Beware the Home Manager

Ian and I have always worked as an equal partnership when it comes to raising our son, cooking and cleaning, chores around the house, etc. (At least that’s the idea.) It was something we even verbally agreed on when we decided that we would have children. So when one of us cooks, the other does the dishes. Ian chops the wood and mows the lawn, and I manage the finances, the website and the admin work for our little shared business. I change Bode’s nappies all day when Ian works, so he changes more of them on his days off. We both do the shopping. And so on.

We have a reciprocal arrangement, and it works for us. One reason is that we have in common similar, quirky aspects of personality, such as our shared abhorrence of waste and our mutual delight in finding ways to be more efficient with our time, money and energy (bordering on obsessive compulsive here).
For example, hardly any food gets thrown away in our house. Meals are planned around what vegetables are in the fridge and how long they have been there. When I walk down the hallway I’ve got papers for the office in one hand, a laundry basket in the other and on my way back I’ll grab something from the freezer for dinner. We each have a unique style of running the home when one of us looks after Bode for the day. We tend to agree on most things.

Of course part and parcel of our neat little system is the corresponding tension that results when someone doesn’t pull their weight. If the person doing the dishes leaves the stove a mess, the other person scowls. If one of us is putting Bode to sleep and the other fails to get dinner started, it’s cranky time. If someone’s hanging out the laundry while someone else reads the paper, eyebrows are raised. Let’s not even talk about the toilet paper roll.

Perhaps atypically, Ian and I tend to share the offender and offendee roles fairly evenly, and neither of us misses a chance to drop a sarcastic hint or a slip a sly comment when a transgression has occurred. Recently however, I have been pointing out Ian’s oversights more often than usual. It only came to my attention yesterday when I commented on something that wasn’t quite up to scratch and his face distorted into this cartoonish mocking of me while he bleated “Nag, nag, nag!” I stopped short, we both stared at each other then burst out laughing.

It suddenly hit me how much I had been niggling him for little things that didn’t quite fit the “system” that I have developed in my role as the primary manager of our home. And the more I thought about it, the more I realised that in the absence of structured, daily work for me in the outside world, my home is where I have exercised my organisational skills and cultivated ever-increasing efficiencies for how things are run. I have systems for everything because it makes my life less chaotic and therefore more fun. It means that when Bode sleeps I can spend quality time meeting my own needs rather than running ragged doing house chores all day and into the night.

So join me in broadcasting the message to all those unsuspecting, hard-working fathers out there: Beware the achievement-starved, overqualified manager of your home (I know hundreds of you out there). When you step onto her turf you better learn the system and toe the line… or else! 