Women's Work

I find the division of labor in our household interesting. In some ways, it falls strictly along traditional gender roles. For example, I am responsible for all of the car maintenance. Back when we had a yard, I was almost always the one who pushed the mower, sharpened the blades, and otherwise made sure all of the power tools were running properly. Similarly, Hanna has always decided how our home would be furnished, decorated, and organized; she takes my opinions and preferences into account, but it's her show. Other times, it is the opposite of those traditional expectations. I do the grocery shopping, cook the majority of our meals, and deal with the laundry, freeing Hanna to leave every morning for her job that pays all of our bills and provides our health insurance.

A great deal of who does what is decided by interest. Left to my own devices, the house would probably be furnished with milk crates for shelves and cable spools for tables, and have posters from college decorating the walls. I appreciate how much better Hanna's thoughtful and practical choices are, but they simply would never occur to me. Similarly, Hanna is every bit as capable as I am of managing our personal finances. She and I have the same goals for saving and investments, and share similar philosophies about money and what do to with it. But where I find the day-to-day tasks of dealing with our personal finances oddly enjoyable (it feels like a game to me), Hanna views it as a chore that she is happy to have someone else do.

Sometimes, the responsibility for something is decided by ability. Plumbing, to me, is a black art; even simple repairs involving pipes, water, or valves are all but beyond me. Hanna, on the other hand, has spent half her career in laboratories or machine shops crafting all manner of clever devices out of vacuum fittings and pressure gauges. If a plumbing issue arises in our house that is more complex then removing a clump of hair from the shower drain or attaching a garden hose, I'm useless; Hanna not only actually knows what to do, she's capable of doing it. In these cases, I hold the flashlight for her and hand her tools, and I'm happy to do it.

Some tasks in our household have gone back and forth based on circumstance. For example, when we lived in New Mexico, Hanna went to work via a leisurely bicycle ride through a nice neighborhood to the university; I was getting in the car shortly after sunrise for an hour long commute to Albuquerque. As a result, she got home well before I did in the evenings, and almost always had dinner ready when I finally got in the door. In contrast, Hanna often didn't have a moment to spare when she was working towards her PhD, and so I took up the responsibility of making sure we were both fed.

Of course, most work is shared to some degree. The kitchen is not my exclusive domain, and both of us fold our share of laundry and take care of work in the garden (even when the "garden" is just potted plants on the balcony, as is currently the case). Chores that nobody wants are often decided with paper-scissor-stone, with the loser resigned to do the disliked job.

The one way that has never been used to decide who does what in our home has been gender. There has been no task that was deemed "women's work", and therefore off limits to me. Similarly, Hanna has never been stopped from doing anything because it was a "man's job". The arrival of the twins made this abundantly clear. When Hanna was put on bed rest during her pregnancy and couldn't so much as get up to make herself a sandwich, I had to cook, clean, and take care of the house; if I didn't do it, it didn't get done. Now that the twins are here, both of us feed babies, change babies, and bathe babies. This is done out of sheer necessity; there is simply too much work to do for either of us to worry about what should be done by only men or women, even if we wanted to do that. Work needs to be done, and so we knuckle down and do it.

This attitude is something I believe both Hanna and I received from our Appalachian roots. The men and women living in the mountains of West Virginia have always been self-sufficient; given the geographic isolation of the area, this is a matter of necessity. Neighbors are few and far between where I grew up, so you quickly learn to do as much for yourself as you can. Hanna and I are no longer hours away from the grocery store or in danger of being snowed in and unable to move from our house for days at a time the way we were growing up, but with the rest of our family so far away, I feel a similar isolation. If I don't help give baths or change diapers, there's nobody else around to do it.

This bending with the winds of necessity has meant that I am currently a stay-at-home father. Hanna's job requires her to be at her office, whereas I have the flexibility to work at home and set my own hours. This allows me to take care of our children during the day, and when they are napping I can sit down to do work, be it writing documentation or cleaning bottles for the next round of feeding. I imagine this will change in the future; Hanna and I have always worked as a team, passing responsibilities between us as needed and compromising when goals or circumstance places us at odds. For the moment, however, I'm keeping the house and minding the children.

Some men might well emasculated in my place, or resent the circumstances that force them to do "women's work". I don't see it that way; quite the contrary, in fact. I'm pleased that I was able to reconfigure my career so that Hanna could continue to work. I'm glad for the chance to be with my children and provide for my family. I once heard being an adult defined as, "Doing things not because you want to or because someone tells you, but because they need to be done." I think this sentiment also serves to define manhood. It's something I intend to teach my sons as they grow up. In the meantime, I'll demonstrate to them that being a man means more than how much you can lift or how much you know about cars; it means taking care of your family, meeting your responsibilities, holding to your ideals. And sometimes, it means scrubbing showers and changing diapers.