Angela Mollard: Not shifting the dial on the domestic load will end in resentment

Let’s detonate maternal guilt once and for all – not a protest for protest’s sake but as recognition of the radical idea that sharing the load is the fairest route to a happy family, writes Angela Mollard.

Men should take more of the domestic load off women.

Recently I was at a special birthday party for a friend and noticed one of the young guests – a new mum with a one-year-old – had been missing for more than an hour.

I went to look for her.

She was sobbing in the dark.

“Why is it always on the mums?” she wept, explaining how she’d single-handedly set up the travel cot, fed her daughter, then spent ages trying to get her to sleep. The poor thing had missed half the evening.

As her partner had been required to make a speech, she wasn’t directly upset with him. Rather, it was dawning on her that from packing their daughter’s clothes and food to communicating with daycare, this unrecognised labour always fell on women.

From packing children’s clothes and food to communicating with daycare, the unrecognised labour always falls on women. Picture: iStock

I felt sad. And guilty. It’s 25 years next month since I had my firstborn. I’d done exactly what she’d just done – feed, cot, sleep, rage – and I had no answer.

Because while fathers are clearly more involved in raising their children, we have not shifted the dial on the domestic load. It’s there in the statistics – men do an average of 12.8 hours of housework while women do 44 per cent more at an average 18.4 hours – and it’s there in the fury I’ve uncovered as I’ve sought the experiences of a new generation of young mums. Catch them when they’re down and you’ll find volcanic levels of resentment.

While fathers are clearly more involved in raising their children, we have not shifted the dial on the domestic load.

How did my generation, who supposedly had it all, fail to fix this? We were supposed to be the change-makers. Yet somehow between the “leaning in”, the demands for equal pay and the breastmilk pumped in bathrooms, we failed to create a blueprint. Instead, we stumbled on, trying to retrofit equality into relationships built on outdated templates, hoping love and good intentions would carry us through.

But the day-to-day inequities – who stayed home with a sick child, who purchased the birthday presents and booked the babysitter – piled up and the imbalance eroded our relationships. Without a clear model of how to divide the domestic load and without a reckoning of what fairness actually looked like, the corrosive effect wasn’t just practical but emotional, intimate and structural.

Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn clash over housework in The Break Up.

The families we’d begun with such hope began to crack. And instead of bequeathing a road map for the division of labour, we’ve left a new generation circling the same exhausting roundabout. Of course, this conundrum featured in popular culture. In The Break-Up, Jennifer Aniston’s character loses it with Vince Vaughn. “I want you to want to do the dishes,” she rails.

In 2011 I wrote a column about being overwhelmed by what I dubbed “fadmin”, or family administration. A year later in The Atlantic, Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a seminal essay titled Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, and shortly after Annabel Crabb captured the dilemma in her book The Wife Drought, observing that what powerful men have – and powerful women don’t – is a wife. But our tone was typically observational. Or, at best, comedic.

Not anymore. I’m sensing a shift. Whereas my generation saw martyrdom as just another form of multi-tasking, this generation is getting mad. They’re pushing through the trad wife tropes and the gen X apologists like me and replacing resentment with rebellion.

Few things have made me laugh louder than a British woman’s decision to invoice her boyfriend for all the household chores she performed. Not only did Clara Aberneithie present her boyfriend Callum with an invoice for 10 hours of domestic work when he failed to take their disproportionate division of labour seriously, she wrote about it in The Times. Waking to find he had not cleaned the kitchen after a late shift, she spent a week noting her domestic tasks on a spreadsheet, then billing him for £200. As she said, it was “the most passive-aggressive statement I could muster”. Her friends thought it was brilliant. Her boyfriend? He was apologetic, offered to pay but instead took her for a fancy dinner. He also changed his ways.

Monique Van Tulder wrote taking time for herself as a solo traveller brought her sepia life back into technicolour. Picture: Supplied

Meanwhile 54-year-old Australian mum Monique van Tulder has written a book about how, after caring for her family for years, she left her husband and two sons to travel alone for eight months.

In A Grown Up’s Gap Year, she describes how she’d been living life in sepia but taking time for herself brought life back into technicolour.

She’s still with her husband and splits her time between the family home in Sydney and living alone interstate.

As she says: “As women, we need to step back a bit because eventually the good men will step up.”

Intriguingly, the dynamic Turia Pitt is about to release a book called Selfish – a title that slices through the expectation that women exist chiefly in service of others.

She’s reframing “selfish” not as a vice, but an act of preservation.

I hope she’ll also detonate maternal guilt once and for all. Because this isn’t protest for protest’s sake.

It’s recognition of the radical idea that sharing the load is the fairest route to a happy family.

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Originally published as Angela Mollard: Not shifting the dial on the domestic load will end in resentment