Doves on my balcony.
Because my husband has a demanding job outside our home, he has (relatively) few household chores. One of them is to take the laundry, once a week, to the local laundromat. He washes and dries it, then brings it home and leaves it for me to fold things and put them away. That's how it's worked for years, but I have not been doing that the last few weeks, because I've been trying to fix the damn computer and save all the files. To save forty compressed files takes a little over a day in a process I don't want to tell you about yet, lest I jinx it.
So my family has been taking laundry out of bags, I iron it, etc. Otherwise it sits in the bags - or spilled out of the bags and got mixed with dirty laundry, and this is what is upsetting my husband. He's angry because he finds himself washing the same clothes each week, even though he knows they are clean. You have to be a housewife (or househusband) to get why this is making me mad. I understand why he is frustrated, but still I'm angry. Being honest - if it were me, in the position I am in, it would piss me off, too. However, in the position he is in, well.
I'm sitting on the couch, trying to watch "Field of Dreams" and comfort our son, who is nervous about sleeping in his own bed again. It's five in the morning - during the summer, the kids and I always end up staying up until three in the morning and sleeping till noon. Tonight it's five because my son is so anxious. Even though this has happened to our schedule every summer since our oldest was in kindergarten, my husband always seems to be caught off guard by it.
So he's sorting the laundry that needs to be washed and firing these little bullets my way every now and then, the upshot being how angry he is to have to blah blah blah. I reminded him why I haven't been devoted to the laundry lately, and then I offered to switch off with him: I would take his outside-the-home job and do the laundry - once a week - and he would take over my daily duties. He would do the dishes (three or four times a day). He would clean the bedroom, living room and kids rooms, every day. He would vacuum the floors (on his knees today, because my vacuum just broke and I have to use the handheld) at least once a day. He would tend to the rabbit. He would give the cat his meds twice a day. He would clean the bathrooms and scrub the toilets. He would parent the kids 24/7 instead of ten or twelve hours a day. He would make the schedules, pay the bills and order the meds. He would structure the various appointments, take the oldest to work and do all the grocery shopping. He would go to meetings with teachers and doctors and bureaucrats of various stripes and colors. He would keep track of when his parents birthdays were and make sure gifts were bought and cards mailed. He would fix things that break, build things sitting around in boxes and talk to creditors on the phone. He would do these things every day. He would be on call for the kids all day every day, even when he is asleep, and he would be the one to sit in the ER or by the hospital bedside for days on end. He would have no privacy, no time to himself and perpetually reddened skin on his hands.
I offered to trade all the much easier work I do every day for his challenging, boring, unfulfilling and frustrating once a week chore . . . and he declined.
Gr.
None of this is to say that he doesn't have a challenging job or that he doesn't do his part around the house. He does. It's only to point out that having a job outside the house is no more challenging or time consuming than one inside the house, especially when your job outside the house has a start and end time, whereas my job never starts or ends, but is continuous, and that scrubbing toilets and doing dishes can be as demanding as arguing with clients on the phone. It's also to point out that having a job outside the house should not absolve one from responsibilities inside the house. If the new computer breaks and all you have to do in order to save hundreds of precious, irreplaceable files is wash the same pair of clean jeans three weeks in a row so your wife has time to save the files, shut up and wash the fucking jeans.
