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The (Non) Negotiation of Domestic Labor: What’s Your Deal?
A Response to Nami Thompson
My daughter is 24 and in grad school, aiming at being an academic. I’ve spent most of her life doing freelance writing and “contingent” college teaching — and am now on SSDI; my wife is a tenured professor and chair of her department. When I joke about my daughter’s odd choice to attempt to join the job-shedding juggernaut that is the Academic-Industrial Complex, I say that she must figure she has a 50/50 chance, based on the examples of “her mother the chair and her father the couch.”
I’m not complaining about this. Before we got married, my wife and I made a deal: about work, about children, about money, about how we saw the division of domestic labor and how we wanted our household to function. Three decades on, we continue to make that work.
I won’t pretend that this has always and only worked perfectly or that my wife and I — with our daughter in the mix as well — spend all our time basking in the warm glow of this absolute and unmitigated success. Things have sometimes been rocky. We’ve tussled; we’ve adjusted; we’ve haggled.
And that last word is perhaps the most important — haggled — because, in the end, what we did was “make a deal.”