FAIR PLAY HOUSEWORK
The other day I read an article by a newly married woman who recounted her frustration in trying to get her new husband to do his share of the housework. She got good advice from a marriage counselor named Eve Rodsky who wrote a book called Fair Play. Eve Rodsky devised a deck of cards with a chore on each card, in which men and women sort out who is already doing which chores around the house. It turns out that women usually end up with most of the cards. So the two then select the ones they would prefer to do and divide the rest of the cards so that each has about half, with each getting an equal number of chores. This is a way to get each to do an equal amount of the house work.
But the problem that immediately arises is that the man either doesn’t know how to do some of the house work he has chosen cards for or he simply forgets most of his chosen tasks and doesn’t get around to doing them. In the opinion piece I read the man kept forgetting to do his chores or claimed he didn’t know how to do it and had to keep being reminded by his wife.
When I read articles like this I feel queasy. My wife Kathe died four years ago. I knew at the time that she was doing most of the house work and now that I am doing all the housework I feel like apologizing to her and starting over.
I was then responsible for everything to do with electricity or heavy lifting or cutting grass and keeping track of our finances and anything to do with our cars. I didn’t always do these well, and often but them off, but Kathe was clueless. They were mine to do well or badly. Kathe took care of the children’s activities (which took a huge amount of time) and the laundry and house cleaning and most of the shopping and cooking good home cooked meals. Gradually in the last years before her death I became the cook. Cooking for me was putting frozen meals in the microwave and shopping for groceries consisted of buying frozen meals. Any real cooking, she still did.
But my assumption all along was that she really liked taking care of the kids and all that that demanded. When she had a part time job for a few years it was in a Montessori school where she really enjoyed interacting with children. When grandchildren came along she volunteered to care for them when both my son and his wife were working. She really enjoyed doing this, I think. I was busy with work and other things.
I realized this was unfair, but didn’t do anything about it. We never balanced our household activities in the way the Fair Play book suggests. Her time with the children was way more than my time cutting the grass or making sure the bills were paid. We didn’t balance spending either. She spent more than I did on clothes and commetics. I spent more on big purchase items like tvs and computers.
For the past year the primary button that holds my pants together at the waist have been slowly dropping off my pants, one after the other. Zipped up without a button the pants still somehow stay up. I did try sewing one on. I had to search around for a needle and then thread, but when I sewed it on I didn’t do it tightly enough and didn’t know how to rotate the four holes through which I pushed the needle. When I was finally satisfied with my work, the button still hung on loosely and within two days it loosened more and then the threads began to fray and the button dropped off.
I know that sewing on a button is the easiest thing in the world. And yet I simply couldn’t do it right. Today, since I am about to go on a trip I gave Susie one of the two pairs of pants I am going to take and asked her to sew a button on. She has been going through Kathe’s buttons and knitting yarn and sewing tools including thread and moved them to her studio so she has the tools and knows how to sew on a button.
I realized, not as an excuse, but as a fact, that I simply don’t know how to sew on a button and that I feel intimidated when I try. I am not trying to get out of doing things around the house that need to be done, I either don’t know how to do them (like cooking from a recipe) or am unaware that they need to be done.
I’ve lived by myself for four years now. Spiders don’t bother me, in fact, when there is a spider in the shower stall I am very careful to remove it without harming it. I see it as a fellow living creature. There are spider webs in many places in the house. They don’t bother me either. They are necessary for spiders and so I leave them. I sweep the floor at times but unless there are pieces of crumpled paper on the floor I never feel the need to sweep. I’m fine with the floors just as they are. The battery of the vacuum cleaner that Kathe used continuously has ceased working. But since I don’t see any dirt I don’t need it anyway.
I am not avoiding doing housework, I just don’t see the need to do most chores or, as with sewing on buttons, don’t know how to do them properly. I do wash the dishes but since I use few for each meal I just rinse them off so that no food is stuck on them and then when I have enough dishes to make washing worth while I wash them. I don’t mind washing dishes, I just do it efficiently (and in somewhat of a hurry when I know someone is coming for a visit). But this means there are stacks of rinsed dishes in the kitchen.
So this is my response to the Fair Play book and to housework. I am 87 and less and less seems to need to be done, and the less I feel like doing. I am the old man with discheveled hair and food dripping down his front, who finds the table piled up with old mail and a few dishes in front of him to not be offensive at all. I like living in this relaxed way. Nothing bothers me. I don’t have guests but when I know one of my children is coming for a visit I do try to straighten up a little, not for myself, everything looks fine to me, but for them so that they don’t feel uncomfortable. There are other things I would prefer to do than wash dishes or sweep the floor clean of invisible dirt.
I still keep track of my finances, cut the grass occasionally, see that the car is inspected and keeps running. If I had a deck of Fair Play cards I would notice that I was dealing with a quarter of them and that the other three quarters would be things that I never learned how to do like sewing on a button, or things that that I wasn’t even aware of needing to be done.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 