Reply to I have an egalitarian marriage, and I HATE it

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We split childcare, cooking, cleaning. Everything is always chaos. Who has time to work full time plus communicate constantly about every little detail of home management in order to keep things running remotely smoothly? Power struggles about how to do every little thing since there are two people who have to have ultimate responsibility for the outcome. We are bad at this!! Maybe other people can do it better.

To me the ideal arrangement would be that my husband was out of the house more, earning more money, and I had a part time job and had more time with kids and home management. Why do women complain about that arraignment? I really don't get it. I actually hate having other people (DH, nanny) in my kitchen, doing a half-ass job. My poor kids have part time with me, nanny, and daddy, but no one person who really gets to spend extended, quality time, learning about their needs and being there for them. I hate this.

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I disagree.  The ideal arrangement is that your husband works part time and does a great job doing nearly everything around the house and with the children.   You get up in the morning, put on the clean clothes he hung up for you in the closet that he organized, brush your teeth with the toothpaste he bought, give the kids a kiss and casually tell your husband that one of them might have a runny nose and maybe shouldn’t go to school that day, then go to work.  After work, come home and play with the kids while your husband finishes making dinner, do the dishes while he supervises homework, play a game as a family, and put the kids to bed 50% of the time.  If you have to work late, you just send him a text to let him know.  He figures out what to do. 
If it works out, you might take kids to an activity or pick them up after work.  If it doesn’t, you just text your husband, and he figures it out.  
Saturdays, you make the kids breakfast with the food he bought from the grocery store, dress the kids in their athletic uniforms that he washed and laid out, and go watch their games.  Sundays, you sleep in.  One of those days, you make dinner.  Sometimes you take the kids to visit family or friends.
Holidays and birthdays, you just show up.  
Summer, pretty much the same as the rest of the year except you go to the pool more often, congratulate your kids on learning to swim (how did that even happen?), and sometimes your kids tell you they went to camp that day.
Throw in splitting some of the home maintenance, hiring someone to mow the lawn, unloading the dishwasher twice a week, and showing up to parent teacher conferences, and you can say that you do 50% of the housework and childcare when you are home, go to most of their games, are involved in their school, and are still doing great at work. 
 [/quote]

This is not actually what I would want (I would not enjoy being so sporadically involved in my kid's lives or being so passive about day-to-day functioning in my home) but it's a fair point. For many men, this describes an "egalitarian marriage" because so much of the work is invisible to them or they assume it to not take very much time.

However, I also think a lot of UMC/rich people I know get around this problem by outsourcing a lot of stuff. So the PT spouse or the one with the flexible job really does get to focus more on just spending time with the kids, because it's important to them. Stuff like organizing a closet, keeping the house clean, laundry, grocery shopping, sometimes even cooking and other day to day stuff, gets taken care of by someone else. Plus say you work 15 hours a week but kids are in school for 30 hours -- if you are also outsourcing a lot of household tasks, you are actually better off than the spouse with the FT job in terms of having free time and being able to do things for yourself.

Conversely, in a working class family, splitting everything 50/50 (either down the middle or dividing up tasks) can be hard if one partner is just not sufficiently competent at childcare and household tasks. I now working and middle class couples where the woman works and does most of this other stuff because, even assuming their spouse is willing to do some of it, his competency is so low and can cause more problems than are worth it. Managing a household on a tight budget requires real attention to detail and diligence, much more so than when you have enough disposable income to outsource or simply not to worry too much if someone buys the wrong size shoes or forgets to buy things on sale or whatever. It's easy to look at these marriages and say "Oh you're enabling your husband, just make him do it, but I've seen situations where that just doesn't work -- he will never be competent enough to be a true partner in that respect, so if he's capable of earning a decent salary, just let him do that and handle the rest yourself.[/quote]

I agree with you generally but I want to point one thing out - it can be really difficult to find someone to do any non routine chores like organizing a closet. You’d almost have to spend as much time explaining to them how you want it done as you would just doing it yourself. Even with routine chores it’s often required to spend a lot of time explaining. We have our nanny do dinner prep, but it takes 15 mins every morning for me to get that setup for her, as an example. Outsourcing, unfortunately, is not magical unless you are the Queen of England and have staff managing your staff. [/quote]

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