Someone has to do it

So men, don't leave all the hard work to women

Christmas, as we all know, is a time for giving. And this year, as always, alongside the joy of seeing my family all stockinged up and festive, it’s been giving me a terrible inferiority complex, feelings of guilt and shame, and a desire to be better.

It’s a special time of year and the fact that I still feel excited about it at the age of 58 makes me think that it’s one thing I should be grateful to my parents for.

Christmas for me as a child was great: a pillowcase full of presents at the foot of my bed (that you could feel with your feet when you woke up); properly good telly for once and all day long too (and obviously the bumper issue of Radio Times that you could take a highlighter pen to, and pick out the must-watches); a tin of Quality Street; cold turkey, mashed potato and salad cream on Boxing Day; and that little pile of opened presents that stayed on the floor in the lounge for several days, that you could keep rearranging but didn’t have to put away for the duration of the holiday period. Or was that just me?

Photo by Isaac Martin on Unsplash

Anyway, I loved Christmas. And then when our children began to arrive we had the chance to do it all again and create our own version.

I suppose that was when the inferiority complex began to kick in. Because my wife made it all happen. She made sure that Christmas was a magical time for all our children, right from the start. She hadn’t gone back to paid work after our first child was born and was just… there. And so capable. I was working and assumed a support role at home, taking my lead from my wife, helping her, not contributing so much with the ideas, just trying to help her make it happen. [Writing this made me think of this piece by

Richard V Reeves

, which had a great line from Anna Machin that fathers shouldn’t just be there for mothers; they need to be there for their children.] And as I’ve described on here before, this gradually became a problem for me as I wanted to be different and it to be different: I wanted to be involved more at home, be more of an instigator rather than a follower (which I’ve come to realise is me all over).

In particular, I wanted (and still want) to be someone who buys great presents. I mainly bought for my wife and my parents and siblings. My wife bought the children’s things. We’d talk about the big presents and do all the fretting about whether they were too young for certain computer games or tech or whatever, but my wife had the better ideas and she was so often right. The kids’ faces on Christmas morning told me that. But the things I bought were never as good as I wanted them to be. The perfect present, what Christmas was supposedly all about, seemed so elusive, yet so important.

I was so grateful to my wife that our children got the magic of it all but over time I began to realise (as she began to tell me) what a weight of expectation it was for her. All that pressure to make it special (although, as I would point out to her, my mum and dad seemed to make it special and I didn’t think that they worried that much or put that much effort into it; maybe Christmas just is special for children?) weighed heavily on her and made December (and a few months before that) a hugely stressful time for her.

It's all such a cliché – the woman does all the work while the man gets an easy ride. This, from a recent piece by Amy Beecham for Stylist, sums it up. She cites the annual festive meme that shows a bewildered man and says something along the lines of

‘Your dad watching you open presents on Christmas morning, just as surprised as you are.’

It’s funny. And painful. Beecham then quotes a recent Instagram comment on a similar theme: ‘As a kid I never realised how much my mum actually did to make Christmas work.’

vulgadrawings

A post shared by @vulgadrawings

That is it for me. And as much as I don’t want it to be the case for me, I recognise it.

In many ways Christmas is the ultimate domestic challenge, or combined housework task, when all of the inequalities and differences between men and women are shown up. So the fact that women do far more housework than their male partners the rest of the year (20 hours per week for women compared to 11.5 hours for men, according to YouGov last year; and as the pollster frequently points out, men always lie in these kinds of surveys) is going to be replicated at Christmas, which is basically doing loads of selfless tasks that don’t get you any medals or reward. It was back in 2013, but YouGov did a survey on who does the Christmas tasks. And it found:

69% of women say they send out the Christmas cards, while only 12% of men say the same. Buying the presents is split female to male by 61%-8%; doing the food shopping by 54%-13%; and cooking the Christmas dinner by 51%-17%.

That’s what men are so crap at, generally (not all men) speaking. We don’t do empathy and selfless caring as well as women. Partly because we’re not expected to; too many of us get a free pass because we’ve grown up knowing that it’ll get done by the woman in our lives.

That Asda Christmas TV ad from 2012 said it all. The mother and wife of the family does absolutely everything in the build-up to Christmas and throughout the day itself and finally, towards the end of Christmas Day, is permitted a glass of wine and a sit down, all the while smiling contentedly that the whole family are obliviously watching TV and playing games. Ah, bless them all (the selfish, uncaring lot of them for leaving so much of it to her). The ad got a whole load of flak for being sexist and reinforcing stereotypes, but it was and remains so true.

But the man’s position in all this – to be off stage, remote, distanced, reliant – is harmful to them too, as well as to everyone else. It fuels disconnection and apartness and unreality. It leaves many men in a place where contentedness and satisfaction have to be chased and sought and created rather than found right there in the heart of his family.

I often think that the key measure in all this is for men to ask themselves: what would happen if the woman in your life who does most of this wasn’t there? What would things be like? Would you cope? Could you do the things that need to be done? And that means the emotional as well as the practical things. If the answer is that things would be very different and nowhere near as good, then that is a real problem.

We’ve known mums and dads who’ve died young, leaving very small children and a single parent. The challenge for dads in that situation is enormous, but it’s still the case that you would want your children to grow up knowing they were loved and heard and known. And the way a lot of dads live their life when they are with a partner means that would require a huge shift in approach and behaviour and thinking.

I’ve also come to think that the most important piece of advice that I can pass on to my children (and I do) is that there’s an awful lot of stuff to do in any household – we humans do seem to require a massive amount of logistical support – and SOMEONE HAS TO DO IT. So the only fair way is to share the work, the burden, the responsibility, as evenly as possible.

And one thing that often comes up with our children is that they will say sure, they’re happy to help, just tell them what they need to do. And I reply (we’ve had this a few times!) that the thinking and planning are a big part of the work. I don’t want to do all the thinking and planning and responsible stuff all the time: I want people around me to take some of that and just do the thing that needs doing, without having to ask how, or when or whether this is the right way to do it. And I know my wife wants that too.

I say all this knowing that my wife carries out far more emotional labour than I do and more physical labour too. And it’s my life’s work to redress that imbalance.

Merry Christmas. Now get back out to the kitchen. And think some more about your partner and children. Someone has to do it.