A frequent topic of conversation around our house for the last month or so has been the "burden of thought." It's changed a bit how we do things, though it is a tricky change to make.
The burden of thought, very basically, is the fact that women know/do everything in the home. We know when the doctor's appointments are, we know how much toilet paper we have and where it is, we know what's in the pantry, we know who the teacher is and what kind of drink she likes from Sonic, or if she prefers Starbucks instead, we know what's going on with our kids and what time of day is their best. We know everything and do everything. Men don't for the pure reason of not being there when things are scheduled or purchased or revealed.
This has led to the social view of men being helpless dolts around the house and women being the frazzled "how does she do it all" mature one of the relationship. Men are children and women are the long suffering adults who got suckered into spending their lives raising their children and cleaning their homes.
This is wrong. Men are not HELPING around the house when they pick up their laundry or wash dishes or put children to bed. They are being a part of the household. I don't care if he works all day and she stays home or vice versa. The house has to be cleaned periodically, the children have to be tended, the food cooked, the laundry washed. It all has to be done and just because he works outside the home and provides the finances to keep the family going does not give him a free pass to do nothing.
Austin read an article about the burden of thought and asked me about it. It hadn't occurred to me that he just didn't know these things and that he might want to. We keep our communication lines pretty open but we still have times when we miss something, like all couples. We talked about how I'm the one who's always making lists of what we need to take when we go on a trip, I'm the one making all the plans for the weekends when we do something (like CALF...that weekend was planned out weeks in advance, then altered slightly Thursday night and again Friday night....all by me), I'm the one planning all our meals and shopping for everything. Austin never hesitates to run to the store when I've forgotten something or to pick something up whenever I'm just wiped out and too tired to cook. He's not "helping" exactly, he's being a member of the family. He and his children need to eat and if I wasn't there, he'd have to do it on his own.
For a couple of years now, I've sent Austin a weekly email with our schedule for the upcoming week so he knows what's going on while he's working. Sometimes it's packed full of school and doctor's appointments and outings around town. Sometimes there's nothing but praise team practice. He likes knowing what's going on so if there's a day that's going to be particularly busy for me and the kids, he knows that maybe that's a day he can take over and "help" me. Since things have been changing on short notice recently we got the Cozi app and started using that. Austin can pull up the calendar and see what's up that day at a glance. It has a place for grocery lists, too, if I need him to hit the store so I don't have to go with 1-4 children in tow.
Writing this I've had to stop myself from typing "help" a lot. It's so ingrained in our heads as women that men are helping us it's hard to get away from that. It's even Biblical that we are helpmates to our husbands, though it seems that women have had some pretty difficult tasks historically, what with raising children, keeping vegetable gardens, cooking, cleaning, making clothes, etc. Almost always in long skirts and long sleeves. God bless the women before me. I'd not survive without my leggings and tank tops and a/c in this Texas heat. My generation hasn't seen it much in the previous generations. I remember my dad reading to us and occasionally cooking breakfast (always on Mother's Day, though) but that's about it. He wasn't even a grill kind of dad. He worked a lot of long hours so he just wasn't there for that kind of thing, but he was there for us in other ways. It seems that most dads of my peers were like that.
I'm getting off track.
The main purpose of this is to say: I'm trying to relinquish some of the load, but it's tricky. For 9 years of marriage, my "job" has been to run our household. And Austin was my assistant. When kids came into the picture, he stepped up, almost eagerly, to do more. He has always taken the diaper changes when he's home and most of the feedings in the evenings once they're on bottles. He does bath time and bedtime and playtime and clean up time. He's really the parent in charge in the evenings. I'm the back up then. He's in charge of dinner on weekend nights when we don't have something planned. He gets that I need time away from my kids to be a good mom so he doesn't mind when I run away to play with my friends at 8pm and don't come home until midnight. I don't ask his permission, but I check to make sure he's got the energy to parent solo for the evening or that he didn't have plans or a thing he wanted us to do as a family. He's taking over more with the boys when it comes to travel plans. We sit down and discuss day by day what we'll be doing and eating and he takes on some of the tasks. I'm apparently too much of a control freak (who knew?) that I can't give up complete control of things, but he's ok with that. Sometimes he needs a reminder or a little push.
We're both learning how to share the load and it's trickier than you might think, but we'll get there.
Disclaimer: this is not to say ALL men are clueless at home. Some are very hands on and stand shoulder to shoulder with their wives or partners in the trenches of young childhood. I'm just speaking in general and personal terms. 😊
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