck a toilet scrubber.

You know, I have been very fortunate. I haven't got that feeling, though Christ knows society wants me to, just as it wants me to think about dieting all the time.

I think it may be because, in my late twenties, I thought, "I am not a cornucopia." So I don't try to be one. I am also determinedly selfish in keeping my own priorities, even when they have to be deferred constantly. Like, 95% of all available time.

There's a line I love from a Raymond Chandler book:

He bent me. I can be bent. I'm not the City Hall. He bent me.

It's how I feel about the dieting thing too. I'm so happy they didn't get you, though!

Ugh, the constantly deferring priorities. I know women who have decided they are happier giving up those priorities than dealing with the frustration and disappointment and price they pay in trying for them. Me...I think no solution is final, and what kids need changes all the time. So maybe there's more reason for hope than it sometimes appears.

Re Hope:
Speaking from the grand vistas of just one easy child, now nine:
Doing all the hard and tedious things well, or as well as you can, and explaining even to a preverbal child when you need to take a little detachment break--
being calm and gentle, or as calm as you can be, but definitely gentle,
and narrating when you need to admonish your child that these are choices--
and (funner part) (mostly) treating your child as a partner to the greatest extent possible--
pays off faster than you expect
in spades.

Hi, I've just added you because yay people talking about this stuff. My kids are 12, 9 and 6. My husband has been unemployed for 3 years. It is hugely better now I have managed to rent office space and am not trying to work from home amid the domestic stuff he isn't doing that I think he ought to be doing. He will have cleared away breakfast by the time he needs the table to cook dinner and that is fine by me now that I don't have to either look at it all day or do it myself (when I should have been working) and be cross about that.

What I've worked out about it is that he doesn't do hypothetical and is focussed on only one thing at a time, whereas I am constantly worrying about fifteen steps ahead over hordes of different things, some of which might not even happen. He thinks this is a waste of my time and energy because no-one is going to die over it. He does all the cooking but he sits down at lunchtime, decides what he is going to cook, goes shopping and cooks it. When I was doing the cooking, I planned a whole week in advance and went shopping once.

We've sort of ended up at (4) but it has been painful. The advantage of older children is that you can factor them into the people doing more of the other jobs part (the 12 year-old does all her own laundry now because I once lost a sock) but you have to factor in their different personalities too and I still don't know whether the anxious micro-managers or the laid back take-life-as-it-comes people ought to win.

I would just like the piles of clean laundry not to keep falling down the stairs and having to be washed all over again because the cat sat on them really.

Yeah, these are tough questions!

I am a firm believer in that the person who is doing the thing is the one who must decide how to do the thing. Like, if that is how your husband prefers to cook, if he is happy to shop every day then that is his thing. But then that runs into the thing about how you don't want to look at non-cleared-away breakfast all day: that is a relevant fact too.

And yes, one thing I really like about working outside the home is that I spend all day in a place that I am not primarily responsible for keeping clean and that is not covered with baby crud.

The clean laundry is a constant roadblock for us as well. We have a machine to wash it, and even dry it, but no machine to fold it and sort it and put it away!

Edited 2014-02-27 05:05 (UTC)

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