Kate Carraway is a Toronto writer whose book about adulthood for millennials and Gen Z comes out in 2027.
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The angriest I’ve ever been at my husband, Simon, in 10 years of marriage, was a few nights into the process of “sleep training” our baby. It didn’t feel right to me; it was the first parenting decision we’d made that crushed the new, dewy grass of my mother’s intuition. The idea is that, after too many months of no one ever sleeping more than a few hours at a time, or the baby never falling asleep on their own, you become delirious and agree to some version of letting them cry, and cry, and cry, while you do nothing, until a specific, terrorizing amount of time has passed, and you’re allowed to pick them up.
I was a wreck of postpartum exhaustion, and that night, wild with the wrongness of it all, listening to our daughter cry, and cry, and cry upstairs, while I cried, and cried, and cried downstairs, Simon said I should go get her, because “I don’t think the timing is that important.”
I had read everything about sleep training – its methods, its lore and its fine print. In the absence of experience, and in a pandemic with no help, or any witnesses to the project of parenting the baby other than our dog, Jem, my husband and I relied only on each other. This included my industrial-grade research and evolving body of knowledge about everything from baby-nail scissors to cluster feeding. In one move, Simon dismissed what we were trying to do – the timing of sleep-training intervals are extremely important! – and the kind and amount of work that I do for our family. I was the one, as I always was, who had actually found the information, considered options, and created a plan.
When he’s not being subjected to his wife and daughter crying simultaneously, Simon does appreciate the invisible, intangible domestic work that I do. I mean, mostly: he once suggested that the time I spend on mommy-based Facebook groups and message boards, locating the best ballet classes and pediatric dermatologists, was “fun.”
Advice: On Father’s Day, I remember these parenting teachings from my dad
A lot of men seem to believe that the operational efficiency and warm atmosphere that surrounds them is produced by fairy magic, and not a millefeuille of unyielding mental load, constant and compulsory relational labour, a lifetime habit of providing attention and attunement, and holding aloft a CEO-style vision for a family’s collective life. Simon, though, gets it, and responds accordingly.
The best thing that Simon does, in the context of our division of domestic labour, and in deference to the amount that I do that he only sees the results of, is almost everything else. The best thing that Simon does for me is “more.”
Women overcontributing and men undercontributing affects families in every socio-cultural and socio-economic stratum, but solutions are rarely included in the conversation. Men doing more – not more than they currently do, but more than their wives – is a real, sustainable fix for a persistent and unnecessary problem. Dads, inside of typical heterosexual (or heterosexual-ish) married-with-kids relationships, the kind that usually suffer from a patriarchy-enabled paradigm of imbalanced effort and expectations, should do more than their wives or partners do. Just, more.
A lot of dads, including the ones who aren’t struggling to understand that a woman is a person, just like him, and aren’t “bad guys,” still do just enough to appease their wife, or feel good about being better at the whole wife-and-kids thing than their own dad was. These men will go to couples therapy, post a pic with a caption of gratitude and admiration, and do the public-facing, or easy-win playground-supervision stuff of parenting – this is “skimming,” doing whatever looks like effort – but won’t interrogate what “half” or “fair” would actually involve.
Doing more, considerably more, of the daily, boring, annoying work is the only way to realistically get there. (And that “more” has to include initiating, doing, and completing the task without being asked, reminded, or monitored.) Because – twist! – even doing considerably more will probably land them somewhere around 50 per cent of the true amount of family and household work, when the emotional, affective, and imaginative work that is usually done (and unaccounted for) by women is included in the total. “Equality” is sameness: when everyone is miserably doing half of everything, which is missing the point. “Equity,” which accounts for differences, according to our circumstances, is what we’re after.
I spoke to Eve Rodsky, the author of Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live), a bestselling banger of a handbook about equity in marriage and parenting, who said that while third-wave feminism brought “extraordinary gains of women in the workplace,” it’s “not finished. The only way that feminism is finished is men making extraordinary gains in the home.”
Simon probably does 75 per cent of our housework, which feels unlikely, if not extraordinary, for a Gen X finance bro. He always cooks, and he does most of the dishes. Jem died in May, but until then Simon handled her disgusting raw-food diet and administered most of her 18 daily anti-anxiety pills. He does everything around garbage and green bin and recycling and, because he is three times stronger than me, every kind of hauling and lifting. I do the laundry, and all of the incidental tidying, organizing and cleaning, which puts me at about 25 per cent of the actual housework. We have very-part-time help, which rises and falls depending on my schedule, but the primary beneficiary of that help, in hours saved, is me.
But, this split doesn’t reflect the rest of what I do, much of which happens, unseen and unremarked upon, on my phone or laptop: tracking and sourcing and buying literally everything we need; managing all the to-do lists, appointments, social plans and travel; and doing the reading and research that informs our shared decisions. And it doesn’t include my observations, sensibility, judgment, relationships, and assorted other psychic labour arranging our present, and planning our future.
It’s not that Simon doesn’t contribute to the feeling of our family – his care and love and presence is cacophonous, and his unusual, ultradirect way of being is my continuing obsession – but he simply doesn’t know any of the stakes involved in this weekend’s birthday parties. He was not socialized in soft skills. He is not doing anything that’s not on his list.
As to Ms. Rodsky’s “extraordinary gains” that need to be made in a family, we’ll know it’s happened when everyone’s time is valued the same. “Men’s time, in a patriarchy, is diamonds,” she says. “It’s guarded, by everybody. Women’s time is infinite.” She uses the example of schools calling moms first, because moms pick up the phone. When my husband is working, he’s working; when I’m working, I’m also texting my daughter’s friend’s mom about a playdate and ordering groceries. Simon would never interrupt himself like this.
I do all this, in part, because my husband dramatically out-earns me, and my mostly self-employed work can shape-shift, for our shared benefit; many women end up in flexible, often lower-paying careers for this reason. That said, friends of mine with full-time or otherwise very demanding jobs are still the ones keeping the family going between (and during) Zooms, exhausting themselves and enabling their husbands.
The precedent of men doing considerably more in recognition of an a priori imbalance has already been established, in dating: There, we recognize that women dedicate many more resources (the costs of the products and services of feminine performance, plus Ubers home from the bar, minus the 12 or 22 cents on the dollar that we don’t make, compared with men), and take on significant risk to their safety and well-being, while men are sort of expected to pay for dinner and maybe hold the door open.
Learning how to make sausages from my dad fills my fridge – and my heart
Once a woman is in a relationship, having children presents incredible and permanent danger to her well-being – physically, financially, legally, emotionally – even if it all works out. Having our daughter, for me, meant two miscarriages, two rounds of IVF, one high-risk full-term pregnancy including a week of hospitalization for pre-eclampsia, one (elective) abdominal surgery, and eight months of breastfeeding. It would be reductive to say that Simon did nothing other than produce the necessary genetic material, because he did everything he could, but I don’t feel bad that he brings me a coffee in bed every morning.
The foundational luck of my life was having an excellent, devoted dad, a world-class sweetie, who worked 60 hours a week and was still our go-to guy for homework, dentist appointments, long talks, all of it. The bar was high, but Simon met it, by adjusting for his relative privilege in our family, and by relentlessly putting us first: by doing more.
Reckoning with the ways in which the patriarchy keeps everyone down can open up a new, essential freedom that men are owed, too. Ms. Rodsky says, “What’s really hard for men is that when they’re just sort of ‘helpers,’ they lose psychological safety. That’s an organizational term where you don’t feel safe in the organization where you try to contribute, and you’re not doing anything right, so then you retreat from doing anything in that organization. And you become much more passive, like, ‘I’ll help you if you tell me what to do.’”
Ms. Rodsky says, of taking on more: “This is investing in your humanity.”
Happy Father’s Day.