Small Strokes Big Oaks

Tim and I moved in together on July 1.

And we have been fighting ever since.

Don’t get me wrong; we haven’t been fighting 24/7.  Not at all. No, it’s more of the silent tension every time I have to move the dining room chair back the way it was, or every time I have to put a renegade measuring cup back where it belongs. (Seriously, who would wash one measuring cup and then put it back in an entirely different drawer than all of the other measuring cups?!  Come ON!) ¹

Now, I’m not saying that I’m not the totally hyper-organized, everything-has-its-place-and-you’d-better-put-it-back-in-its-place type.  Some might even venture to describe me as a control freak or seriously uptight about my organization.  And this might be really, really annoying to some people.  OK, most people.  But, for the first time in my life, this isn’t just my apartment or my dorm room or my bedroom.  This is our home.  A place I’ve made for me and my family.  A place I can take pride in because it is ours and however it looks and feels is something I designed.  It isn’t good enough anymore to just throw the bed in the guest room wherever it fit at the time we moved in or to leave the bed unmade or the laundry undone or those empty bottles on the counter next to the sink.

Since I have never, EVER settled for good enough, I’m constantly rearranging furniture, putting kitchen utensils back where they belong, doing laundry, cooking, tidying up… and I feel like I might as well be a pearl-wearing, vacuum-cleaning effigy to Joan Cleaver.

And I said as much to Tim last night.  Or this morning.  I don’t know, really, because I woke him up at about 1 AM to share my frustrations with him.  And, boy, did I share them.  Down the last minuscule sloppily folded hand towel in the bathroom.  I told him how frustrated I was that I was constantly cooking and cleaning and doing laundry and picking up after us and worrying about this wedding and OMG HOW COULD HE HAVE PUT THAT MEASURING CUP IN THE WRONG DRAWER?!  Use your brain, man!

Some might call this nagging.  I call it a crisis of faith.

And Tim, the ever patient, 8th wonder of the world he is, just listened to me talk and talk and talk.  And when I was done, he said: “You know, I can pick up after myself and put things in the right place.  I can work harder at that.  But, you know, you’re really only worried about this because you’re a feminist, and feminists aren’t ‘supposed to’ fall into that ‘wife’ role of cooking and cleaning and staying at home with the kids.  I mean, you like cooking and laundry!  Was it not just you who made the most delicious farfalle pasta with vodka sauce totally from scratch and from memory?  Or who just said: ‘I love folding laundry.  It smells so good and feels so good to have clean clothes!’  And you like organizing!  It’s your thing!  So what is it about this that’s really getting to you?  I think it’s that cooking and cleaning and tidying up are typically ‘women’s roles’ and you don’t like that you’re falling into them.”

I was speechless.

He… was… r…rrrr…..right.  I like cooking.  Love it, in fact.  And I do really enjoy doing laundry – it’s one of the few chores you can do while you’re actually doing something else.  And organization is my thing, man.  It just makes me so happy when things are sorted and arranged properly!

So what was my problem?  Was it Tim’s bachelor ways?  Or was it a fear that I was turning in to everything I had fought against being – a contemporary Joan Cleaver if you will?

I don’t know if I will ever know.  But I do know that Tim and I are focusing on equaling things out: he’ll do a little more cooking and cleaning and I’ll do a little less picking fights at 1 AM about little things that are really about larger moral issues.  Underneath it all, though, we’re really just focused on getting this right.  And, when it comes to relationships, what could be more feminist than that?

This post is part of an ongoing series about feminism and relationships.  Have something to say?  Submit a guest post to samsanator(at)gmail(dot)com!  And, of course, you can always comment here!