Immaculate Equal Wrongs
Housework is the front line
in the ‘gender’ tussle. Who is going to do it? Women are still the world’s
slave in this department, usually.
Oldest of six kids, Cheap
Dude assisted mom’s “homemaking" from earliest memory, while dad finished
school and worked full time. He swore that when he was a dad, he would be his
lover’s co-worker, not overseer.
So when Dudine began working “outside
the home," and returned to college full time, he took full charge of their
sons and their messes, while working 50-60 hours a week. Women are expected to
do that sort of thing all the time, he reasoned; reverse the genders and no one
blinks. But family, friends, and the kids were aghast--”you’re doing what!?”
Surprise! It is not gender
that turns women into angry witches; it is the endless, thankless drudgery of
running a household. Men simply become assholes since by definition they can’t
be witches. Either way, the task, as usually structured, is infuriatingly
impossible for anyone. On bad nights he wondered if, through the centuries,
only their paychecks kept legions of men from being murdered in their sleep by
overstressed matriarchs.
Whatever your primary sexual
characteristics, trying to ‘single parent’, while working full time, feels like
one huge stressful ongoing failure. Unless you give up sleep to clean, your
home ends up looking like a landfill after a hurricane.
When children are involved,
one solution is obvious. They need to know how to scrub a toilet, to start.
Finally, a use for those howling offspring. Don’t lie by pretending it’s fun.
Just teach ‘em it sucks but do it anyway. Much like life. (Also, for the
record: confiscating electronic devices is not child abuse, no matter how
often.)
The final solution to this
winless war is to simply quit worrying about it. A clean house does not make
you a better person, nor higher class. It might mean you are a good kid boss.
Most likely it means you wasted a bunch of time cleaning stuff for no real
reason, or paid hard cash for someone--a woman, of course--to do what you could
have done yourself. Let it go!
Cleanliness is not next to
godliness, nor is the phrase in any holy book. For most working people,
cleanliness is next to impossible, to paraphrase “Pig-Pen.” Ignore dust and
dirt, follow your nose, and focus on what stinks, or soon may. When both adults
are working, a coin flip is the only fair way to determine the ultimate toilet
scrubber, or Rancid Milk Refrigerator Spill Containment Specialist.
Fairness is the real issue
anyhow. Stop doing 90% of your cleaning, and split the other 10%. A breeze
then, no matter how foul!
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