Full Times: When You’re Tired But Can’t Blame the Patriarchy
At the end of May, my partner quit her day job. Her pivot from program manager for a college to full-time therapist has been years long, so slow that, at times, it has felt like a flat line. You can’t see the curve of the earth when you are walking along it. The pivot years contained health problems, adoption problems, behavioral-health-bureaucracy problems, and a pandemic. They also contained our two children, who are glorious, but of course come with 99 problems.
We agreed we wanted to speed up the transition, so a year ago, she took on a demanding internship at a local clinic while continuing to work full-time at the college. Being a therapy intern is exactly like being a full-time therapist, except that you are working under someone else’s license and get paid much, much less.
For a year, her jobs were: the college, the internship, helping her overworked sister help their ailing mother, doing a sizable chunk of the housework, maintaining the yard, helping Dash (our nine-year-old) with his homework, and managing his extracurricular activities.
For a year, my jobs were: my nonprofit job, my unpaid literary jobs, cooking, cleaning the bathrooms, picking up all the household detritus, and putting in the longest parenting shifts of my life.
C.C. loves to garden, but toward the end of the year, our yard turned feral. Flowers died and weeds grew. I don’t know the names of plants. I watched as wheaty-looking things sprouted in the grass and in front of our sidewalk. One night a local crew spray-painted their tag on the tree in front of our house, adding to the semi-abandoned vibe.
I love to write, but the novel I’d drafted just before our youngest was born went into hibernation. I imagined a bulb deep in the soil, its green tendrils tight as fists. Waiting.
If our salaries had been higher, we would have paid someone to clean and mow and weed. If they had been lower, it wouldn’t have made sense to pay for childcare at all, and one of us would have quit one of our jobs sooner.
Meanwhile, the anxiety I’ve been wrestling since Joey was born—or maybe since I was born—gained a stronghold, like the morning glories that tighten around our trees. It is a deep-rooted thing, and a year of long parenting shifts is not entirely to blame. But spending 15 hours alone with a toddler is like looking at a word too long; you start to wonder if it’s misspelled. You start to wonder if you even know how to read. I studied his own words and wondered if there were not enough of them. I studied his gait and his lymph nodes and his toenails and wondered if they should be different.
I wanted C.C. to become a therapist. She was good at it. I knew she loved me and our kids, and was stretched to the max. I knew we had created this life together. I often felt like a stronger person than me would be able to rise to the challenge. At the same time, it felt impossible, and I resented her every time she slept in on a weekend morning, or had to miss a family event to see a patient.
She resented me for resenting her. Did I really think she wanted to work two jobs? Did I understand what it was like to navigate her mom’s psychiatric care and Medicare while watching her slip deeper into dementia? (I didn’t.)
I have read and heard so many versions of this story. Often, they go something like Becca Rose Hall’s beautifully written essay. Hall observes, “something is wrong in the daily workings of so many heterosexual relationships.”
My straight friends talk a lot about invisible labor, caregiving labor, the way that even the most helpful, enlightened men wait for their wives to tell them to empty the trash, feed the baby, listen harder when the middle schooler talks about their day.
C.C. and I are a kind of control group. Neither of us carried a baby or breastfed. For most of our relationship, we made roughly equal amounts of money. We were both socialized to take care of people, though we heed this call in different ways. When Dash was a baby, even our queer friends would sometimes ask, in roundabout ways: Which one of you is the mom? Which one of you is the dad? But while I’m perhaps more likely to wear mascara than C.C., we split wakeups and play times and daycare drop-offs and pickups and credit card bills 50-50. It wasn’t easy. But it was straightforward.
When C.C. started her internship last year, I became the “default parent.” I worked, but I could write a grant proposal or email at midnight if I needed to, and C.C. could only see patients at set times.
When Joey partially dislocated his elbow, I shuttled both kids to the emergency department while C.C. conducted her evening sessions.
Oh shit, I just saw this! she texted in response to my string of updates, which spanned two hours. (I think Joey hurt his arm when Dash and I were swinging him. He’s not freaking out, so I don’t think it’s broken, but we’re going to urgent care…. Urgent care is closed, at the ER now…. They’re going to do an X-ray…. Weird, apparently the X-ray popped his elbow back into place, because he’s totally fine now. But can you come get Dash?)
She raced to the hospital.
My resentful thoughts seemed oddly gendered. Must be nice, being so important, I thought sometimes, as I slapped together grilled cheese sandwiches. The kids noticed, too. Dash, who remembered the old ways, missed C.C. when she was gone. But when she was home, even if she was in the living room with him, Dash would wait until I arrived to ask for snacks or water.
“I am sure that Mama would be happy to get you water too,” I said to him, but also to her. She bristled at my passive aggression.
Our eleven-year-old neighbor said matter-of-factly, “Dash is C.C.’s favorite and Joey is Cheryl’s favorite.”
My heart broke. What if Dash saw my harried distraction as abandonment?
Having a hard schedule for a year isn’t the same as lugging around the weight of patriarchy for a lifetime; maybe I should check my gay privilege here. C.C. never made the assumptions about who-should-do-what that some men make. But somehow that didn’t stop me from feeling like an unsung housewife.
Maybe I can blame the patriarchy after all, a little.
But the struggle to divide labor when there is too much labor is not just a gendered one. The core question is: How do we create equity when people have different tools and needs? This is, of course, the same problem that plagues our educational and economic systems. In education, we fund things and redesign things and pass laws and create IEPs. In economics, we declare that corporations are the most special people of all, and we tell ourselves that the poor are fucked for reasons of their own design.
So yes, this is capitalism’s fault. But—I’m whispering now—maybe it’s not entirely capitalism’s fault? Hunter-gatherers are my Roman Empire, which is to say that I think about them often, wondering what humans were like in our “natural” state. I’m too postmodern to truly believe in such things—“natural” vs. “unnatural”—but I wonder how workdays unfolded before the baggage of capitalism and its equally unsavory predecessors (colonialism, feudalism). These structures are useful to think about, and tempting to idealize: bands of humans clad in natural fibers, raising kids in intergenerational packs, eating Paleo. I imagine mothers laughing and gossiping and singing together—my group chat in my living room, my living room in an open field.
But while that sun-dappled picture might be true, it’s also just a snapshot. Hunter-gatherers spent a lot of time…hunting and gathering. Their hands grew raw and calloused. Some winters were long and cold. Most were dead by the age when C.C. and I were adopting our youngest.
I want to call myself cautiously optimistic about this new work-life “balance,” now that we have only two jobs plus parenting between us, but that phrase does not accurately describe my frayed nervous system. We probably have not seen our last long winter. Maybe we will have a nice summer, though.
Last weekend I set up a treasure hunt for Dash and the girls next door. I bought trinkets from the toy aisle at the grocery store and hid clues in the weeds, in the sand of Joey’s activity table, under the sports equipment strewn about the yard. In its neglected state, our yard offered ample hiding places.
The kids hunted, and gathered, and complained about their treasures. It was work, it was play.
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