The other day my wife was out grabbing a few things and asked if I wanted anything. I had one thing on my mind for, like, a week, but I was desperately trying to convince myself I didn’t want this thing. But folks, I wanted it. I wanted it bad. So I told her, hoping she wouldn’t laugh because what I wanted was straight up geriatric.
“Rainbow sherbet.”
Not only did she not laugh, the idea was a slam dunk. That rainbow sherbet ruled. Tasted like spending the summer at my grandparents’ house in the 90s. Sublime.
But that’s not even all of it. We used to drink a beer or two after doing any kind of yard work. It was a rule: if you do a yard work, you got a cold one after. But I don’t even want the cold one anymore. We drink home brewed unsweetened iced tea on the porch now.
I’m also really into, like, apple slices lately too. Just real old man shit. An appreciation for the classics. And not to add fuel to the rumors of my antiquity, but peep these arboretum photos I was talking about.
I’m not sure how common arboretums are. Like, they weren’t in SimCity the last time I played so I don’t know. My local arboretum is maintained by a local college and it’s completely free to just show up and wander. Might be worth looking into if you have one near you.
How I Became a Househusband
I don’t have a job. Specifically, I don’t exchange time, talent and knowledge for a fraction of what it’s really worth with some other guy who doesn’t give a shit about me. I don’t have a current W2 with my name on it. It’s pretty great.
Usually I’m cautious with how I reveal this information. I’ve developed this routine now for introductions: “Oh, I’m an artist. Yeah, not very lucrative. My wife’s the real moneymaker.” Yada yada. This works because it’s generally true. My wife easily outearns me and I am an artist who, very occasionally, sells pieces. It also quietly implies my days are probably not as stressful as most peoples’, an important admission because I find that people are often scanning for my self-awareness.
I do this because saying “I’m a househusband” does not land, even when delivered with a bit of a chuckle. It sounds like a pervert thing no matter what you do.
This may seem like I’m routinely worried what others think. The reality is, I still have to interact with people and they’re going to ask what I do and, it turns out, “I make a household run” is somehow a less acceptable answer than “I sometimes sell a doodle.” There is a whole history of misogyny and devaluing domestic labor in this exchange that I am wholly unqualified to unwrap, but I can tell you how I found myself in this atypical arrangement.
When I was 12, I got a paper route. Yeah, this starts when I was 12. Sorry. But I got this paper route and I was fucking psyched. My parents didn’t let me do shit and now I have this whole responsibility completely separate from them. They had no hand in it whatsoever. They didn’t find the job, they never met my manager (the first person I ever met who was also named Craig), they never once delivered a single paper. It was something that was, for the first time ever, mine.
Well, it was mine apart from the pay.
That’s why my parents were so cool with letting a little slack on the leash. They wanted the money. At first, they would politely ask and I would just hand it over. I figured if I could still buy a new Nerf gun every now and then, it was fine. It was definitely more Nerf guns than if I didn’t have the route at all.
But the asks became more aggressive and manipulative. Pleading for money I didn’t have because it had all already been taken. If I did have any money I didn’t want to share, I learned very quickly not to carry it on me. My mom would stand over me with a frizzled cigarette fused to her dry lips, clinically coaching my dad on how to wrestle me down in the most efficient and humiliating ways.
So I would hide the money in my room. It worked for a short while, but eventually I’d come home from school and it would be ransacked. We were poor and I owned little, but it still somehow made an impressive mess. Sentimental tchotchkes, old Happy Meal toys and small souvenirs from my grandparents, blasted across the room.
I remember one time. I reached into the hollow of a makeshift table next to where I slept on the floor and the 35 dollars I had hidden is gone. An unopened copy of the Men in Black soundtrack I got for Christmas is also missing.
“You hid it in a good place this time,” my dad laughs. He tosses my empty wallet at me, limp and weightless. It’s a child’s wallet, with a velcro closure and a 311 patch I struggled to attach myself that was now growing ragged with each careless theft.
What I thought would be my first taste of freedom actually became a years-long violent and traumatic panopticon. I was pushed relentlessly to take on more routes. If I asked for anything, I would be sternly reminded that I have a job, my parents somehow forgetting all the money was funneled to them.
It didn’t stop when I was old enough to get a “real job” either. My parents secretly applied for me to work at the McDonald’s my dad also worked at the day after I turned 16, and I don’t think I touched a single paycheck from that job. My parents cut out all the bullshit and just forged my name to cash the checks themselves. It only ended when they lost custody of me.
It’s also important to note that all this happened while my family experienced a chaotic and protracted dissolution, during which time I became what the state referred to as parentified. By the end, I was doing most of the household work and much of the caring for my siblings. Maybe someday I’ll write about this era, but if you can believe it, it’s harder to talk about than being beat up by your parents for drug money and I don’t feel like it right now.
What I have written though, I’ve written because it’s important to understand that this is how I entered adulthood. I learned to regard money without emotion, so I became pretty good with it, but I also developed a repulsive brand of conflict avoidance and people pleasing that really fucked up my ability to maintain healthy boundaries.
Generally I had good instincts though, so I was able to make “smart” and “correct” moves that look like accomplishments from the outside, but really, I was walking a knife’s edge. Because of my tumultuous home life, I never got the luxury to pause and consider what I wanted to do. You don’t really have a lot of options when you start from that place anyway.
So I kept my head down and performed the years long painstaking work of escaping the gravity well of poverty and abuse.
My first roommate was also my best friend at the time. It didn’t work out. He was also good with money, and financially, things were very equal, but domestically? Hey, if you needed your roof redone or your kitchen remodeled, he’s the guy. Top tier problem solver for big things. Everyday stuff like taking out the trash or doing the dishes though? No way. Even as he threw parties and took in a cat against the lease, I still had to do almost all of the housework.
After, I moved in with a girlfriend and the situation flip flopped. She was very helpful around the apartment, but I paid for nearly everything. To be fair to her, I don’t regret this entirely. I was a high earner at the time and had more money than she did so that’s just how it shook out. But when she ended the relationship, she had a much larger personal war chest than me to draw from, a direct benefit of not having to spend very much of her own money for five years.
Basically, I had learned to just cover the spread of those around me, often to my own detriment. A therapist would later refer to this as an “Atlas personality type,” so named for the mythological Titan who held the burden of the heavens on his shoulders. It’s surprisingly destructive and a very hard thing to unlearn.
A few years later, I met my wife and we moved in together. The first year was tough. Off the Great Recession, we both were working fresh, entry level jobs and there was, like, no money. If our grocery budget had enough leftover for a six pack, that was a good week. We struggled our way together until my paychecks began to improve.
At that point, I was working a ton of hours and had a really long commute, but I had most of the money so I paid most of the bills. My future wife worked fewer hours and drove just 10 minutes to her office, so she did the grocery shopping and cooking. We shared the rest of the chores around our studio apartment. Good division of responsibility all in all.
But things change, of course. We got married. She began to make more. Her commute was now longer. She worked longer hours. She went back to school. Meanwhile, my marketing career stalled. I was underpaid and overworked with no advancement opportunities, but I couldn’t find anything better within a 50 mile radius. We had money now, but no free time and we were both super stressed. Nothing got done.
I don’t think we had an initial conversation about it, I just… started doing the housework. All of it. Fell into the learned routine. I spent so much time commuting that I had to go to physical therapy partially to just undo the damage it had done, I worked 50+ hours a week, helped pay for my wife’s schooling, paid for our wedding and the downpayment on the house, tried (and failed) to maintain fulfilling hobbies and relationships, while also doing all of the cooking, cleaning, laundry, budgeting, maintenance, pet care and whatever else. We don’t have kids, but I can’t even imagine what that would have looked like.
Anyway, I did this for five years and then I got fucking mad about it.
Look, I’m not going to do something so audacious as to give marital advice on the regular, but I will say, sometimes, for the betterment of the marriage, the household, the kids, whatever, one partner might have to take on more than the other in terms of communal responsibilities while the other pursues something, and no, it’s not “fair,” but that doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary, or at least, an understanding and loving thing to do. Sometimes, you just gotta eat shit. I recognize this, and I love my wife, so I did it.
Five years is a long time though, and in that time, I had completely lost myself. I gained weight. My mental health deteriorated. I wasn’t even sure if I liked some of my hobbies or friends anymore, but I didn’t have throughput to try anything new. I truly didn’t know who I was anymore.
I was often frustrated and angry, which I tried to direct at “the situation,” but when your wife gets to shirk off doing laundry while you’re paying someone to unkink your shoulders on a weekly basis, sometimes you can’t help but think, “hey honey, real quick, but what the fuck are we doing here?”
Because I then found myself on the cusp of 40, realizing that I’ve exercised almost no agency in my life. Plowing ahead, doing what is expected and demanded and necessary, unquestioning, blindly, tirelessly. There is no person at the end of that, just a series of heuristics reacting to stimuli.
I think I so desperately didn’t want to live life impoverished and addicted and aggrieved like my parents that I didn’t notice I was constantly finding myself in the same situations they created for me as a child, and that I had failed to close the loop in other ways.
But sometimes, folks, you do get lucky. You can tell your wife all of those things and make an insane ask: please let me quit my job and replace it with nothing. Please give me the latitude I never had to find myself. Please save me from his hellish grind we have both trapped me in. And she understands. Like, really understands. And says, “Sure, I will earn all the money while you take care of everything else and spend the rest of your time as you like” and she’s not even being sarcastic. She will thank you for the sacrifices you made and repay the faith you had in her.
That was three years ago. I’ve lost almost 40 pounds and I no longer have suicidal ideation. I get to do the sorts of things I’m good at while also not overextending myself. The house is clean, the budget is balanced, food and other sundry is always stocked, and most importantly, we’re both happier and dramatically less stressed.
My wife remarks that it’s weird that she doesn’t know how to work our washing machine anymore, but snort-laughs when I ask if she’d rather go back. The answer is obvious for both of us.
I’m not going to bore you with the details of my days, if you thought that’s what this would be about. You know what housework looks like. It’s a bunch of fucking chores and endless administrative tedium. I keep a desktop computer just so I have a place to store all these goddamn contracts and PDFs and junk. Not interesting.
But it’s rewarding in a way that I haven’t experienced from a job since I was a paperboy or working at McDonald’s, where I could hand someone their paper or cheeseburger, personally, and say, “here” and see the reaction on their face. Every job is some moving-numbers-around-a-spreadsheet sort of pretend bullshit now that, for me, there is such a poisonous disconnect between the effort I put in and the end result.
As a househusband, however, I can immediately and intimately see the effects of my labor. I love knowing that because I’ve done all the housework, my wife can just clock out and play video games while I make dinner. It’s like I’ve triggered a chain reaction that ends in her comfort. Very satisfying seeing my work pay off so directly.
Like I said, I know the topics of domestic housework and gender dynamics often go hand in hand, but I can’t really offer much from personal experience in that regard. Even though a lot of what I have experienced is often attributed to the lived realities of women (parentification is in fact sometimes also called “eldest daughter syndrome” because of tactic’s propensity to target girls), I’m still a man and don’t have a lot of insight into how these experiences affect women specifically.
Once, an acquaintance lashed out at me, telling me I should get back into the kitchen to cook my wife dinner. I just laughed. Maybe that’s a luxury, free from centuries of gendered domestic servitude, but my guy, I will absolutely go into the kitchen to cook my wife a delicious meal that we will then eat together. Don’t threaten me with a good time.
Honestly, I don’t think a lot about the gender implications insofar as they apply to me personally. Don’t really have an opinion on it.
I think a lot about my grandfather. He’s still alive, trucking along at 85 and as warm and gregarious as ever. He’s a lifelong gardener who has passed that down to me. He cooks often, and generously. It never occurred to me that care and kindness could not also be masculine traits.
And if they’re not, I still don’t give a shit. If the alternative is the Roman Empire or being mad at women on a podcast or stoicism or memecoin crypto or whatever dork shit the lads have cooked up, I’d rather just go back to the kitchen.
My So-Called Fantasy Life
There’s this new game called Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, a sequel to a Nintendo 3DS game from 2014. This one isn’t on 3DS. That’d be weird. It’s on everything else though.
Fantasy Life i is pretty good. It’s a standard action RPG, except that what would be called roles or classes in other similar games are called Lives in Fantasy Life i, and you can swap Lives whenever you want. What’s cool is that there are combat Lives, of course, because this a video game and the primary language in this medium is death, but there are more pastoral Lives, like angler or tailor, and they all have their own skill trees and mini-games and quests.
Fantasy Life i has all these different parts, including town building, random dungeons, multiplayer, and a massive expanse to explore, so there’s something novel around every corner, but none of these things are particularly deep.
Like, the skill trees are dominated by small stat bump nodes, not actual new abilities you can try. Multiplayer is shockingly limited. Lives that seem like they’d have more interactions with each other, such woodcutter and carpenter, don’t actually. Most of the exploration and discovery kind of gameplay happens on a map that is, as far as I can tell, completely disconnected from the main game, which is really bizarre.
Somehow, though, it all works. I love it. I’m having a great time. I can’t wait to play with my friends once I finish the main story. Each feature is just robust and interconnected enough to be satisfying without creating too much bloat despite the number of systems. I wish there was a little more meat on some of these bones, but I can’t complain too much. Other than Marvel Rivals, the only game I keep coming back to lately is Fantasy Life i. Must be doing something right.
It’s the tail end of May so I’ve planted my annuals for the year. I usually do a bunch of potted flowers around the yard to really bring out the color and attract the bees, as well as vegetables, of course. The vegetables are almost always the same thing, because I’m good at growing those particular vegetables and I’m very good at eating them. But I try to do at least one new or different thing a year, and this year, it’s watermelon. Never grown a melon before. It’ll be fun to see how it goes.
That’s all I got this time. See ya.
Insightful, cathartic, great writing. Thank you for sharing your experience!