Manly Dish-Doing

As a dish-washing, laundry-doing, floor cleaning grandfather, this ridiculous answer caught my attention. No, not the one about the frozen embryos, the second one. Well, actually I required a hat tip from Pandagon.

This is the ridiculous lengths to which the view of gender roles can go, and many times Christian complementarians head right off in that direction. I’m not saying everybody winds up with some ridiculous stereotype of male and female roles, but it’s easy to get there. My view is that each person should do what they are gifted to do, and I really doubt that anyone’s masculinity or femininity will be harmed by that.

How does this work out in my family. Well, right now my wife has an outside job (she’s an RN), but I work at home running our business and writing. She’s also a writer, but she works that around the other job. Now think of this logically. Who in our home is best set to do the dishes, clean the house and do the laundry? I am, no question about it. I can make any of those activities a break in my day, lose remarkably little work time, and keep up with it. Since I am sitting in front of this monitor pounding this keyboard almost all day, or otherwise reading and researching, I’m not physically tired when I grab the vacuum cleaner or whatever else is necessary.

She, on the other hand, comes home tired because her job involves being on her feet much of the time, running around the work place, and she comes home physically tired. Even if we started with an equal amount of time to put aside for housework, it just doesn’t make sense for her to be the one to do it. She needs that time to sit down, relax, and also do her writing, all of which get her off her feet.

I note here that I don’t work less. People seem to think that because I work at home and have a small business, I don’t really have a job and should be available at all hours of the day or night for whatever anyone wants to do. In order to keep the business going I have had to put severe boundaries on my time. For example, I no longer answer the business line outside of business hours and generally ignore our personal line during business hours. Caller ID helps me sort that out a bit better.

But back to the topic. I simply have to wonder if the people who make this type of pronouncements actually have real lives. Maybe they live insulated from the everyday world where you have to make things work together, where the house might not get cleaned if the man doesn’t step up to the plate and do it, not because the wife is shirking, but because she’s killing herself adding to the family budget.

I don’t say every woman has to work outside the home; I’d leave that to individual couples. What I would suggest is that simply being practical makes a lot more sense than trying to rule your house by ideology.