All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership

by Darcy Lockman

Our transition to parenting has not been easy on our relationship, and our division of labor has been front and center in that unease, a dusting of gunpowder ever ready to blow.

they’d found themselves shouldering the bulk of all the theretofore unimagined burdens at home.

George believed me unsympathetic to his need to blow off steam. He was wrong—my consideration of him simply didn’t extend so far as to obliterate my own needs in unrelenting service to his.

decision to start a family was now putting limits on his freedom, as it was on mine. In his mind, or so his attitude implied, those limits were not meant to be borne by him.

I cannot recall when annoyance turned to deep disharmony for me, at what juncture watching my husband start to eat while I once again cut up our toddler’s food became enough to leave me aggrieved for hours. It was the constant thrum of little things.

“Men Share Housework Equally, Until the First Baby.”2 The study found that members of working couples each performed fifteen hours per week of housework before having kids. Once they had children, though, women added twenty-two hours of child care while men added only fourteen, the latter also compensating by eliminating five hours of house care (women maintained their fifteen).

“Work hasn’t changed. Workplaces still act like everyone has a wife at home. Everyone should be the ideal worker and not have to leave to take care of a sick kid. If one family struggles to balance it all, it’s a personal problem. All these families with the same problem? That’s a social issue.”

Indeed, her partner’s standard response whenever she tries to address their imbalance is “I do a lot more than other men,” a sentence much easier to utter than “Yes, our arrangements are unfair to you, but that is the lot of women, so suck it up.”

He just sits there. He doesn’t do it on purpose. He has no awareness of what’s happening around him. I ask him about it, and he gets defensive. It’s the same in the evening. He helps with dinner, but then I’m off to doing toothbrushing and bedtime, and he’ll be sitting there on his phone.”

But she’s struck by how little her husband’s priorities have shifted. She resents the liberties he continues to take with his time, his assumption that his involvement at home remains discretionary, and that all the many tasks invariably fall to her.

“When men do work, it tends to be because women are [physically] unavailable,”

Day-to-day, nobody wants to do drudge work. Mental labor is exhausting. My husband had no idea what I was keeping in my head. I was scurrying around and getting everything nice before he came home. We were caught up in traditional norms, what a good mother is. It was a failure of imagination.

She joked that if anyone in her life were going to walk out on her, it would best be her husband. ‘If your day care person leaves you, now, that’s a problem.’ She was only half joking. ‘I could get along without him. He does so little.’ That’s a risk for men.”

I read Lean In before I was pregnant, and I was like, ‘This is great.’ I read it again after having a kid, and I was like, ‘This is bullshit.’ It’s unattainable unless you have a bevy of resources financially and emotionally.”

Women will be flexible when they need to be. And men hope that others are flexible.

To employ “limited attention” is to announce that one cannot be bothered, and when the task must ultimately be completed by someone, the forgetter is asserting his right to fail to attend.