The mental flood
It was a Thursday afternoon and I was filling the sink to do the washing up.
My mind was racing with thoughts of school lunches, dinner ingredients, work, a dirty sports uniform lying at the bottom of the washing pile on the eve of sports day, reading homework, the location of a drink bottle lid, the collection of mismatched bits from my kids’ plastic toys which I was hesitant to throw out because I knew they would definitely drift out to sea and choke the last surviving polar bear. I had terrible hayfever and a blocked ear, which I hoped would resolve themselves because there just wasn’t a spare half hour for a doctor’s appointment. Everything was bubbling up in my throat like a tepid cappuccino from 7-Eleven.
Joel was in the garage making our daughters a basketball ring, and he asked me to come and have a look. As I opened the door, I heard our eldest daughter squeal and saw her running towards the road to chase a ball. I ran after her, collected the ball from the street, and thought to myself: “chill mate, just take a breath, play with your kid, everything else can wait.”
After about 15 minutes, I went back inside to find the tap still running, our kitchen and living room flooded, our bamboo floorboards already curling up like potato chips. The dirty dishes were still there, just waiting for me.
The builder who came to inspect the damage told us it happens all the time. People always leave taps on, he said, in fact he’d just had a job where someone’s cat had nudged a tap and flooded their house. It was nice to be on the same level as a cat, I guess.
Joel handled the conversations with our insurance company and I yelled at him every time he updated me with their growing estimates of the damage. “Twenty grand, they reckon!” “SHUT UP.” To add to the shame and guilt, we live in a regional area affected by the worst drought in living memory. All those lectures I’d given about shallow baths and the scarcity of water were being thrown back in my face by a grinning buck-toothed toddler. My eldest daughter told her class about the flood. “Our house was filled with water and mum cried and said we had to play outside for a while”. She imitated her teacher’s reaction: a sharp intake of breath through gritted teeth. Yeah, she knows what’s up.
In 1971, Judy Brady wrote an essay called “I Want a Wife”. I read it the first time when I was about 18, and felt grateful I did not live in the 70s. I read it again about a year after having a child, and, burning with rage, I slammed my book of collected women’s writing shut.
I want a wife who takes care of the children when they are sick, a wife who arranges to be around when the children need special care... My wife must arrange to lose time at work and not lose the job. It may mean a small cut in my wife’s income from time to time, but I guess I can tolerate that. Needless to say, my wife will arrange and pay for the care of the children while my wife is working.
I need to add here: I am married to a man who cooks and cleans and cares for our children and listens to me and encourages me and rearranges his work to let me do mine and comes up with outrageous schemes to help me achieve things and loves me and sometimes makes oozy chocolate puddings on a whim. But we have arranged our domestic lives around a few facts: I was told by a doctor that if I wanted children, I had to have them before 30. When I had a baby at 27, I did not have an established career or bank balance. I was the one who had the boobfeeding boobs and I was earning less, so it made sense that I was the one who took leave and then returned to work part-time. We lived in a city where it did not make financial sense for me to go back to work full-time and pay for five days of child care. Then we moved to the country, and Joel works several days a week in a different city, so I am the Commander In Chief of the Household. I guess I could pay someone to do my cooking and cleaning, and full-time childcare, but then I would likely be paying another woman a measly — but completely legal — wage to do so, because “women’s work” is not exactly held in high esteem.
Despite my unique circumstances, and delightful husband, I am not alone in navigating the overwhelming amount of expectations and menial tasks assigned to women. As Annabel Crabb points out in her book The Wife Drought, using ABS figures, 76 per cent of women will change their working lives after the birth of a child compared to one in three fathers. On average, women do more housework than men, and after the birth of the first child, it goes up considerably while men’s housework is stable. Crabb talks about how we’ve been so busy encouraging women to “lean in” we’ve forgotten men might also like to “lean out”, and that those men might be the leaders of societal change for everyone’s work and home lives.
But for now, it is July 2019 — 47 years and six months since the “I Want a Wife” essay was published in New York magazine. I know I am not the only woman who could read it and flood her kitchen and living room with her tears.
