Musings on shared housework

For every memory I have of Mom scrubbing at plates and spoons in yellow rubber gloves, I have one of Dad sorting a massive pile of dirty clothing into neat piles of colors, whites and delicates and running the loads through the washing machine in a process as smooth as a well-tested assembly line. When I was growing up, watching my parents work together to clear the kitchen table of dishes and utensils brought me a kind of comfort.

Both of my parents worked, and on quite different schedules—my dad on three 12-hour shifts as a nurse at a hospital, my mom as an accountant at a private high school—so the notion of both my mother and father doing housework with each other came to make logical sense to me. There were flowers to water, snow to shovel, papers to file, rooms to dust. And sometimes, my dad was free to complete these tasks. Sometimes, my mom was. My mom and dad would tell me that the responsibilities of a successful relationship were not split 50/50. Rather, both people contributed 100%. Doesn’t it make sense that whoever is free ought to do these chores?

I had, therefore, tasted dinners that Mom had made and dinners that Dad did. I had seen Dad shovel away snow from the driveway, and I have seen my mom do the job too. Sometimes Mom dropped me off at kindergarten and sometimes my dad did. Once I was school, though, apparently I was painted a different picture of a mother and father’s respective roles in the home. Despite the view of housework I gained from my own home, immensely impactful because I experienced it through my first teachers, my parents, I somehow picked up on the idea that, at least, it was “more normal” for a woman to do housework than it was for a man.

Perhaps it partially had to do with the lessons I learned and books I read in school, which featured stay-at-home mothers and working fathers. I’m immediately reminded of the Berenstain Bears books I read in school, published in the sixties, seventies and eighties, in which women’s role as homemakers was more clearly emphasized. I remember playing in the play kitchen in my kindergarten classroom that was crowded with girls, all nicely playing with the toys and with one another. I remember one boy who really enjoyed playing in the kitchen. The rest of the girls and I loved playing with him—we always included him when we made "meals" for our stuffed animals. I do remember, though, thinking that his enjoyment of playing in the kitchen was a defining feature of his— one that was not negative, but rather defining. I did realize how there were a lot more girls who played in the kitchen than boys.

Although I viewed housework differently at home than I had at school, I never felt that the dichotomy between my two experiences was strange. Perhaps my young, developing mind had not yet learned to be so critical of the world around me, and perhaps it was because I subconsciously found credibility in both my parents’ and my school’s lessons, but I never had a strong view of women as houseworkers.

This leads me to wonder how these two experience will combine to form my future—as either a stay-at-home mom, working mother or single career woman. Regardless of my awareness of women’s expectations and the experience I had growing up watching my parents, anyone who I might be interested in might have a different view than I do. Perhaps I’ll find no problem with pursuing a career, but someone who I might be romantically interested in is not. Or perhaps my future marriage will necessitate me staying at home. Regardless, differences between how I view housework and how others do might have a big impact on my future relationships.

Mary Ziemba is a Trinity freshman. Her column runs every other Friday.