Avoid the trend of thinking the worst of your husband
Instead, here are two methods for your consideration
The School for Housewives brings you short, practical, and thoughtful messages to inspire you to make your home. If you’re new here, go to the homepage for the previous Lessons; the categories are arranged in the menu bar at the top.
Once you start imputing bad motives to someone, there is no end, other than finally arriving at contempt and fatal separation.
You would never think to judge your friend’s motives, if she failed to put the dish towel back on its rack. At most, you’d think, “She knows where it goes [all women know where the dish towel goes] but she might be afraid I have some thought about it she can’t figure out. It’s so nice to have her here.”
If you thought, “I feel so unseen when she does that… she knows how hard I’ve worked… why doesn’t she respect me,” you are on your way to not being friends anymore.
The truth is, because she’s another woman, she probably would just ask.
God made marriage to be between a man and a woman, not between two of the same sex. Recovering housewifery means acknowledging this deep difference and not getting sucked into the fallacy of equity.
So don’t assume your husband can internalize your dish towel rules and preferences (or whatever the point of contention happens to be), or worse, purposely ignores them because he doesn’t respect you! That is the road to contempt, which is almost impossible to recover from.
Instead, choose one of these two options:
Hang it up yourself at some point. Make the effort to assume he forgot, truly doesn’t care about the dish towel (not you; he cares about you), and/or is afraid you have some arcane rule about the dish towel that has been used for wiping his big manly hands and then the counter and maybe a kid’s face, and he’s better off leaving it than putting it in the wrong spot. Admit it, none of us is above having random, unspoken rules our husbands are constantly breaking.
Tell him he’s a neanderthal and lucky to live in a sweet orderly home with properly hung up dish towels instead of a cave, please for the love, put it on its hook
In other words, move on in charity, knowing full well you will be leaving all sorts of tools, live spiders under mason jars, piles of brush, and bags of trash for him to deal with and that’s certainly just fine.
Or say what you have to say with a good sense of humor, because that is the best way to communicate with a man, versus scolding him and assuming the worst in that painful, schoolmarm manner (or don’t men get to be communicated with in a way that respects their nature — only women get that privilege?).
Is it also his kitchen? Yes.
Does that mean he will put everything where you think it ought to go? Probably not. Just as the trash, brush, and spiders are also all yours, but you’re maybe not doing much about them.
But don’t fall for this awful trend of making him out to be a monster who has no consideration for your nerves. It leads nowhere good.
As with everything here at the SFH, the best thing is for you to take my ideas, which come from my experience of escaping feminism to enjoy the gift of 45 years of marriage, seven children, and more than a score of grandchildren, and apply them to your situation with discernment, prudence, and confidence — and a sense of humor!
Be happy at home! Could you become a free or paid subscriber? That way you won’t miss anything!
If you don’t wish to subscribe just now, I understand! How about…
For the longer version:
My book on how to live with the Liturgical Year: The Little Oratory
I love the image with this one! You certainly have a talent for finding the post images. :)
This is a really needed and helpful perspective. The "mental load" conversation so often goes in really bad directions, as you've noted here and elsewhere. My husband's favorite comment is along the lines of, "Has anyone asked what *his* mental load is? He definitely has one." And then we can go on to list over a dozen really important things *I* definitely never think about, let alone lose sleep and stress out about! (Things like how long it's been since the septic's been pumped or the propane levels and oil filter on the underground propane, ALL car maintenance times two cars, well maintenance and water softener applications, anything having to do with state and county property taxes, rental property issues, etc etc... just scratching the surface here!). And then, we laugh because even things that are in my mental load that don't particularly bother him but are actually important (like this week's disgusting adventures with another mice invasion), eventually become *his* problems anyway-- I am NOT the one dragging our 500 lb oven away from the wall and digging through mouse droppings to stop up their entrance hole, nor am I setting out glue traps at night and then disposing of the victims the next day. :P
So we have found that (as in so many marriage areas) we have to communicate kindly about what things stress us out, or even just tell each other about our little projects-- it helps us see the hidden work of the other one better, and it can be so, so helpful for each of us to get each other's perspective. He will readily admit that I have helped him untangle work and household and big picture stresses, and he has definitely done the same for me with homeschool issues, household management challenges, etc.