Be Glad Your Housespouse Isn’t Union

Note: This arti­cle is a “refur­bished res­cue” from the Ground­ed Par­ents blog I used to write for. They had to aban­don their old site (and many of their old arti­cles) when they moved for­ward after a “you used my image” scam, but I found it in the way­back machine, and con­sid­er­ing that I just tried to fig­ure out how to charge my clients for a 21 hour shift in which I was asleep next to a two-year-old for eight of them, I thought that with a lit­tle dust­ing, a rewrite, and a fresh coat of paint, it was just as rel­e­vant today.

[At the time this was writ­ten, I was one side-point of a “V” rela­tion­ship with a mar­ried cou­ple, and I was the domes­tic of the fam­i­ly. These days I still watch the same kid (plus one more) in the nan­ny sit­u­a­tion I’m always talk­ing about, but I don’t live in the house. All names have been changed.]

I’ve tak­en on 20 hours a week of being the stay-at-home care­giv­er to Tom on top of most of my house­keep­ing duties, and let me tell you, it has com­plete­ly changed every­thing.

I real­ly like my morn­ings with Tom. Even when he’s being utter­ly incon­solable, fill­ing dia­pers so quick­ly I’m not sure how he doesn’t look like a squeezed tooth­paste tube, or when he’s just sleep­ing the whole time like a limp rag. It’s just us. He’s cute and sweet and I have been mind-con­trolled by his eye-to-face ratio, large head, and tiny chin. 

How­ev­er, I also know part of the rea­son I love our time so much is that it ends after five hours. When the timer dings, I get to hand him back, trun­dle upstairs to do some writ­ing, take a nap, or just save a galaxy far, far away from those Sith jerk­faces.

I’m the house­hus­band in this arrange­ment. The par­ents of Tom have jobs out­side the home, and we keep track of the hours I’m putting in because until a three-way mar­riage is legal, I lack some of the ben­e­fits like health insur­ance or a retire­ment plan that I would be co-build­ing even if I were the stereo­type-shat­ter­ing house­hus­band in a het­ero­nor­ma­tive mar­riage. From the moment Renee dis­cov­ered she was preg­nant, we knew that the kid was going to have some pret­ty pro­found effects on the del­i­cate equi­lib­ri­um we’d estab­lished where I do a few hours a day of house­work and they brought home the bacon. 

Long before we’d grown com­fort­able with this equilibrium—for years—we tracked hours, totaled up gro­cery shop­ping receipts, watched the incom­ing and the out­go­ing care­ful­ly. And it just kept com­ing up pret­ty even. We would pass the same $20 bill back and forth week after week and month after month, and final­ly just decid­ed to call our­selves “fam­i­ly,” and stop wor­ry­ing about it.

But then along came 20 hours of babysit­ting into the mix.

That balance….that equi­lib­ri­um where my con­tri­bu­tions to the house­hold basi­cal­ly equalled my room and board (and some incidentals)…was about to be com­plete­ly fucked. We all kind of knew we should at least have a rough sense of how many hours I was going over the tip­ping point.

I’d been the hous­espouse for my fam­i­ly for nine years. I’d felt all the clichés of under appre­ci­a­tion for the work I do. William and Renee won­dered why it took me so long to clean up, and I’d been in their face that fairies don’t flit into the liv­ing room to tidy up their aban­doned dish­es and dis­card­ed socks.

I told them I was going to be like any oth­er employee—I would want more mon­ey if I went over 40 hours. So they told me to stop at 40.

There’s a rea­son the unap­pre­ci­at­ed house­wife is a sol­id cliché of TV and movies.

And yet.

AND YET!

And yet….

I still had no fuck­ing CLUE how fast 40 hours would blow past with a Doppler effect sound once kids were in the mix. Some weeks we hit it by ear­ly evening on Wednes­day. Almost every week, I would stop doing house­keep­ing by Thurs­day or soon­er, just so I’d have a cou­ple of “banked” hours left over in case Renee and William need­ed some emer­gency kid watch. Dish­es have sat in the sink for days because I hit my lim­it. Week after week.

The kick­er is, I don’t “offi­cial­ly” watch Tom all that much. Five hours a day for four days a week while Renee works out­side the home is all that’s cer­tain. I get tapped to help out in the case of a social engage­ment or just an “hour of soli­tude,” but I get to give him back. I don’t have mid­night feed­ings or dawn chang­ing or col­icky nights. I don’t put the baby down for a nap and then rush to try to clean all the things before he wakes up. I’m not con­stant­ly try­ing to bal­ance his need for atten­tion with how bad­ly the dish­es need doing, toss­ing him into a bounc­er and pray­ing that he’ll stay dis­tract­ed for long enough to put on a load of laun­dry and pick up the liv­ing room enough to run the vac­u­um. 

But there have been a cou­ple of weird weeks. Some­thing went wrong. Their jobs out­side the house were par­tic­u­lar­ly hard. I had to tag in a lit­tle hard­er. And I did some math and fig­ured out that a full-time stay-at-home par­ent who also cooked and cleaned would be cruis­ing up around 100+ hours a week. Eas­i­ly more. Four­teen or fif­teen hours a day. Sev­en days a week. And that’s not even count­ing that nights are more “on call” than they real­ly are “off.”

The claims that “moth­er­hood is a noble (even ‘sacred’) call­ing” are oft repeat­ed despite all evi­dence to the con­trary. Devalu­ing jobs tra­di­tion­al­ly held by women isn’t any­thing new in our soci­ety, but even among folks who would clutch their pearls and whip out their smelling salts at the accu­sa­tion of sex­ism, there is still a sense that a family’s bread­win­ner is doing the “real” work. It is a sober­ing expe­ri­ence to real­ize just how much devalu­ing has gone on when it comes to child rear­ing and domes­tic work. While most fam­i­lies find a way to divide the labor with­out ever feel­ing the need to track hours, because of my family’s quirky cir­cum­stance, I hap­pened to sit down and crunch some num­bers.

And those num­bers are shock­ing.

What I dis­cov­ered is so stark­ly imbal­anced that the absur­di­ty of “tra­di­tion­al” roles is breath­tak­ing. A tra­di­tion­al father putting his feet up and refus­ing to pitch in with child­care or clean­ing because he “worked all day” should prob­a­bly be aware, accord­ing to US labor laws, his wife should be get­ting about 60 hours of over­time. 

Per week.

At least.

That means that even mak­ing the fed­er­al min­i­mum wage for this “sacred” call­ing, a hous­espouse (work­ing a mere 100 hours) would be earn­ing about $1050. (That’s over­time for hours over 40 and “gold­en time” for sev­enth-day pay.) And if they made the actu­al going rate for a housekeeper/nanny, got paid for the hours they were on call, and were paid more accu­rate­ly for the hours in which they were expect­ed to per­form duties, they would be mak­ing clos­er to $2000 or more.

Per. Week.

That’s a six-fig­ure salary even at a deval­ued wage. Think about what would hap­pen if there was a domes­tic labor union instead of just this cul­tur­al sense that hous­espous­ing is the easy job. Which is why it’s just a METRIC CARGO CARRIER of bull­shit to be say­ing, “I do the ‘real’ work” just because we live in a soci­ety that refus­es to acknowl­edge unpaid labor as actu­al work. 

Take home?  While a mod­ern fam­i­ly is more like­ly to flip gen­der roles, share respon­si­bil­i­ties, and approach equi­ty, it might still be worth look­ing at the clock…just to check. 

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