Hands off my Roles

A small headline caught my eye recently. “Fathers must do chores too,” it announced. Mmm, yes, I like the idea of my husband in Marigolds, I thought.

Then I read on. According to recent research, half of all relationships suffer following the birth of a baby. Nothing new there, then. But there was more. If fathers carry on being traditional breadwinners and leave all the domestic duties to new mothers, divorce beckons. The solution? For parents to share caring and earning roles.

Hang on a moment. Share caring and earning roles? If anything is the recipe for divorce, it surely has to be shared roles.

When I became pregnant with our first child, I had a very good, well paid job which was, astonishingly, flexible enough to accommodate a baby. My husband was working part-time from home, so we had Fisher’s ideal set-up: both able to work and also both able to look after the baby and vacuum the stairs.

Fast forward. That baby is now nine, and his sister is seven. I wash, iron, make packed lunches, remember birthdays, supervise homework and piano, make supper, and don’t vacuum the stair carpet (after all that homework, there’s no time for stairs). I gave up my job seven years ago because the confusion of shared roles was more than we could all bear. My husband has turned himself into a full-time property developer, though I think he’d have turned himself into a full-time bin-man in order to escape from the chaos and detritus of the children.

And we love it that way.

For us, shared roles meant that all consistency went out of the window. Being consistent with yourself is hard enough (what exactly was the sanction for hanging Barbies out of an upstairs window?); being consistent with someone else is well-nigh impossible. Even if you agree on the big things (no to murdering one another, yes to family meals), every day with children throws up several trillion tiny-but-really-quite-significant dilemmas. Do matching socks really matter? (Husband says yes, I say no). Can a little girl climb trees in a Disney princess dress? (I say yes, husband says no). Can your son really walk to school in his underpants if he doesn’t get his uniform on now? (Oh, actually that’s the one thing we did agree on - to our son’s horror).

Shared roles also lead to two possible domestic outcomes. Either nothing gets done at all (because nobody knows whose job it is), or - worse - two people do the same jobs, meaning that one floor is spotless and the others untouched. And few things are more likely to lead to divorce than a husband putting his wife’s only decent jumper in a boil wash - except a wife tidying up the heap of scrap paper that was obviously a year’s worth of invoices filed on the floor.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that all women should be corralled into the domestic sphere. It could equally be the woman who leaves for work at 6.30am while the stay-at-home father washes up, makes the beds and sorts out sibling squabbles over the blue felt-tip. If both parents work full-time, it could be the nanny who plays this role. What matters isn’t that roles be divided according to gender: it’s for them never to overlap at all.

That way we and the children all know exactly where we are. In our family, it’s very straightforward. Spiders in the bath? Daddy’s job. Vomit, dead animals, drains, and bins? Daddy’s job. Party invitations, snacks, homework, family presents? Mummy’s job. Stair cleaning? Um, nobody’s job.

Having clearly defined roles has turned out to be as important for our relationship as me shovelling the children off to bed early so we can drink Baileys and watch Match of the Day. Now that’s the one shared role that really does work.