Fair and Share

OK, I am sick and tired of hearing about how men don’t share the house work. Women are always reminding men that dishes and laundry don’t do themselves. Now, I know that I can’t speak for all men, but I certainly share the house work, as do most of the men I know. I do laundry on occasion, fill and empty the dishwasher when needed, clean the house in a general way and cook when I have to. Now, it may not be an equal share, but I do share. However, to get a sense as to what is a “fair share” one must look at the totality of things that need to be done around the house, not just the most obvious. For example, I also shovel the snow, rake the leaves and mow the lawn. If you want to get picky about this whole “sharing thing”, then we need to look at these factors as well. My wife and I have lived in our house for 10 years and how many times has my wife mowed the lawn? Precisely zero times. How about, shoveling snow, or even something as simple as taking out the trash? To be fair, I believe that she has done these things on maybe one or two occasions, ever. Distasteful projects go to me, like the time my wife tried to flush a comb down the toilet. “Oh”, I hear you say, “you can’t flush a comb down the toilet”, and you are right. It gets stuck, but my wife did not know this and I ended up having to take the toilet up off the floor and snake it. There was also the time when the basement flooded because the gutters were clogged causing them to spill over, thus flooding the basement. I had to spend several hours out in the wet, cold rain to fix that little problem.

Now in fairness, I know that there are plenty of distasteful things that my wife does also, like cleaning up after the dog barfs. My point is however, that next time you, a woman, gets upset that your man isn’t sharing the work load, ask yourself when the last time you shared the responsibility of changing the car’s oil? It doesn’t change itself you know.