{"id":37284,"date":"2017-10-06T10:46:27","date_gmt":"2017-10-06T15:46:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=37284"},"modified":"2017-10-06T14:31:39","modified_gmt":"2017-10-06T19:31:39","slug":"housework-resentment-and-power-in-a-different-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2017\/10\/housework-resentment-and-power-in-a-different-light\/","title":{"rendered":"Housework, resentment, and power, in a different light"},"content":{"rendered":"
Housework will not get you to heaven. Image courtesy of Wikimedia commons.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For a period of my marriage I harbored resentment toward my husband, unfailingly gentle and hard-working, over questions of housework. It was all utterly typical. I felt my work was unappreciated and invisible to him. I felt I was left with more than my share of the work generated by the kids and the household. I felt resentful that <\/span>he resented me<\/span><\/i> when I got grumpy. There was little outward conflict between us–chilly silence is more my speed–but I would allow aggrieved accusations to play on repeat in my head as I stomped through my chores. <\/span><\/p>\n

Observing <\/span>recent <\/span><\/a>conversations<\/span><\/a>, I\u2019ve realized that I don\u2019t carry that kind of resentment anymore. The exhausting work of caring for small children has ended for me; no doubt that\u2019s part of the change. But the mental load and time demands of a larger home and busier household remain on my plate. I think I\u2019ve come to see myself, my work and my relationship differently over the past few years, and those changes have contributed to my present composure on these matters (though new challenges always arise in family life). For me, the most generative ideas have not been about gender roles and sexual politics, but about how I understand myself, my desire, my agency, and my husband\u2019s agency. <\/span><\/p>\n

Caveat: my experience is far from universal. I\u2019m lead parent of our four kids, while my husband is lead breadwinner. I work at home as an independent scholar, while my husband works a demanding job in research. As a household, we do not outsource any housework or yardwork. I\u2019ve been lucky to find fulfilling vocations beyond our home, and our household structure generally suits me well. My experience may not apply to women in other circumstances, particularly those parenting alone or living in abusive situations. <\/span><\/p>\n

For what it\u2019s worth, then, here are four ideas that I\u2019ve found compelling.<\/span><\/p>\n

1. It\u2019s been helpful to reframe my housework as an economically productive part of our household economy. I began to think about housework less as an expression of myself — of my love for my family, or my personality, or my work ethic — than as my contribution to our budget, an addition to the (very small) monetary income I bring in. It might seem counterintuitive, but <\/span>when I stopped thinking of my housework as a personal sacrifice for those I loved, I stopped needing to be loved for doing it.<\/span><\/i> You can\u2019t buy love, and you can\u2019t earn it or demand it from others–especially not on the implicit notion that you deserve it in exchange for your work. <\/span><\/p>\n

Instead, I focused on the fact that my domestic work amounts to a significant (tax-free!) contribution to our household wealth, because we do not have to pay other people to do it. There are tradeoffs to contributing to the household economy primarily through non-market work, of course. But there are significant tradeoffs to earned income wages from a job, as well, and I can weigh those tradeoffs pragmatically. For me, the calculus favors non-market work. <\/span>Thinking about housework this way allowed me to revalue my work in ways that did not demand love as payment and did not put my sense of being worthy of love into question.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

2. Over time, I\u2019ve learned to take responsibility for my own emotional state. I saw how futile it was to try to control my children\u2019s emotional states — \u201cCheer up!\u201d \u201cBe happy!\u201d \u201cStop crying!\u201d — \u00a0and I realized that only they can be responsible for their own emotions, with parental support and tools. Similarly, I came to see that I alone am responsible for my emotional state, and that<\/span> I assume that responsibility when I work for the work\u2019s own sake, not for some consequent emotional reward (like appreciation, praise or love) that may not come. <\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

If my emotional wellness depends on recognition from my husband, and if I seek that recognition through housework, I\u2019ve set myself up for unhealthy emotional dependency. That\u2019s true for two reasons: first, it\u2019s not my husband\u2019s prerogative (or responsibility) to determine how I feel. Second, recognition from him, no matter how extravagant, brings me only momentary appeasement, not lasting happiness or peace. That\u2019s because the nature of happiness and peace is to flow outward from a person, not to be accrued within, much less transferred from one to another. <\/span>When I do the work for its own sake, not for recognition or relational credit, I assume responsibility for my own emotional wellness, which magnifies my agency within my own experience. <\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

3. As I age, I\u2019m better able to own my desire, to recognize what I want. Women are often socialized not to acknowledge desire beyond consumer goods, and this was a message I absorbed powerfully. I found it difficult–and still do–to give honest attention to my desire and discern what I wanted in a particular situation, let alone forthrightly express and seek that desire. Instead, I would channel the desire through some other narrative of duty or false self-sacrifice: this is good for my kids, I\u2019m doing this for so-and-so, this is what\u2019s expected of me.<\/span><\/p>\n

The latter, expectations, is an especially powerful narrative in the era of the lifestyle blog. I\u2019d find myself in a frenzy of fancy girls\u2019 hairstyles before church, or making holiday gifts for schoolteachers late at night, because, I told myself, that\u2019s what\u2019s expected. In truth, <\/span>I was doing those things mostly because I wanted to be viewed by others as the kind of person who did them.<\/span><\/i> Cultural lifestyle expectations only have power over us to the extent that we desire the social rewards–praise, admiration, status–of fulfilling them. AND THAT\u2019S OKAY, but own it. It\u2019s natural to want admiration for the admirable work we do, and it\u2019s not wrong, as long as we don\u2019t expect to receive love in return. <\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s been enlightening for me to realize that when I spend hours decorating my house for holidays, for instance, I am doing it because, in the end,<\/span> I want to<\/span><\/i> — either for the sake of the pleasure it brings me in itself, or for the pleasure it brings me to project that image to others. <\/span>When I find myself resentfully doing work that neither brings me pleasure in the doing nor brings me pleasure in the projecting, I\u2019m using \u201cexpectations\u201d as a cover for mere vanity. <\/span><\/i>Recognizing that the expectations narrative often works as a cover for vanity has been counterintuitively freeing. I can jettison the \u201cexpectations\u201d guilt-free, as a positive process of overcoming vanity, not as a shameful shirking of duty.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

4. I became acquainted with the vocabulary of personal boundaries. It was helpful in itself to understand that when I build healthy boundaries into a relationship I prolong and strengthen its potential. I can\u2019t gratify every wish of those around me, even those I love most, because I am a particular person, not an ideal projection. The problem is not that I\u2019m unwilling to give of myself, the problem lies in the very structure of an ideal: definitionally, an ideal is not a particular. They\u2019re just two different kinds of things.* For a lifelong good girl and people pleaser like me, it\u2019s been a difficult but freeing process, ever ongoing, to give up a self-story greedy for external approval. <\/span><\/p>\n

More powerful, though, was the realization that what\u2019s true from my perspective is also true from my husband\u2019s. He\u2019ll never gratify my wishes, about housework or sex or politics or anything else–not because he\u2019s unwilling to try, but <\/span>because wishes are ontologically different from persons.<\/span><\/i> When I measure our relationship instrumentally, in terms of how he is or is not providing what I need from him for my own happiness, he\u2019ll never, ever be able to satisfy me. It\u2019s a structure-of-reality thing. Worse, he\u2019ll never be real to me. I\u2019ll never really love him. I\u2019ll never really <\/span>see<\/span><\/i> him. I\u2019ll spend our life together chasing an instrument of my own mind.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a kind of self-emptying–letting go of what<\/span> I want <\/span><\/i>and what <\/span>I need f<\/span><\/i>rom him and others–but paradoxically this self-emptying frees me to act more powerfully as an agent in the world, because I\u2019m no longer dependent on external compliance or approval for my energy. I hear echoes of Christ\u2019s dictum that she who loses her life shall find it. <\/span><\/p>\n

In those moments when I can let go of what I need from him, and can own up to the fact that I am not what he needs from me, we have a chance of grasping the hardest thing the world: the inkling that the person sitting across from you is real.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

In themselves, these four ideas don\u2019t directly resolve issues relating to housework, mental load, or emotional labor. But I think they\u2019ve helped in approaching the conversations. My love language is collaboration: I feel closest to my husband when we\u2019re working on something together. I can invite him to participate with me in domestic work as a way to grow together, or explain to him what it would mean to me if he took responsibility for some of that work. But if he does not respond to the invitation on my terms, my happiness is not at stake. My love for and recognition of him as a person is not at stake. I continue the grown-up work of recognizing what\u2019s given in my life, finding sustainable sources of happiness, determining what I really desire, and forthrightly becoming an agent in a world. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

*It might actually be better to say that ideals are ontologically <\/span>the same<\/span><\/i> as particulars: both are particular entities, with particular histories, that can never fully coincide with another entity, but are always partially composed of other entities. Regardless, the point is that a person can never fully correspond to another person\u2019s wish because of how reality is made. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a period of my marriage I harbored resentment toward my husband, unfailingly gentle and hard-working, over questions of housework. It was all utterly typical. I felt my work was unappreciated and invisible to him. I felt I was left with more than my share of the work generated by the kids and the household. I felt resentful that he resented me when I got grumpy. There was little outward conflict between us–chilly silence is more my speed–but I would allow aggrieved accusations to play on repeat in my head as I stomped through my chores. Observing recent conversations, I\u2019ve realized that I don\u2019t carry that kind of resentment anymore. The exhausting work of caring for small children has ended for me; no doubt that\u2019s part of the change. But the mental load and time demands of a larger home and busier household remain on my plate. I think I\u2019ve come to see myself, my work and my relationship differently over the past few years, and those changes have contributed to my present composure on these matters (though new challenges always arise in family life). For me, the most generative ideas have not been about gender roles and sexual politics, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37284"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37290,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37284\/revisions\/37290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}