I shouldn’t be telling you this. We have a routine around here. My friend M calls it “pink jobs” and “blue jobs”. We have our respective colour-coded jobs and it works really well for us. Pink jobs around our home include grocery shopping, laundry, cleaning bathrooms, meal preparations, and just generally taking care of the housekeeping. Blue jobs include lawn-mowing, home renovations, car-washing, taking out the garbage, and all of those manly chores. AND loading up the dishwasher and turning it on after dinner. Really, I feel ridiculous even bringing this up. I know that there are women out there that would throw a parade if their husbands did a quarter of the things my guy does around here. I should just stop... but yet... I can’t.
So anyways, Tuesday nights are ball nights for David, so after dinner he plays with the kids for a bit, then heads for the ball field. He tends to not do dishes on Tuesdays. Now that I see it in print, I can clearly see that in itself is not a big deal. He’s had a long day at work, he gets a short time to play with the kids, and then he is off. And, at the time, it doesn’t bother me. Now, you may ask yourself why I don’t go ahead and load up the dishwasher myself on these evenings. I’ll tell you why. It’s a blue job. Blue. The problem doesn’t start until I wake up Wednesday morning. To that big stack of congealed dishes in the sink. The stack of dishes that have overnight hardened and crusted over and now will take a sandblaster to scrub clean. And I haven’t even made coffee yet—and I’ve TOLD you how difficult I find that task in the morning! So now, Wednesday morning, I start my day slamming dishes around, trying to make room in the sink so I can rinse out the coffee pot and in my mind I am grumbling, “BLUE job, BLUE job, BLUE job...” You get the picture. Not the most positive way to start the day.
At this point you would probably expect that I would do the dishes. Oh no, dear reader, please don’t give me so much credit. That would be the rational, un-pregnant thing to do. Has the dish job miraculously taken on a new colour? No, that job is still blue. So instead of just doing the dishes, I start stressing out on the extra work I have to do. Not only do I have to do my regular chores--now I have to do BLUE jobs because somebody around here is clearly NOT PULLING HIS WEIGHT!!! Because today is the day that I clean the bathrooms, but I am paralyzed by the stack of dishes in the kitchen. I cannot move forward to do the other jobs, but I am resolute to not touch the dishes. I cannot clean the bathrooms because the kitchen is a mess. Are you beginning to see where my daughter has inherited her insanity from? So by the time David comes home I’ve worked myself into such a state that I can no longer make dinner (how could I make dinner with that mess in the kitchen?!). And I am crying. And the children are wondering why Mommy is crying. I've got to stop telling them it's because I'm pregnant or I'll never be a grandmother. They will think pregnancy is this horrible affliction that is visited upon you and DESTROYS YOUR LIFE.
The thing I really like about David is that when I have a nervous breakdown, he does the dishes. And then he laughs when I read my blog to him out loud. And says, “I hope you feel better now that you wrote that down.” And I do. I really do.
Personally, I think "pink" and "blue" jobs is a little old school. Potentially any job belongs to both. A gentle comment about what needs to be done works best. Just don't expect it to be done immediately. We're all human, and I'm running as fast as I can.
ReplyDeleteNow, I'm going to have to disagree about the gentle comment part. If I always have to ask to get stuff done around here, that puts me in the position of being "the nag". The best situation would be if everyone took a look around and did what needs to be done, but that doesn't always happen. Having jobs that we've self-designated lets us know our responsibilities without having to constantly remind each other. Our jobs aren't based on gender, although they've been named so. I do the stuff that David hates to do, and he does the stuff that I hate to do. It's a fair division, and we both feel good about what our responsibilities are around here.
ReplyDeleteI agree. Everybody's responsibility can become nobody's responsibility, and no one wants to nag or be nagged. My only dinner responsibility is to empty the dishwasher and put things away, which is pretty light, but I sometimes forget. I do most of the shopping, though, which has as its reward that I pretty much get to choose what we eat.
ReplyDeleteOMG, I love that you read your blog to David and he is happy that it makes you feel better to write it out.
ReplyDeleteWell, he's either going to hear it WITH the intended humour of the blog, or the much unhappier, louder version LIVE in SCREECHY, NAGGY WIFE voice. He just opts for the kindler, gentler version. He makes good choices. LOL
ReplyDelete