Does this sound familiar to anyone else?
Your mom is always doing all the chores and housework. Your father is there, but he won’t help without an ordeal. You have a brother, but he ignores your mom’s requests and locks himself in his room immediately after school and after dinner. Exhausted, your mom turns to you and asks for help.
When you were a child and were asked to help, you always used to point to your brother and whine, “but why doesn’t HE have to?” What you couldn’t see was that he would inevitably refuse, throw tantrums, and do a purposefully bad job, which your mother would wind up having to do over again anyway. In this way, asking your brother (or father, even) to do a task doubles the time it takes to complete it. And your mother has come to understand this. So although she will call both of you and give you both chores, she only enforces it with you. Because despite the fact that you hate it, as every child does, you do not act like your brother. Your chores get done, not without whining, but they get thoroughly done.
When you got older, you’d do what she requested without whining.
Now, years after that, you don’t even have to be asked.
You are keenly aware that only half of the people in the house do the chores. That half is all female. You and your mom. You resent this, but you love your mother, and will always help her. When there is a family gathering, there is still that gendered split. Again, you resent this, but you care about your mother, and her mother, and your aunts, so you will always help them.
And that’s how it was for your mother when she was a girl. And hers. And you realize that this is probably how it has always gone, that this is how things came to be how they are. And what can you do about it? Nothing, except for picking up the next dirty dish and taking solace in the knowledge that you are not alone in your anger.
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