So my marriage is falling apart. In the course of a very serious discussion about this fact on Monday, Simon confessed that he resents, among other things related to my lack of housekeeping skills, the fact that he sometimes runs out of clean underwear.
This is a fair complaint. He is off to work 50 or 60 hours a week so that we can have a nice life and I don't have to work, and in return he expects to have clean underwear.
I am mortified. Not just that I haven't been doing his laundry, but that he has been silently judging me for this for years. In my defense, I do laundry almost daily. But most days, I am physically pushing down the kids' clothes and the towels and the dinner napkins to make it all fit. There is seldom room for my clothes, let alone Simon's clothes.
So I have to do his laundry more often. That's the deal, right? I take care of trivial tasks like underwear washing so he can have his brain free for running his company. It has been the division of labor between stay-at-home moms and their husbands for millennia.
I resent it ferociously. I am a smart woman, maybe smarter than Simon. And yet I wash his underwear. What I want to say is, "You're 42 years old. Wash your own goddamn underwear." But I don't, because I am a 34-year-old woman with no job.
In theory, we are a team, balancing family and work, child care and checkbooks. In actuality, he is the widely-applauded circus elephant, I am the guy with the shovel following him around.
I love being with my kids. But there is a mixed bag of financial dependence and underwear washing that goes with that privilege. I feel powerless and ashamed and very, very torn.
