Learning a New Division

When This Mom's Job is No Longer "The House"

Photo by Pille R. Priske on Unsplash

When I was a kid, nearly every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, we got together with my mom’s side of the family. I loved these family gatherings, barring one thing that always happened when it came to after dinner cleanup: there was a strict division of labor and leisure along gender lines. When the last of the Mrs. Hooker’s Dessert (I know, that name—but it’s actually rather tasty; message me if you want the recipe) was scraped out of the glass bowl and all that remained on the china dishes was picked-clean chicken bones and a few stray peas, the women of the family got down to work.

The hostess divvyed up leftovers into Ziploc bags to send home with the guests. One of the matriarchs stationed herself at the sink and worked her way through sinkful after sinkful of dirty dishes, while the rest of us dried and put the dishes away. It was an efficient system and a perfect environment for getting caught up on the extended family’s news (and let’s be honest, the juicy gossip.)

I was a quiet girl so I worked and watched, not saying much. Still, I couldn’t help but notice that none of my brothers or dad or uncles pitched in. In fact, they all congregated around the biggest television in the house and watched whatever sporting event they all agreed on—Football during Thanksgiving and Christmas, baseball during Easter or Nascar or golf—the males in our family weren’t picky. All that mattered was that men were playing it and a score was being kept.

When I hit my early teens, I remember one specific get-together when I outright asked my mom the question that had been eating away at me for years. “Why do the boys get to watch tv when I have to help in the kitchen?”

And I will never, ever forget my mother’s response. “Because that’s just how it is, Maile. The women take care of the kitchen. Now start drying.”

A flush of injustice poured right down over me like a pot of hot coffee. Because I was a female, I had to clean. Because they were males, they got to relax. At the time I was pissed at my mom, that she couldn’t see with her own two eyes how completely unfair it was. Now, I don’t fault her at all. That was what she was taught from as young as I was. It was the established and accepted position of women in the home.

Interesting enough, as our nuclear family grew and my siblings and I got married and we all began having children, we got together less with our extended family and started enjoying holidays with just our immediate family.

And that division of labor and leisure began to blur.

My dad made a lot of the meals for our gatherings (my mom never loved cooking) and when dinner was over, my brothers were just as often in the kitchen cleaning and tidying things away as me and my mom and sisters. We never sat down and had an official discussion about it; it just happened. But I’ve recently found myself butting up against this archaic mindset in my own house, and the main proponent of it is, shockingly, me.

For years I took on the primary role of cleaning and maintaining our home, cooking our meals, doing the laundry—yada, yada, yada. I reigned as the domestic goddess of our little world. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it either. It was simply how the responsibilities of our family got divvied up.

Since we had six Babes to feed and clothe, it was important that my husband or I had a full time job. Shawn took that role, and I was happy to let him have it. The idea of having to show up with washed hair and coherent thoughts every day of the week exhausted me. I was more than happy to stay home with my Babes, clean the toilets, make a pot of chicken noodle soup, and nap while they were watching Dora the Explorer reruns.

When they got a bit older, we decided to homeschool and the household responsibilities shifted. I simply could not be in charge of their education while also doing all the cleaning in our home. So, I taught my little Lovies from age 6 and onwards how to vacuum, load the dishwasher, do their own laundry, etc. And their help kept our home from falling into complete disarray while also teaching them some important life skills. But when it came right down to it, the job of keeping our house clean still rested firmly on my shoulders.

Fast forward a few years to when we decided to send all our Babes to traditional school. It was a big step for us. Our Bigs began attending our local high school, our Middles went to the elementary school just down the street, and our Littles were still busy working their way out of the toddler phase. My role as homeschool teacher was gone. And I went back to being the main caretaker of our home.

This is where things started getting sticky.

Sure, I no longer had the full-time “job” of homeschool teacher, but I was the parent in charge of most child-related activities: doctors appointment scheduling and attending, school meetings, sports meetings, fundraiser participation (good gracious, everyone is ALWAYS raising money for something), clothes shopping, event planning (with 6 kids, there’s always a birthday to organize), dropping off forgotten textbooks at school, picking up feverish children from school…ad infinitum.

I never dreamed that sending my kids to school would mean I had just as much work to do, especially since I didn’t have extra hands to help out with some of the chores around the house during the day. So when I wasn’t running all the errands, I was vacuuming and doing laundry and scrubbing toilets because we all agreed that a clean house made all of us just a tad bit easier to live with. At least I believed that. And keeping the house tidy was my job.

Mom’s job.

Again, I didn’t love my role, but I didn’t hate it either. I really hadn’t figured out something more meaningful and “valuable” that I wanted to do with my time so it made sense that this would be my job. And that’s what I did for several years. They weren’t easy years for me, personally. I wanted to believe that there was something more purposeful for me to do with my life than keeping clean towels in the cupboard and the shower drains unclogged, but I just couldn’t figure out what it was.

Then…we bought our bookshop.

And I finally discovered the job that meant enough to me to get me out of bed in the morning, in the shower, and out the door wearing pants that had buttons and a zipper. I loved walking into our shop each day, flipping on the lights, preening the books on our shelves, and opening up our doors to the community around us. Book matchmaking, chatting with customers, building relationships with our fellow business owners in the city—it was such a thrill. Such a life-giving vocation that I felt completely blessed to have.

But the whole time I took on this new role as a business owner, my mind kept playing a rephrasing of the answer my mom gave me all those years ago when I stood glaring at her at the kitchen counter, dishtowel in hand. And this time I was saying it to myself: “The mother takes care of the home. Now get to work.”

Mind you I was working. Sometimes 12 hours a day at the shop and many weeks I had no days off. Monday, the only day our shop was closed, I worked on orders or event planning or replied to customer emails or ran errands or cleaned the shop. I was working like a dog, making no paycheck, and still feeling the responsibility of coming home and making sure the toilets didn’t have orange rings in them and the constant layer of dog fur from our Labrador got vacuumed up on a regular basis. Shawn saw the load I was trying to carry and jumped in by taking on the laundry and tidying the kitchen between his work calls or after he’d finished up his own shift at the shop. We kept this up for nearly a year.

Then, a month and half ago, my mom moved in with us, and it was the proverbial straw that broke this poor little camel’s back.

It wasn’t my mom that did it. It was the material chaos that barged in and man-handled the fragile order we had in our house. To make room for her to have our basement as her new home, we had to relocate the stuffings of an entire level of our home. They migrated to our main and second floors in boxes and crates and laundry baskets. They lined our hallways, dining room walls, entryway, laundry room. Everywhere you looked, there were things. So many things.

The overwhelm of it all culminated two weeks ago. A funk fell over me that I haven’t felt in over a year. Just getting out of bed felt like an impossible feat. Because when I opened my eyes, I saw the dog’s bed that needed to be washed and my closet that needed cleaning out. I stumbled to the bathroom only to be confronted with the grisly scene of my uncleaned toilet and the petrified toothpaste detritus on the vanity countertop. As I moped down the staircase, I spied a new family of dust bunnies that had bred and multiplied overnight on every step on which I placed my foot.

The carnage continued in every room and upon every surface that I looked at. And instead of resolving that this was a family issue that needed to be tackled as a family, I took it as a personal failure. Sure, over the weeks leading up to my breakdown, I declared my displeasure to whichever Babes were in earshot. “You know, cleaning your dishes isn’t my job. I have other, more important things to do just like you.”

But the problem was, I didn’t really believe it.

In the deepest, most vulnerable places of my heart, I felt like if I could have just done “my job” of taking care of the house, I wouldn’t have to get upset about the dishes. If I had the right systems in place or I woke up earlier, everyone could get on with their more important activities. I just needed to get my shit together and figure out how to do two jobs now. I needed to work harder and smarter.

The mantra continued chanting in my mind: the mother takes care of the home, the mother takes care of the home, the mother takes care of the home.

Until…

she can’t anymore.

Until, that mother is me, sitting on our dog-furred couch staring into nothingness with tears sliding down my cheeks and not one damn ounce of gumption in me to put my feet on the ground and stand up and take a single step forward. I had nothing to give to our home. And, worse, I had nothing to give to our bookshop. I was paralyzed.

Something absolutely had to change.

And so, The Family Meeting was called.

The Meeting happened a week ago. We gathered in my youngest daughter’s bedroom (not sure how that became the meeting place but it did), some sitting on the bed, some sprawled on the floor, a few sitting criss-cross applesauce in the middle of the room with a Little in their lap.

I started off by simply saying, “This house.”

They nodded. They knew exactly what I was referring to. It had gotten that bad.

I continued with my plea for help. “I need you all to step up.” I’d said that same exact sentence before in the past. There was nothing unique in it. But the place it was delivered from was different. Because I was finally beginning to believe that this wasn’t a “mom problem.” It was a family problem.

Our family is far from perfect, but one thing we do really well is hearing a plea for help and jumping into action. And that’s exactly what they did. Immediately, they started throwing out possible solutions till we finally landed on a division of labor that included everyone. At the end Shawn added, “What will take each of us 20 minutes to do each day, takes Mom two hours to do. Imagine how much we can get done around here if we all do our part.”

Our part.

I’ve sat with those two words a lot over the past week.

Our part.

Can I actually, fully believe caring for this house isn’t mine to shoulder, but our family’s? What if my actual job is doing the thing that I love: owning and running our bookshop?

Even as I write this, it seems so elementary, like this is something I should have learned about in 4th grade, right along with photosynthesis and long division. I hope when my girls grow up, they see themselves in a different light than I have. I hope their understanding of division will go far beyond my own, beyond that stale mantra, “The women take care of the home. Now get to work.”

I hope.

Friends, how have you navigated the division of labor in your own families? Are there archaic ideas that you are surprised to find yourself still governed by? I’d love to hear your own stories down in the comments below!