Battlefield: Home Front

My Wife And I Never Argued About Chores. Then We Had A Kid. The Problems Piled Up, And So We Followed A Plan For Fairness Set Forth In The New Book Fair Play. After A Month Of Madness, Here’s What We Learned

- Paul Kita

IT’S 7:15 on a Tuesday night and I’m neatly folding my wife’s underwear. This is not something I usually do. This is not something I usually want to do. But right now, in the name of domestic serenity, and quite possibly for the sake of our family, I am gingerly doubling over each pair of panties and tucking them into her top drawer. My wife is putting our toddler to bed and I’m thinking to myself, Well, this is weird.

This all started when my wife called me out on my parenting abilities during a family vacation. She recounted how, at a brewery earlier in the day, I had watched as our son picked up two mason jars filled with crayons and began banging them together.

“You just kind of stood there. Like you weren’t worried he might shatter them and hurt himself,” Meghan said.

I admitted to her that I hadn’t thought that might happen. It was like previous times, when I’d let our son get dangerously close to an exposed wall outlet or lamp cord and my wife had to jump in to rescue him. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d been relying on Meghan to do more than her fair share of mental labour – those household tasks that demand vast stores of cognitive energy – on my behalf.

“If this isn’t something we can fix, I’m not sure I’ll ever want to have another kid,” she said.

If my own wife couldn’t trust me with our child, then perhaps I had to become better at undertaking those mentally demanding jobs – like watching our son closely so that he doesn’t accidentally shock himself.