Stuck in the 1950's

Photo by Throw Her in the Water.

We’ve come a long way towards equal rights for women. On the surface it seems that we are pretty equal with our male counterparts. As a teen, I was convinced that the man I married would be an equal partner in everything. He would cook and clean, help raise our children, and I, in turn would be a career women, bringing home some bacon of my own. I looked down upon the women of generations past who were slaves to their husbands. For these women, no retirement date was in sight. They continue working as full time housewives, long after their husbands get their gold watches. That, I swore, would never happen to me!

I laugh bitterly at this thinking, as I clean one of our many household toilets for the umpteenth time, whilst my equal opportunity husband naps on the couch, having fallen asleep watching golf. That he can so easily relax knowing full well that I am working my ass off cleaning the house, yet again, perplexes me. I rarely feel such a sense of time entitlement that I will abandon all household duty, kick my feet up, and tune everything out. The image of a woman with her hand in her pants, feet up, cold beer in hand, doesn’t exist. The phrase “A woman’s work is never done” is an understatement. I tell my husband he is like a bad roommate.

I blame my mother in law for some of his ways. I witness her continuing to serve her man, and it infuriates me. Despite his retirement many years ago, she continues in her full role as house wife, cook, laundress, house keeper, etc. Were he left to his own devices he would simply starve. Growing up in this type of household, my husband’s DNA is imprinted with the belief that women do the house work, and in fact, enjoy it. They like it so much, they don’t want or need any help. Helping them would be more of a nuisance really, so best stay out of the kitchen lest we interrupt their merriment! No matter how many times I bitch, complain, rationally discuss or present flashy power-point presentations, he hasn’t change his ways. I worry that my son will learn the same things from him and drive his future wife bonkers too!

Men benefited most from the equal opportunity pursuits of our forebears. They have their proverbial cake, that we bake in our immaculate kitchens, and eat it too, while we are at work making the dough! My mother-in-law did not work outside of the home. Her full time job was her home. Women today have two full time jobs, housewives and career women. I bring home the majority of the money, and pay the mortgage, but somehow I still have to do all of the house work! Don’t get me wrong, my husband is a hard worker and successful, he just never added anything else to his plate when his woman went to work. Some might blame me for enabling this, but I tell you, I can be a nasty biatch about this issue, and no amount of this generates any sympathy from him. I could cattle prod his ass, and he still would not learn how to turn the vacuum cleaner on. Our house could be buried in filth, and as long as it didn’t block the TV, he would ignore it.

For many years, I hired a cleaning lady, primarily to remove the possibility of me resenting my husband for his household laziness. I witnessed my mother, for years, grating at my step father, for not doing a damn thing around the house. When the economy turned, I let our housekeeper go, figuring we as a family could pick up the slack, and save the money. Well, I have been picking up the slack, and I am getting angrier and angrier, every time I mop the floor and do the laundry! Ironically, my income has increased during this economic downturn while my husband’s has decreased more than 50%, but I am still the only one doing housework!

When my husband goes on boys trips and regales me with stories of all of the great meals they cooked up for themselves, I could slit his throat! Are you kidding me?? You rarely cook at home for our family, but you can get off your ass on a boys trip and cook flank steak?? WTF? I don’t even know how to cook flank steak! He shared an ironic story with me about men who fail to contribute anything in their households, yet when golfing will rake a bunker to smooth perfection, and remove a fragment of grass from their putting line to insure the ball’s undisturbed travel to the hole. I laughed so hard I choked. He finds his behavior funny! Funny to whom? Him and all of the other lazy ass, free loading, dirt bag husbands who sit back and watch their little women toil their lives away in the never ending hell of housework? Just writing this I am getting pissed!

Sometimes I can get him to pick up groceries, but I have to make a very detailed list, else he will return with Cheese Nips and Dinty Moore Stew as our weekly staples. His household jobs are garbage removal (which he does about 80% of the time) and dishes. His definition of doing the dishes however, involves only what goes in or out of the dishwasher. Everything else accumulates on the counter top in bubbly soaking water until it rusts or I break down and wash it. Recently I had another teary, pleading break down, asking for his help. Couldn’t he, a reasonable and intelligent person observe the unfairness of this situation, and couldn’t he summon up some compassion to help a little around the house? He agreed that he could, and would take on the chore of cleaning the sinks and toilets in the house. I thanked him, telling him that anything he could do would help. That was four weeks ago, and he has yet to do either of those things.

I am at a loss. Somehow I was misled as a young woman into believing that equality was the norm, and that men were enlightened enough to recognize that if they benefited from a second income in the family, they would need to step up too, and take on their fair share of household duties. That memo apparently never got sent out. Maybe we are just at a generational crossroads. Husbands of my generation were raised by housewives. They seem to expect their wives to provide the same services.

I read recently that in relationships where women make more money than men, divorce rates are higher. My first thought was that men must grow to resent their wives for making more money and diminishing their manly role. I now realize that these marriages end because these hard-working exhausted women, are sick and tired of doing everything! I imagine they come home from work, deposit their big fat paycheck into their joint account, and their husbands call out to them, from the sofa, when they come in the door, “Honey, what’s for dinner?”