Your Mom Rage Is Real
All The Rage: Mothers, Fathers, And The Myth Of Equal Partnership by Darcy Lockman
If you are a parent in a heteronormative relationship with at least one child, chances are you and your partner disagree on the division of labor in your home. Mothers, including working mothers, have historically done more domestic work than their husbands, though the current generation of fathers is more involved than ever. My husband is among the cohort of actively engaged fathers, doting on his daughter, playing with her, and taking her on adventures. Still, there are times I get annoyed.
One afternoon after arguing about who should watch our baby and who gets time to themselves, I stomped up the stairs, sulking. I plopped down in my desk chair and googled, “why do men suck so bad?”
My search turned up a valuable result: An opinion essay from writer Darcy Lockman called, “What ‘Good’ Dads Get Away With” discusses how to-be parents expect they will coparent equally, vs. the reality once baby is born. This led me to her 2019 book, All The Rage: Mothers, Fathers, And The Myth of Equal Partnership.
In All The Rage, Lockman writes, “Mothers spent four times as many hours on child care as fathers in 1965, and only twice as many hours in 2010. Cross-nationally, between 1965 and 2003, men’s portion of unpaid family work went from under 20 percent to almost 35 percent, where of course it has remained ever since.”
Unpaid Labor
Let’s define unpaid family work: it’s everything that goes into running a home and a family. It’s the laundry—sorting, washing, drying, folding, putting away; meals— menu planning, grocery shopping, chopping, slicing, or preparing, cooking, then cleaning up—washing dishes, loading the dishwasher, putting dishes away; keeping inventory—shampoo, snacks, laundry detergent; diapers—changing them, packing and restocking the diaper bag; activities—researching after school sports or other programs, signing up, chauffeuring kids to soccer field or pottery class; vacations—researching and booking, then packing for kids and husband; researching pre-school/day care; getting kids fed and on the bus or driven to school; buying clothes and shoes for growing kids and husbands, the list goes on and I’m out of breath.
These tasks, and many more, constitute a tremendous amount of labor and none of it is paid. In our culture, domestic work is a woman’s job. Not only are women underpaid in the workplace, we are not paid at all in the home. But if it’s a mother’s job, why isn’t she paid?
I’m not here to argue women get paid to raise their families. What a socialist crazy idea! Though several European nations that do in the form of subsidized day care, pre-school, generous parental leave, affordable healthcare, etc. which allows mothers to pursue careers and manage childcare with less competition for time. In the US, we don’t have those subsidies and not every family can afford full time daycare. It is a dilemma because we cannot expect half of our population to work full time, manage a household, and take care of children, while the other half enjoys his downtime. Lockman writes, “Unlike housework, which goes down for women as paid work hours go up, mothers maintain their child care time almost regardless of their employment obligations They accomplish this by cutting back on leisure time, personal care, and sleep.”
Thus, it’s up to parents to find an equitable way to address family needs, which might not always be “equal.” I keep track of my daughter’s clothes, shoes, seasonal items like swimsuits or coats, and when she needs new ones. Then I do the shopping and purchasing. My husband then washes and folds everything. Then it comes back to me to put everything away. We’ve never counted the hours each task takes, but we work in an equitable way to keep our kid dressed and clean. (Except when I don’t put the clothes away, which is almost never, and he becomes resentful of all his hard work wasted.)
Lockman writes, “The most recent time-use diary information collected by Pew Research and the Bureau of Labor Statistics consistently finds that women who work outside of the home shoulder 65% of childcare responsibilities, and their male partners 35%.” Not only is this not equal mathematically, but it’s not equitable because the study is predicated on fathers working outside of the home, too. My husband and I have never counted our hours of childcare, but we try our best to work in an equitable way to keep our household running. It’s when in-equitability cycles through, we become resentful.
Gender Roles For Parents
The current generation of fathers are more involved, but mothers still complain they don’t contribute enough to the home. If a couple is even loosely following traditional gender norms, not all of a mother’s labor is physical, rather much of the father’s is. Taking care of a family requires constant mental acuity, or what is called “emotional labor.” Scheduling doctors appointments and vaccines, writing shopping lists, signing permission slips, managing the whole family’s schedule, planning vacations, researching activities for kids outside the house, keeping inventory of dog food, and if there’s enough toilet paper in the house.
This mental, or emotional labor, is what drains many mothers because it is not shared labor. Even more infuriating, fathers are oblivious to the imbalance. The dog food and toilet paper magically appear, everyone gets their checkups and shots—what’s to notice? Everything is perfect. Also, fathers can be less reactive to children who are about to do something terribly dangerous or terribly messy because they are not in the same constant hyper-vigilance. When they take it upon themselves to “help” with some household chore, they ask their wives how to do it and then expect praise when it’s done—even if it’s not done well or correctly. We are supposed to be grateful.
An exception to the gender norms is same-sex couples with children. Because they are not dealing with a binary set of rules, these couples typically come to parenting with a more egalitarian approach. “‘…In the absence of sex differences telling us how to value various aspects of relationships, we can see how the division of labor might be explored in alternate ways.’”
In straight couples, fathers too often need repeated instruction. If a mother must instruct her partner in detail to, say, pack a diaper bag, she will often feel it’s easier to do it herself. Unfortunately this perpetuates the prophecy. Mothers equivocate, thinking at least he’s not as bad as so-and-so’s husband who doesn’t even take out the trash. Lockman, interviewing Shannon, a forty-two year old mother from Oklahoma City, writes, “My husband thinks he is supposed to bring home a check and do nothing else. He makes no bones about it. It’s not that bad. He doesn’t beat me. He doesn’t drink excessively…”
Lockman goes on to explain, “Given that there is always a nameless, faceless partner in the background whose laziness or inattentiveness is worse than your husband’s, women who appreciate their lives and their relationships feel reluctant to acknowledge their displeasure… Only when one feels more deprived than other members of her reference group will she feel entitled to adamant protest.”
Where Else Could You Get Away With This?
My husband and I share certain household duties. He does all the steps of laundry, including haranguing me to put my nicely folded clothes away, which, as you know, I ignore. I do (or intend to do) all the food shopping and cooking—or ordering. He cleans up the kitchen after dinner, puts the dishes in the dishwasher, hand washes pots and pans, wipes down the counters. Every morning I come down to a spotless kitchen to make our toddler’s breakfast. Like many other dads, he also takes full responsibility of the garbage and carrying heavy things I don’t want to wrestle with. He breaks down boxes, cleans the garage, and puts gas in my car. He is the breadwinner, bringing money in one door as I walk it out the other paying for grad school tuition.
My husband is a reservist naval officer. He went to the Naval Academy and served as an active duty officer for six years in Surface Warfare Operations (SWO). He has captured pirates and learned how to command cruisers (ships). Now, he is a director at Microsoft where he takes initiative, manages an entire team, pulls resources out of thin air. He gets shit done and he provides.
Until I read Rage, dinner time used to go like this:
Me: Dinner’s ready!
Me: Did you hear me?
Him: I’m in the bathroom!
Me: Can you set the table?
Him: Yeah. Typing on iPhone as he walks into kitchen and sits at the table.
Me: Can you get the highchair?
Him: Yeah, just a second.
Me: Can you please get the baby’s water cup and spoon?
Him: Complies.
US: Sit at table.
Me: Where are the napkins?
Him: Oh, I forgot.
Me: Gets up for napkins, exhausted from a long day on my feet.
Me: Sit back down.
Me: Oh my god, where are the knives?
Him: I didn’t think we needed them.
Me: Face palm, get up for the knife apparently only I need. Panting from all the ups and downs.
Me: Return to table, he has finished his dinner.
Baby: Squawking, throws noodle on dog, laughs.
Me: Takes first bite.
Him: Gets up to do the dishes.
Reading this book, I realized coparenting and cohabitating are two separate objectives. I talked it out with him and explained why I get so frustrated, even though he contributes in so many ways. I let him know that as a cohabitator, he’s excellent, perfect. I love that he’s my life partner and we get to share our lives. He’s a loving, engaged and interested father. In 22-months, he never missed a pediatrician appointment.
But as a coparent, we needed refinement. Using the dinner example, I asked him, “If you needed to be told the same instructions at work all day, every day, as if you’d never done them before, do you think you’d have the job you have now?” I saw the light bulb above his head flicker. “You’re right,” he said. So why are they like this at home if they aren’t at work?
Biological Myths
There’s a few reasons, and they are all the fault of our American culture.
First, we raise girls and boys differently starting in infancy. This goes without much explanation. Girls are groomed to be caretakers, with easy bake ovens, toy vacuum cleaners, dolls. We teach them to share their emotions and communicate. Boys are raised to be rough and tumble, to ram toy cars into walls and play war-themed video games. We do not teach boys effective coping skills, rather to eschew anything “girly,” like sharing feelings. Thus, they enter adulthood with profound anger and loneliness. In the US in 2022, the percentage of suicides by men was 80%. Though we have certain expectations of men, most notably that they are providers, masculinity is not clearly defined in our culture compared to femininity, which is why men prone to violence are are more likely to join extremist groups, like Incels.
Second, our culture believes in biological myths, like mothers make the best caregivers with their maternal instinct that men don’t possess. Lockman busts this myth writing, “Colloquially, we speak of maternal instinct, the presumably inborn, hardwired, and natural driver of the wisdom and devotion we ascribe to female parents alone. Biologists don’t use the term because it’s technically incorrect. By definition, an instinct is a behavior that does not have to be learned, shows almost no variation between members of its species and manifests in a rigid sequence of behaviors performed in response to a stimulus… [A]lmost every aspect of primate behavior is mediated by a larger and more developed brain.”
If you have given birth in the US, you probably had a birthing class, doula, midwife, or some other non-medical prenatal support. You were taught what to expect, how and when to react, like going to the hospital, or whether or not you want pain mediation. None of this is instinctual, rather our neocortex facilitates learning.
“In hunter-gatherer society of the !Kung San in Southern Africa, a woman gives birth alone, delivering the child into a small leaf-lined hole that she’s dug in the sand… In a Tanzanian tribe of hunter-gatherers called the Hadza, women give birth in huts, attended by their mothers and grandmothers.” These birthing traditions are radically different from Western ones. If mothering were instinctual, all women everywhere would know exactly what to do to give birth, and raise children without instruction.
Moreover, children of same-sex male couples do not wither away without a “maternal instinct” in the home, rather they grow up just like kids raised by straight parents. In 1970, a psychologist named Milton Kotelchuck said, “‘It did not seem reasonable that in a world where mothers often die in childbirth that we’d have a species where children can’t adapt to other people.”
Yet these fallacies persist through generations as if they are gospel. I suspect that by continuing to accept these impractical biological explanations, our culture tacitly agrees with the patriarchal status quo.
Entitlement
Fathers could take more initiative—especially when they see their partners drained, exhausted. Instead, they say things like, “Looks like you got this,” and walk away, they could step in without asking what to do or how to do it.
Darcy Lockman found a root of this discrepancy lies in the fact that men feel more entitled to and protective of their leisure time. Women, particularly working mothers (or students, like myself) don’t feel entitled to leisure time, though they need it. There is no impetus to change this imbalance because it would not be in men’s interest to do so. Lockman quotes a psychology experiment conducted by Tulane and University of California, Santa Barbara. The results indicated, “‘Elevated feelings of entitlement may… blind men to seeing when they are over benefited, allow them to justify their privileged position… In contrast, a depressed sense of entitlement among women may prevent them from seeing when they are targets of discrimination… In this way, gender differences in feelings of personal entitlement may serve to perpetuate and maintain gender inequality.’”
The question, of course, is, how do we fix it? Lockman calculates that it will be another 75 years before parity in relationships becomes a reality. It might be beneficial to change the conversations you’re having with your partner. Lockman doesn’t necessarily give an explicit “how-to” for readers, but in each chapter brings up different topics that might be specifically relatable to your relationship. Perhaps, your partner believes that he can’t do what you do because he doesn’t have a maternal instinct. Maybe you talk about that and not about how he’s oblivious, lazy or entitled (even if he is.)
My husband and I discussed the difference between co-living and co-parenting and that made a huge difference in how we communicate and operate in the home.
Lockman also suggests that part of the problem is that women do not feel empowered to ask for more from male partners, but this thinking prevents any opportunity for a father to improve coparenting skills. Instead it breeds further resentment among fathers who feel unappreciated for all that they actually do.
Men don’t need more privilege than they have, but they do need better emotional skills. Instilling confidence in men to be competent caretakers and fathers in addition to providers (yes, I know more emotional labor to explain to your partner how to do everything…) would prevent the complacent deference to mothers in the long term. Would this create an epidemic of kids going to school with mismatching shoes? Sure, but as long as they go to school with shoes, refinement can come later.
What If I Died?
I explained to my husband he is a great father, great man to live with, but then asked, “What if I DIED?” He should know exactly what to do in every situation, even though he isn’t responsible for every situation every day. I suspect that most men want to feel they are contributing, which feeds into their masculine ideal of providing. Most men I know strive to protect their families and would brag about excelling at fatherhood—and not in the half-assed way they currently think they are excelling. So what if all the mothers disappeared? Would they know what to do?
I suspect that they would figure it out.
This spoke to my husband and as a result, took on most of the responsibility for our daughter on the weekends so that I can write. We don’t argue about who gets time to themselves anymore because we both understand and agree that there is no time off from parenting. Instead, I take the lion share of childcare during the week, he does it on the weekends. If one day I wake up with a migraine, he will skip his morning workout and make our daughter’s breakfast. If he’s had an especially chaotic work day, I might cook dinner and clean up.
But, we don’t not deserve rest just because we are parents. I have a babysitter a few weekday afternoons, and on Sundays so my husband can watch NFL games, and I can work or take a breather myself. This is not equal, it is equitable, but it saves at least one argument a week about who is more deserving of time. Since he works full time and parents, and I parent full time and study, we both get what we need—as much a any coparenting couple can with a two-year-old.
