Be Glad Your Housespouse Isn't Union

Note: This article is a "refurbished rescue" from the Grounded Parents blog I used to write for. They had to abandon their old site (and many of their old articles) when they moved forward after a "you used my image" scam, but I found it in the wayback machine, and considering that I just tried to figure out how to charge my clients for a 21 hour shift in which I was asleep next to a two-year-old for eight of them, I thought that with a little dusting, a rewrite, and a fresh coat of paint, it was just as relevant today.

[At the time this was written, I was one side-point of a "V" relationship with a married couple, and I was the domestic of the family. These days I still watch the same kid (plus one more) in the nanny situation I'm always talking about, but I don't live in the house. All names have been changed.]

I’ve taken on 20 hours a week of being the stay-at-home caregiver to Tom on top of most of my housekeeping duties, and let me tell you, it has completely changed everything.

I really like my mornings with Tom. Even when he’s being completely inconsolable, filling diapers so quickly I’m not sure how he doesn’t look like a squeezed toothpaste tube, or when he's just sleeping the whole time like a limp rag. It's just us. He's cute and sweet and I have been mind-controlled by his eye-to-face ratio, large head, and tiny chin. 

However, I also know part of the reason I love our time so much is that it ends after five hours. When the timer dings, I get to hand him back, trundle upstairs to do some writing, take a nap, or just save a galaxy far, far away from those Sith jerkfaces.

I’m the househusband in this arrangement. The parents of Tom have jobs outside the home, and we keep track of the hours I'm putting in because until a three-way marriage is legal, I lack some of the benefits like health insurance or a retirement plan that I would be co-building even if I were the stereotype-shattering househusband in a TWO-person marriage. From the moment Renee discovered she was pregnant, we knew that the kid was going to have some pretty profound effects on the delicate equilibrium we’d established where I do a few hours a day of housework and they brought home the bacon. 

Long before we'd grown comfortable with this equilibrium—for years—we tracked hours, totaled up grocery shopping receipts, watched the incoming and the outgoing carefully. And it just kept coming up pretty even. We would pass the same $20 bill back and forth week after week and month after month, and finally just decided to call ourselves "family," and stop worrying about it.

But then along came 20 hours of babysitting into the mix.

That balance….that equilibrium where my contributions to the household basically equalled my room and board (and some incidentals)…was about to be completely fucked. And because my family is not the sorts to take reckless advantage of me, we all kind of knew we should at least have a rough sense of how many hours I was going over the tipping point. In particular, Renee wanted to keep a watchful eye on the "forty-hour" Rubicon. 

“A full-time job is enough,” she said. “Beyond that, we’re taking advantage of you.”

I’d been the househusband (2021 edit: housespouse) for my family for nine years. I’d felt all the clichés of under appreciation for the work I do. William and Renee wondered why it took me so long to clean up, and I’d been in their face that fairies don’t flit into the living room to tidy up their abandoned dishes and discarded socks.

There’s a reason the unappreciated housewife is a solid cliché of TV and movies.

And yet.

AND YET!

And yet….

I still had no fucking CLUE how fast 40 hours would blow past with a Doppler effect sound once kids were in the mix. Some weeks we hit it by early evening on Wednesday. Almost every week, I would stop doing housekeeping by Thursday or sooner, just so I'd have a couple of “banked” hours left over in case Renee and William needed some emergency kid watch. Dishes have sat in the sink for days because I hit my limit. Week after week.

The kicker is, I don’t "officially" watch Tom all that much. Five hours a day for four days a week while Renee works outside the home is all that’s certain. I get tapped to help out in the case of a social engagement or just an “hour of solitude,” but I get to give him back. I don’t have midnight feedings or dawn changing or colicky nights. I don’t put the baby down for a nap and then rush to try to clean all the things before he wakes up. I'm not constantly trying to balance his need for attention with how badly the dishes need doing, tossing him into a bouncer and praying that he'll stay distracted for long enough to put on a load of laundry and pick up the living room enough to run the vacuum. 

But there have been a couple of weird weeks. Something went wrong. Their jobs outside the house were particularly hard. I had to tag in a little harder. And I did some math and figured out that a full-time stay-at-home parent who also cooked and cleaned would be cruising up around 100+ hours a week. Easily more. Fourteen or fifteen hours a day. Seven days a week. And that's not even counting that nights are more "on call" than they really are "off."

The claims that “motherhood is a noble (even 'sacred') calling" are oft repeated despite all evidence to the contrary. Devaluing jobs traditionally held by women isn’t anything new in our society, but even among folks who would clutch their pearls and whip out their smelling salts at the accusation of sexism, there is still a sense that a family’s breadwinner is doing the “real” work. It is a sobering experience to realize just how much devaluing has gone on when it comes to child rearing and domestic work. While most families find a way to divide the labor without ever feeling the need to track hours, because of my family’s quirky circumstance, I happened to sit down and crunch some numbers.

And those numbers are shocking.

What I discovered is so starkly imbalanced that the absurdity of “traditional” roles is breathtaking. A traditional father putting his feet up and refusing to pitch in with childcare or cleaning because he “worked all day” should probably be aware, according to US labor laws, his wife should be getting about 60 hours of overtime. 

Per week.

At least.

That means that even making the federal minimum wage for this "sacred" calling, a housespouse (working a mere 100 hours) would be earning about $1050. (That's overtime for hours over 40 and "golden time" for seventh-day pay.) And if they made the actual going rate for a housekeeper/nanny, got paid for the hours they were on call, and were paid more accurately for the hours in which they were expected to perform duties, they would be making closer to $2000 or more.

Per. Week.

That's a six-figure salary even at a devalued wage. Think about what would happen if there was a domestic labor union instead of just this cultural sense that housespousing is the easy job. Which is why it's just a METRIC CARGO CARRIER of bullshit to be saying, "I do the 'real' work" just because we live in a society that refuses to acknowledge unpaid labor as actual work. 

Take home?  While a modern family is more likely to flip gender roles, share responsibilities, and approach equity, it might still be worth looking at the clock…just to check. 

The Kids Are Alright

I have sort of a pair of stories, loosely related.

Yesterday, I was trying to explain the basics of the differences between economic classes to my clients' medium smol kid. He heard me talking about some low four-figure amount (enormous to a small kid) and when I told him it wasn't that much when you have bills, he asked if I was rich.

*pause for big laffs*

So I started explaining some of the ways those terms get broken up (and broken down) and given superlatives (like "UPPER- or LOWER-middle class"), and how it kind of depends where you live, so there's no SET cut off, blah blah blah.

Well, I used myself as an example of upper poor. I'm fine. My needs are met. I even have those liminal not-exactly-LUXURY-but-people-could-live-without items like computers and cars. But ALSO I technically live below the Housing and Urban Development Bay Area poverty line for an individual (even with my jazz hands and shenanigans).

His face grew somber when he heard that I was poor. He looked down at the ground as if weighing a big decision, although it didn't take him long. "I have money, Chris. You can have it."

*cue barely-keeping-it-together Chris* 

Of course, I had to explain again that I was really okay. (Really.) I live in a tiny place (that, while tucked into a really cute and nice village, is in a depressed area). I don't spend much outside of my needs. And his parents can teach him about the myriad ways and places they donate money, but he can keep his tooth fairy savings.

He offered me his TOOTH FAIRY money after a moment's thought.

That kid's all right.

His compassion made me think of something from my own childhood that I'd aaaaaalmost forgotten about.

I used to walk everywhere in Santa Clarita (long before its current density––back when it was the very definition of urban sprawl). An up-and-coming suburb was where my parents could afford to buy a house. The streets crisscrossed through lots of undeveloped areas that made the best shortcuts. So I was constantly hiking through some construction site or dry riverbed or something trying to shave a half an hour off my walk time to the local anything. (This is five years before even the first  mall dropped in Valencia). These shortcuts were often through the kinds of places you can get in trouble for trespassing if you're an adult, but that most kids (white kids in particular) get away with going through. I used to steal laundry quarters from my parents and then walk three miles to a bowling alley to play video games––it was about the closest thing we had to a good time unless you wanted to bike eight miles to the movie theater.

It was there where I first noticed homelessness. Calabasas, where I'd lived before––at least the part I haunted––was a combination of extreme wealth––multi-million dollar homes on the hills–– and the bedroom community of condos and apartments that those homes literally looked down on. (That's where we lived.) The area I lived had anti-loitering laws, overnight parking laws, and even a sign in every park or recreational area that said plainly that it was for local residents and anyone else would be fined and removed. So homelessness wasn't something I was ever really exposed to there. I was probably too young to realize what I was looking at when we lived in Canoga Park. And Santa Clarita certainly must have had it, but most of the development of the bedroom community from farmland was only a decade or two old.  I just hadn't really dealt with it.

Then one day, on one of my adventures, I met a guy living in a copse of trees in the riverbed. He had a ratty old sun-bleached tent behind the trailer park by the bowling alley and I still remember his dog was named Kerouac. (One of those things you realize the significance of later. Although I could not tell you if the guy realized it or had just watched that 80s Nick Nolte movie.) I said hi as I walked past. He nodded at me, but didn't look away.

I couldn't stand it though. Why did I have a house and he lived in tent in a riverbed? It just wasn't right. I made it INTO the bowling alley but as that blast of cold air hit my face and I saw the electronic glow of the games, I just couldn't. I turned around and went back.

Kerouac's human wouldn't take my quarters though. I remember saying please, my voice shaking, and he said "four dollars is not the real problem here." That day I ended up playing video games after all. They felt miserably unsatisfying, and I took the long way home. I didn't want him to see me after.

Later, I tried to make him a care package of everything I could think of he might need. A jacket no one really wore anymore. An old blanket. Some TP. Canned food. I maI waffled for hours on the idea of putting our camping tent in there. I finally thought better of it. We only had one and I was an only child––my parents (almost always correctly) knew it was my fault if something went missing. Too risky.

My plan was to put the box nearby so he couldn't possibly miss it, but then run away so he couldn't refuse either. But it was too heavy. It was just too heavy. I could lift it but I couldn't carry it very far, much less walk it three miles through unpaved riverbed.

I cried instead.

My mom found the box and confronted me (thinking I had plans to run away or something), and when I broke down and admitted my scheme, she hugged me for a long, long time in a way that I didn't get then. The way I wanted to hug the medium smol. To hold out a world that would blast the edges of so much goodness.

Of course after the bowling alley guy, I imagined folks of such circumstance were few and far between. It would be more than a decade after that moment before such a presumption was shattered, when a trip to Compton cracked open a childhood of sheltered privilege and a young white Chris, being hugged and rocked by a homeless Muslim, openly wept on the streets of Los Angeles's worst inner city when that cloistered version of me learned unambiguously that a world I knew to be imbalanced and unfair hadn't even shown me the half of it.

We get such a fleeting glimpse of what injustice means and how truly, deeply, profoundly unfair the world is before we begin to look past it or even to rationalize it as actually kind of fair. Even those of us who don't ever want to lose that perspective often require some filter as a survival mechanism. And the twin drums of victim blaming and meritocracy pound ceaselessly through our culture's mantras.

But a lot of kids––and I can't say it's all of them because a sense of entitlement gets its hooks in us early––but a LOT of kids see right through that bullshit to the heart of it.