At my mother’s house, however, occasionally a dude with help without being asked. I can’t decide if it’s the lack of my aunt shooing them out of “her” kitchen, or that my dad sets a great example in his own home.

Her response, “Oh, I don’t think he’ll like that.”

Seriously? Who the fuck cares if he likes it or not. He’s doing his share. We all do chores we “don’t like”.

On a more serious note, I feel for people like Alecto’s mom who cultivate the reputation of never getting sick unless they’re very very sick. This is often an indication that the person in question (usually a woman) won’t admit to feeling crappy, sometimes even to themselves. So they don’t take care of themselves and often end up very very sick. A few years ago, my mother had bronchitis for two months before she missed a day of work *or* saw a doctor. The year before that it was a severe sinus infection that took forever to resolve because she felt that she couldn’t slow down. Now every time I hear her cough I worry that she’ll end up with pneumonia.

Sick days are sometimes a huge point of contention in our house. I know that it’s not that easy to take off work in America, even when you’re privileged to work in a company where you have sick days. But the attitude I get when I tell him he has to stay home to keep the kids alive (and it’s only happened three times in four years)is kind of appalling. I feel like I’m single handedly setting his career back six years when I ask him to let me have a sick day. I do wonder how much flack guys get from other (douchey) guys when they do things like take off work to do childcare.

And my husband is, on the scale of husbands, awesome about pulling his housework weight. Some things just go deep.

RAAAAAAAAAGE!

And yes, all of the above. It does nobody any favours, encourages women to treat men like incapable children who need looking after and there-thereing and men to act like them, and it encourages women to martyr – and to go into work when they’re ill and spread it around the entire office.

I was talking with a staunchly feminist close mutual female friend of ours from his area of the world (Central Asia), and we established that we were both thrown into an incandescent rage by the idea we were both brought up in that women’s health, sleep, and leisure time don’t matter and mens’ do. I decided recently that I’m never going to put up with this sh*t again, in any form. No women cooking for hours *and* cleaning up for hours while the men sit around in our house! This was happening at our place on Thanksgiving so I sat with my husband and the other dude and pantomimed a ball-scratching leisure-hoarding man–and informed them that that’s what I was doing–until my husband got up to help. (To be fair, he’s generally very good at cooking unasked and not too bad at cleaning unasked.) I also refuse to get up two hours before my husband on principle when we’re in his village, the way my mother-in-law still thinks she has the power to insist on (in a “our men are well taken care of by our tireless energizer bunny women” way). It doesn’t accomplish anything except reinforce the status quo and make us women cranky, sleep-deprived, and more vulnerable to illness, which they then have to ignore while ministering to everyone else’s needs. I’ll help with the common work so that other women aren’t stuck with everything, but I’m not going to do this just-for-show symbolic stuff. No thanks!!!

I’m also trying to get used to refraining from doing the invisible wifework and not feeling guilty about a messier house as a result when guests come over. It’s a process. We’re currently living in a more socialist-type country than the one I was born and brought up in (US), so I’m hoping that we can stay here while we have kids, because I don’t want to be a second-shifting superwoman with no social support, and it seems like I have slightly larger chance of avoiding that here. I have a feeling that despite our best intentions, we have a tendency to fall into these roles if we’re not conscious of what’s happening. Fortunately, my husband seems to get it, now that he realizes that this double standard is a form of social injustice.

I am pretty disgusted by the sickness inequality, and it’s something that I hadn’t actually thought about before now. While I haven’t experienced it firsthand, TV commericals definitely help continue this idea.

My mother hardly ever gets sick, but when she does it’s BAD – the last time she ended up in hospital because of pulmonary embolism, so when she got home we all ran around taking care of everything, and to be honest the only other time I really remember is when she broke a couple ribs when I was a kid and had to stay in bed for a month at least, so in my memory at least when one of my parents is sick the other is in charge of everything.

On the other hand, my mother tends to do the inside things while my dad does the outdoors, but that’s also complicated since my parents live on a farm and have horses and there’s a lot of outdoors stuff that needs doing, so I don’t know how fair the split is.
And the rule for dishes is that if you cooked, you don’t clean!
But my mother is the one who does things like sending thank you notes and christmas cards.