Guest Blog: Emotional Labor
BY: AMY
I hit pause on Glennon Doyle’s podcast We Can Do Hard Things. Glennon and her sister Amanda were talking about the cost of the uneven load of emotional labor in their home. A light went off in my head (I was cleaning the floor as I listened – no time for single-duty). Amanda stated that, because of the emotional labor her husband did not do, he had more room for fun. When he was not worried about dishes or summer camp classes or buying airline tickets to visit in-laws before the prices surged, he was relaxing. He was reading articles that he was interested in, for pleasure. Laughing, perhaps with a friend, as his brain did not tick through the 150 things to do to get their kids ready for the weekend full of sleepovers, swimming lessons, homework. Maybe he had the space to tackle a new hobby like juggling or word-searching. Perhaps he never felt the tug I feel to choose a hobby that will benefit my family. Why take up sewing – which could help one make and repair clothes – when restoring a car is much more fun. Why bother gardening and growing your own food when glass blowing is exciting and novel. Who needs to worry about learning calligraphy so you can save a thousand dollars on your wedding invitations by doing them all yourself by hand? Me. I worried about that. I worry about that still, today, 5 years after my marriage. And as I sat there mopping a stain that would not come off, crying quietly over the stress of procuring and managing healthcare for an ill family member and full-time care for a toddler, I heard Glennon and Amanda speaking and I was filled with rage.
The fun part had never occurred to me. In my many conversations with my brother, my husband, and any other man willing to listen to me lecture them about emotional labor, fun had not come up. “Our parents have two children, so it’s really not fair for me to do 100% of the coordination of their care” or “our son has two parents, so why am I the only one who has researched SIDS prevention?” were more likely to come out of my mouth than “I just don’t have enough time for karaoke”. But now the connection seemed so obvious it was laughable. Here I was doing three unfun things all at once – crying, mopping, and listening to a podcast about other women crying and mopping. And who had asked me to do any of those things? Had a teacher assigned me the mopping? Or the podcast? No one had, of course, and yet here I was, diligently doing my homework that I had at once created and resented. The inertia of life and gendered expectations meant these chores just rolled into my lap. Of course it was true that if I did not mop the mopping would not get done. There is a list a mile long of things around the house my husband has not only never done, it has never occurred to him *to* do. Of course he would do them if I asked, but it’s the tracking and the asking that is the labor. So we are left with a difficult choice, a delicate dance. A stand-off can build, where neither side mops and only one side notices. Sure I haven’t cleaned the inside of the trash-can in two months, but I have noticed that it isn’t getting cleaned and that in and of itself adds to my stress. And once it turns to a science experiment you wonder – would he ever notice? If I died tomorrow, would that trash can ever get scrubbed down on the inside? I knew I had options. I could wait until my husband came downstairs after a long taxing day of working remotely and I could cry to him about this subject, again. He could promise to do more, to take on ticker tapes that I had managed alone. And yet, that hadn’t worked before. Why would it work now?
And more than that, this podcast where they spoke of fun made me want fun. Maybe not over-the-top out-of-control gut-busting fun. But fun that was only and exactly for me. So I did something radical. I hit pause on the podcast, texted the link to my husband and brother, and put my feet up on the couch. I read an entire book that night, for fun. It was not a particularly good book, and it was delightful. I never listened to the end of the podcast, though I appreciate Glennon and Amanda Doyle for the emotional labor that went into them creating the podcast and hope that my brother and my husband learned something upon listening.
The bigger step, though, is cultural. And this is where I worry as a parent of a young boy. Both my brother and my husband are kind, diligent, hard-working feminist men who believe in sharing the load equally. I think sometimes they even believe we are sharing the load equally, until I spell out for them all the trash cans I have been cleaning the inside of for months, for years, for decades, without them noticing. So how do we, as a culture, move out of this space? How do I, as a parent, teach my young boy responsibilities that his Dad never carried? Do I teach him to worry more and have fun less? How? I see the temptation to let him lean into the fun of life, the carefree privilege of a male body. He is young enough that I know nothing of his gender or sexual identity, and know that he may in fact carry more burden and less privilege than he appears to. But there are cis-gendered boys right now being raised by mothers and mothers or mothers and fathers or single mothers or fathers and fathers. And we want them to move beyond what they see and reach for what women in our generation can only imagine – a world where fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters take turns worrying and having fun. Where when one wife pauses the podcast and stops mopping, her husband will come downstairs and notice all on his own. Maybe he will pick up the mop. Maybe he will have things to clean that his wife and his sister are not aware of. Maybe his son will notice.
AMY CLICK is a comedian and social worker living and working in the Bay Area.
