The Unmade Bed

by Stephen Marche

And now I remember Halloween costumes, hand-made Halloween costumes.VI My chubby eight-year-old self in a Hobbit costume that made me look like a Franciscan monk. My brother as an owl. As ludicrous as it sounds, working mothers in the 1980s in North America were fully expected to make their children’s Halloween costumes. To buy one was a sign of failure. One Halloween my mother-in-law, a radio producer responsible for four kids, hand-stitched an entire bumblebee costume out of strips of cloth. Sarah walked to the first house on the left, the neighbor said, “Aren’t you a nice convict,” and Sarah walked home, cried in her room, and refused to go out again that night. From the middle of my own harried parenthood, all this crafty business—the expectation that professional women will sew—seems like mild madness.

  My mother’s housework responsibilities were no doubt compounded by living in a house full of rambunctious boys. My father was a tolerated bumbler in the domestic sphere. His efforts were vital, however. Our efforts too were vital, the boys’ efforts. An odd kind of chivalry was involved: cleaning up was a noble gesture to try to keep Mom from being overwhelmed. Was that progress? Pseudo-progress? I have no idea. Or is all progress pseudo-progress?

  The psychology of housework is nostalgic, inevitably—attempting to re-create or avoid the ecology of our childhood. Pulling away from the way we are used to doing things is a slow extraction out of a sticky business. Atavism is as inevitable as progress because the household cleanliness we are used to does not feel like an inheritance any more than our genes do. The household’s cleanliness or dirtiness feels like an organic state of being. We all just want to feel at home.

  * * *

  Despite many failures, mostly mine, there is a much more equal breakdown in our household tasks than in our parents’ houses. What constitutes the progress? Is it that I do slightly more housework than my father, or that our house is less demanding? Or is it that we have lower standards?

  Right at the beginning of the modern feminist movement, in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir identified housework as the key impediment to the liberation of women: “Woman is doomed to the continuation of the species and the care of the home.” Women’s sexual status as objects, their ineligibility to own property, their exclusion from the world of work, even immobilizing fashions—for de Beauvoir, they are all rooted in the original constitution of woman as the maintainer of the home. Her descriptions of housework are blistering in their hatred: “Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present. . . . Washing, ironing, sweeping, ferreting out fluff from under the wardrobes—all this halting of decay is also the denial of life; for time simultaneously creates and destroys, and only its negative aspect concerns the housekeeper.” It is worth noting that for de Beauvoir, who has several ideas for improving marriage with utopian sexual arrangements, there is no suggestion that housework should be divided equally. Housework is oppression in itself. “The healthy young woman will hardly be attracted by so gloomy a vice,” she writes. Radical feminists like Angela Davis find hope in the possibility of changing social standards. In “The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective,” she writes, “Although housework as we know it today may eventually become a bygone relic of history, prevailing social attitudes continue to associate the eternal female condition with images of brooms and dustpans, mops and pails, aprons and stoves, pots and pans. And it is true that women’s work, from one historical era to another, has been associated in general with the homestead. Yet female domestic labour has not always been what it is today, for like all social phenomena, housework is a fluid product of human history.”

  In our own time healthy young women seem attracted more than ever to the “gloomy vice” of housework. In the ideal life the female lawyer comes home to the midcentury-modern living room, with the books organized by color. Maybe when she makes partner she’ll buy that Le Corbusier lamp she’s always wanted, the one that inspired Kanye West. Or at least a decent reproduction. Needless to say, the female lawyer does less housework than her stay-at-home mom did, but that does not prevent the desire for vacuumed blinds, for an organized crisper, for the shelf in the kitchen island—the kind Martha Stewart has—filled with copper cookie cutters in various shapes. And this despite the fact that, from the very first studies of the sociology of housework, women who work out of their home are more satisfied in their lives than women who work in it.

  The bizarre reality of women making their own candles, knitting, and raising chickens coincides neatly with the rise of working women who actually do much less housework. Martha Stewart has made an empire out of immanence. The fetishization of the domestic is everywhere. Hillary Clinton’s major source of relaxation, according to the New York Times, is Love It or List It, a reality show on Home and Garden Television in which a renovator fixes up a couple’s old place while a real estate agent finds them a new place, and the couple has to choose between the two.

  Housework entertainment naturally is compensation. The fantasy of the domesticity channels is of an old-fashioned domestic intimacy. The food on FoodTV isn’t hypermodern fusion; it’s classic comfort food. When a female celebrity reaches a certain level of popularity, she founds a home-based lifestyle website: Gwyneth Paltrow, Reese Witherspoon, Jessica Alba, Blake Lively, and on and on. The domesticity fantasy is about having the luxury to care about the details of our own or other people’s lives. It is about the joy of family life without the unmanageableness. It is inherently nostalgic, antiprogress. Housework is the macho bullshit of women. And, in this light, it is perhaps not surprising that men have not started doing more housework. Men might be willing to lose the garbage of their own gender stereotypes, but why should they take on the garbage of another?

  Equality is coming, but not the way we expected. The future does not involve men doing more housework. A recent study of transgendered men found that housework is divided inequitably even in that group. There is a slight correlation between the egalitarianism of a household and a fairer division of domestic labor, but the most substantial correlation is that the more egalitarian a household is, the less housework gets done altogether. Men’s behavior may not be changing, but here is the good news: women’s is. The sociologist Suzanne M. Bianchi and her colleagues identified this trend as early as 2000: “Time-diary data from representative samples of American adults show that the number of overall hours of domestic labor (excluding child care and shopping) has continued to decline steadily and predictably since 1965. This finding is mainly due to dramatic declines among women (both in and out of the paid labor market), who have cut their housework hours almost in half since the 1960s.”

  By Folbre’s calculation, the proportion of unpaid domestic labor in relation to the overall economy has declined from 39 percent in 1965 to 25.7 percent in 2010. Because women are doing less and less, the difference between the amount of housework that men and women do continues to narrow. And not because women are so busy they can’t do the housework. Bianchi et al. reported that “the likelihood of doing housework was, if anything, declining fastest for those with the most time available for domestic work.”

  The psychological term for this process is disinvestment. Not that disinvestment helps anyone who lives in a house with others, anymore than tectonic shifts help the flower now growing in the alpine meadow. The trends in history leave us behind in our place, to struggle toward our own balance of expectation and gift on the terms of our own inheritance. Domestic arrangements exist to protect us from the trends anyway. Shelter is from change as much as from the elements.

  * * *

  Caring less is the hope of the future. Housework is perhaps the only political problem in which doing less and not caring are the solution, where apathy is the most progressive and sensible attitude. Fifty years ago it was perfectly normal to iron sheets and vacuum drapes; they w
ere necessary tasks. The solution to the inequalities of dusting wasn’t dividing the dusting; it was not doing the dusting at all. The solution to the gender divide in housework generally is that simple: Don’t bother. Leave the stairs untidy. Don’t fix the garden gate. Fail to repaint the stained ceiling. Never make the bed.

  Housework is both the symbol and the substance of the fate of men and women in their intimate lives. The political struggle is more or less beside the point. Educating men to be domestic has failed, and yet subterranean and economic forces are making equality more real every day. And as these waves of change crash against us, we see what crumbles and what sticks, what we really need and what is mostly an act, what we care about and what we pretend to care about, what belongs to us and what is only visiting, who we are and who we just thought we were.

  A clean house is the sign of a wasted life, truly. Eventually we’ll all be living in perfect egalitarian squalor.

  * * *

  I. Not everyone feels that way. Tidying up a house can be satisfying. Creating a warm home can be an act of love. Of course, chores are boring, but housework is like most work: the act of doing it isn’t so pleasurable; you do it for the results. A clean house is nice. It is relaxing. Being in a well-run, ordered environment feels good. Housework is something to be endured if you want that feeling badly enough. Steve usually doesn’t crave a clean house as much as he craves all the other things he’d rather do—like watch the baseball game, or write an essay, or read a story to our toddler. When I enter a messy space my gut desire to declutter it is utterly overwhelming. A friend of mine who lives nearby has a really messy house. She’s got a big career and a big brain and a big heart and she does a lot of good in the world. She doesn’t care that her house is messy. My reaction to her house is one of great conflict; I vaguely disapprove and quietly wonder how she can stand it, while at the same time I admire her ability not to care. I also know I shouldn’t care, but no matter how successful my generation of women are in the workforce we still judge each other’s domestic spaces. My mom is neat, and I confess that I sometimes see a room through her eyes, with the value she places on an ordered space. Will my daughter see space through mine? Do I want her to?

  II. Steve has the ability to do the most incredible thing: in the middle of domestic chaos he can block it all out and focus on something important to him. He can write a novel on his laptop while a singing toddler is building a giant Lego tower on the floor and two nine-year-old boys are jumping through the house with plastic swords and the dishes are piled up in the sink and dinner needs to be on the table in half an hour. All he sees is his work. He can do this with leisure time too: if he wants to watch a baseball game, he won’t notice that the garbage needs to be taken out and the contents of the kids’ backpacks are all over the floor and a piece of rotting fruit on the table is attracting fruit files. He will lock his eyes on the baseball game and everything else will fade away. Or maybe he never even noticed the other stuff in the first place? When I see him on the couch, working or relaxing, in a house with a floor that needs to be swept, beds that need to be made, and dying flowers in the vase that need to be tossed out, I feel two things: anger and envy. Anger because, holy shit, get off your ass and clean up, and envy because it’s actually pretty healthy to be able to focus on one thing instead of constantly puttering about doing triage on an endlessly demanding domestic space. It would be so nice to just plunk myself down and have that kind of focus, to be present in the moment. I honestly don’t know if there’s something wrong with me because I can’t do it or something wrong with him because he can.

  III. A brief list of domestic stuff that’s on my mind right now, swirling around:

  • The fridge leaks sometimes; replace or repair?

  • Our daughter is getting big for her toddler bed; I should go online and fine a proper twin bed that will fit in her little room.

  • The swim lesson sign-up date is soon.

  • Baseball team tryouts are on Tuesday; our son has to remember to pack his glove.

  • What healthy snacks will our son actually eat?

  • I need to pick up a gift certificate to the comic book store for my son’s friend’s birthday present.

  These all have to be done.

  IV. I disagree. The brief two-year period when our daughter was an infant and we had a full-time caregiver in our house was pretty terrific. The home was always tidy. We never fought about who was going to unload the dishwasher because our nanny did that. In fact our marriage works best when there are three of us: Steve with his job, me with mine, and a third person who is responsible for running the household, making the beds, doing the laundry, prepping dinner, and taking the kids places. Now that she’s gone, I feel like we’re scrambling. Always scrambling. I know enough rich people to know that money doesn’t solve every problem. But it does solve the problem of who is going to empty the dishwasher.

  V. I have silently, privately made a vow to myself that I will never fight with Steve about housework. I will never accuse him of forgetting to take out the garbage, or blame him for leaving his dirty lunch dishes in the sink, or ask him how it’s possible he never, ever manages to put his dirty socks directly into the laundry basket but tosses them on the floor near the laundry basket so that I have to pick them up. Why? (1) Such fights are so boring, so predictable, so familiar, and so utterly pointless I can’t bear to have them or hear myself initiate them. They go like this: My accusation (“How could you have left three dirty cups in the living room?”), his defensive response that usually involves an angry itemization of all the things he has done to benefit the family in the past day or so, my passive-aggressive silent treatment at the fact that he won’t just admit that maybe he should have picked up after himself, the lack of resolution, the sour air that lingers, the failure to improve the conditions of our marriage. (2) The fact that Steve is kind of right: he does do a million things each day for the sake of the family and does have a lot of credit in the bank and maybe it’s okay if he leaves his dirty coffee cups around the living room when he’s the one who picked our son up from school because I’m at work and he’s the one that is going to take the kids to the park after dinner to give me the only forty-five minutes of quiet I’ll get all day before the bath-story-bed routine and he’s the one that is going to stay up late working to earn money that we can put into the children’s education fund that he set up and keeps an eye on. Maybe it’s okay that I do a little more around the house because overall it kind of evens out. So now when I find that he has managed to leave three of his sweaters lying around the living room, I just pick them up, take them upstairs, fold them, and put them in a pile, and instead of getting mad, I think about the fact that Steve spends half an hour or more each evening helping our nine-year-old with his homework. I never help with homework. I’m better at picking up sweaters.

  VI. Most of my friends buy their kids factory-made Halloween costumes or used ones picked up at garage sales. My colleague, a well-paid professional woman, has a five-year-old daughter who this year wanted to be a Marvel comic book hero so obscure that the costume was not available at Walmart. A craft was required. My colleague is good at crafts but had no time to give the project the attention it needed, so she hired an art school student to make the costume with her daughter over a couple of weekends in October. This is a growing trend. You can hire people to teach your kid to ride a bicycle. In my neighborhood there’s a young woman who is regularly hired to coach kids on their third grade homework assignments—building bridges with popsicle sticks and that type of thing. Is it wrong to outsource these mother-type and father-type jobs if you can afford to? Not to me.

  EIGHT

  * * *

  Messy Hope

  SOMETIMES I wake up late and lie in bed listening to the voices of my wife and son and daughter on the ground floor.I The sound of the negotiation of breakfast and homework and schedule muffled and funneled by the particular timbre of the house is a beautiful, ordinary sound
, but I know that a vast historical struggle underlies its ordinariness, a centuries-long political struggle for the chance to have the problems of human beings: sex and ambition, school worries, squabbling, cooking meals, sweeping floors, the messiness of the mingled miracle and catastrophe of men and women together. The turmoil is so much more than political. The rearrangement of ideas, and even of economic reality, runs above the rearrangement of bodies: the new ones come; the new ones become the old ones; the old ones go.

  The split between power and intimacy defined gender for millennia: men in the realm of power, women in the realm of intimacy. My parents lived the great tumult of the 1960s and 1970s that brought power and intimacy together, but they lived it from the margins; my mother spent the Summer of Love at medical school, while my father was at Royal Military College, about as square as it comes. When they settled down, they settled in a classic suburban house in a prosperous midsize city, the kind with a two-car garage and a lawn that took me the better part of an afternoon to mow and that could have been decorated with a massive banner inscribed “We Are Normal.”

  Their quiet life was possible only after many revolutions. They were exactly the kind of apolitical people Carol Hanisch was describing in “The Personal Is Political.” They were far from the movements of their time, yet the facts of their lives—most notably my mother’s job as a doctor—amounted to novelty in the sphere of gender relations. It was not ideas that set them forward but the pursuit of personal fulfillment, and the pursuit of personal fulfillment has more radical consequences than ideas ever could.

  The divide between the worlds of power and intimacy, or between the worlds of work and family, broke down of its own accord. My father did paperwork while he watched my soccer games because he had no choice. My mother had her kids wandering the hospital or sleeping in the parking lot while she delivered babies because that was how it worked out. My father learned to cook (or sort of cook—I remember spaghetti and tomato sauce with peanuts added for protein) because my mother was on call. My mother had to be on call to pay the mortgage. Worlds collided out of the ambition of their lives and their need to ride the opportunities of the economic expansion of the postwar period.