How Equitable Domestic Labor Facilitates Better Rest for Everyone

Sabbath? In this Economy? #2

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I used to want to be the perfect house wife. Like the 1950’s circle skirt, with dinner on the table when my husband got home, sort of fictional “perfect.” And sure, you can make fun of me for that, but I think for many of us growing up under the “biblical womanhood” banner, those of us that wanted to please God thought that in order to do so we had to live with an extremely gendered division of labor. (This applied to work both inside and outside of the home—but for the purpose of this essay, I’m focusing on the inside of the home specifically.)

For years of our marriage I did all the house cleaning, not because he wouldn’t have been delighted to help, but because I felt guilty any time he set foot in the kitchen to do the dishes after dinner, or if the bathroom got dirty enough that he decided to take it on himself, because those were “my jobs.” He was the breadwinner, and I was the homemaker. But as you may have already realized, living like this (especially with young children) is a very quick road to complete and total burnout.

It was a frustration for him in our early marriage too, as he would frequently call to me from the couch, “come and sit with me!” But I’d be frantically “serving” him by making sure our home was my version of perfect at all times, and I couldn’t be stopped. It was years before I could ever sit on the couch with him and binge watch a show for a few hours without guilt gnawing a hole in the pit of my stomach the entire time. As someone who had not yet found freedom from perfectionism, I was living with a monster in my head that threatened to devour me if I sat down for a moment, and it certainly would have eaten me alive if I’d strayed from the strict gender norms that I was sure made our marriage “biblical.”

Now, 13.5 years later, by the grace of God we are living a very different sort of life in our household. My husband does the dishes most nights and even cooks a few nights a week. We both tackle the laundry, and help the kids cleanup. He vacuums on occasion and has even been known to clean the bathroom more than just when I am immediately postpartum. Now we share an inside joke in which he cheerfully proclaims, upon finishing a domestic task; “aren’t I such a domesticated house husband?”

To which I answer; “Yes! Especially when compared with all those FERAL husbands out there.” It’s funny, because it’s a little bit true. And yet, we have lived and our marriage has survived those early days when he couldn’t find his pajamas because it was the one day that I neglected to put them back in his drawer after he’d left them on the floor of the bathroom.

If I’m being completely honest with you Dear Reader, I take most of the blame for the early inequities in our domestic labor on myself. I was so afraid of not being the perfect wife, that I burnt myself out doing everything I thought (and unfortunately, was reaffirmed in the complementarian evangelical tradition) that I was supposed to do in order to create a marriage full of harmony and unity. I was afraid of being wrong, and I was even more deeply afraid of being left. Even though my husband had never done or said anything to make me think he loved or appreciated me only for the things I did for him, beneath every action lay a hum of anxiety that if I didn’t keep up my end of the deal, he’d go and find someone who would.

But I wouldn’t realize any of this until our eldest child was incredibly sick, our (then) middle was bouncing off the walls at 3 years old, and I was about to deliver our third child. We’d been living in this darling 1,000 square foot house with no dishwasher for a year, and it had been fine, until it wasn’t. Between homeschooling and hand washing every single dish; the pregnancy and all the doctors appointments for the very sick child—I was at my breaking point.

“I need your help!” I finally broke down. “I can’t do all this on my own!” And of course like any good husband, he sat down with me and listened as I cried out my hormonal and burned out heart. We started some changes then, but it wasn’t until I was pregnant with the twins three years later that the most dramatic shift occurred. Because I became completely unable to do much of anything for the family for months, he began to cook for us again, and he’d begun grocery shopping during the pandemic so we could limit the number of us that were out and about in the world (since his job was always considered essential). I was so sick that I could hardly stand to go in the kitchen at all, and he’d come home from a long day of work, to a pile of dishes in the sick and no dinner made. The shame I felt was palpable, and I wasn’t sure how he could still love me with how epically I was failing at all my “jobs.”

It was an incredibly humbling and necessary season for me, and for us in our marriage.

And I give thanks for that season all the more, especially as it finally drilled the truth into my head: that my husband loved me for me, and not for what I had done for him lately.

That difficult season, and the near impossible one that came afterwards with the birth of our twins, paved the way for the beauty and shared burden of this season we are living in now.

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When we first started practicing Sabbath, I thought it was all up to me to make it happen. I had very good intentions, and pretty poor execution. I prepared all the food. I tried to make sure I’d gotten all the majority of the cleaning done ahead of time. I got out the paper plates the night before to remind us that we would’t be doing any dishes that day. But then, when we fell into a season where I could no longer do those things to prepare for Sabbath (because two newborns will do that to you) for awhile our practice of Sabbath fell by the wayside. I was getting better at asking for help, but I wasn’t quite there yet. And my husband was learning to anticipate what needed doing, but he still was not a mind reader *surprise, surprise.*

So Sundays came and went, not only was I not sleeping, but there were whole weeks where I couldn’t even go a few minutes without someone touching me. To say it was exhausting is an understatement. It felt like actual torture. (I hope those of you who feel this way, feel just a little less alone for my stating it this way.)

Where was the rest for the mother who wasn’t sleeping? Everyone said to me, “take care of yourself,” like that was so easy to make happen with two infants who never napped at the same time no matter what I did. The solutions I kept reading was “self-care”, “bottle feeding,” or “sleep-training.” I was all for self-care, but my daughter had at least three false starts at the beginning of every night. I couldn’t even take a bath after they’d gone to bed because she would wake back up 20 minutes later. They wouldn’t take bottles no matter how hard we tried, and I was against sleep training. So what was I supposed to do? My google and instagram ads were particularly brutal at this time, as I’m sure you can imagine.

For over a year, I longed to take care of myself, but we felt like we were barely surviving. And honestly? When I look back, I can’t even tell you how we did it. We just…did. Somehow. By the unseen yet sustaining hand of a gracious God, we managed to get up each morning and keep going.

But even though I’d gone through that season of relying on Willy more through the twin’s pregnancy, we still weren’t as good at sharing the burden of domestic tasks—especially the mental load of them. And even though my husband was working from home, the majority of the domestic to-do’s, and nearly all of the mental load, still fell to me. This was how we’d always been, and it was hard to get out of the rut that I’d dug us into.

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Of course there have been a lot of conversations and shifts in our relationship to get us to this point, and much of what I share here came out of the long dark wrestling through things I’d believed for over a decade. I’m writing more about that, and will be sure to let you know when I find the right place to share that story.

But what you need to know for now, is that the biggest change in our sharing of domestic responsibilities occurred in conjunction with the final snip of the strings of complementarian theology. I now renounce any guilt I used to feel upon not being the one to do all the house work. I am now I am free to ask Willy to help me as I need. I no longer see myself as his subservient, but his EZER Help—this is the word God used to describe Woman as he first created her in the Garden of Eden, and it is also the same word God uses to describe the Holy Spirit. So then, I am to be my husband’s equal and a powerful help, just as the Holy Spirit is equal in power to God the Father, and God the Son, in the Trinity.

I am not his dutiful minion. I don’t just exist to do his work so that he can do God’s work. I have God’s work of my own to do, and we both know it. It is because of this change in dynamic that I finally published my first book of poems, as the Sparrow flies this past February. My husband Willy believes that my work is important to the body of Christ, and he lovingly frees me up to do it—just as I also free him up to pursue the passions that God has given him that make him come alive as he serves God and others.

We are a team. We are partners. We are equals. We are more UNIFIED than we ever were before while living under a hierarchy. Our marriage has never been more harmonious, though our life continues to be filled with near constant challenges.

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To get nitty gritty, here’s a little bit about what our weekly rhythms of work and rest look like now.

Each Monday we sit in our office with our coffees and look at the week ahead, and consider the demands our family is facing. We talk about how we might tackle the demands on our time and resources together, as a team. We also include in our plan any provisions needed for our sacred time of Sabbath rest, which has never been more important, nor more difficult for us to keep in this financially uncertain season.

Some Sundays we just eat cereal. And some Sundays, Willy makes the kids gluten-free sour cream donuts (because that’s the kind of guy he is—I promise, I know how lucky I am.) We try and make sure that no laundry is left in the washer on Saturday night so we aren’t dealing with a stinky mess come Monday morning. And we leave the unfolded piles in a basket by our closet and we call it good enough. Willy pulls out the paper plates.

But best of all, we don’t only have Sundays. Because we also have our nights off (like I discussed in last month’s post), we also each get a time of uninterrupted rest one night a week. So if Sunday is crazy, and the children are taking all we’ve got and more, there is still rest on the horizon. And I don’t wake up Wednesday morning wishing I’d never taken time off, because my husband is a grown man who knows how to actually take care of the home we live in together. PRAISE BE!

This is only a flyover view of where we’ve been in our own gender roles and domestic responsibilities over the almost 14 years of our marriage, and I realize that there are a lot of complex issues I did not address here, but I hope something in this article will inspire you even still. I wish that we had started out this way, but we didn’t—so if you didn’t either, I hope you know there is hope for greater domestic felicity (to quote Jane Austen) than you can now possibly imagine.

Different seasons require different things of us, but the key thing to remember is that in a healthy relationship, you can always have that conversation about what might need to shift so that you are both working to care for your home, and each other, in a more judicious way.

I now give times of rest and reprieve to my husband more freely than I ever did before, because I have peace in knowing that my needs are also being cared for and met. This is mutual service in love. This is Biblical marriage.

Is the way you divide the domestic responsibilities in your household a barrier to the rest you both long for? How might you imagine a new way forward?

I’d love to hear your specific challenges in the comments, and I will do my very best to help in any way I can by offering my own experience. I am no expert—but I have lived it.