AITA: My Husband Carries The Mental Load

On marital divisions of labor, gender roles, daddymommies, statistical aberrations, and my anxiety I’m a bad wife

On Friday afternoon, I dashed from bakery to bakery to grocery store, in search of last minute challah before daycare pick-up. “I ended up with a baguette from TJ’s,” I told my husband, sheepishly. “Did you get half and half?” he asked. My heart sank. I had not, our half and half status being off my radar since my husband devotedly brings me my one cup of coffee in bed every morning. Nor had I glanced at the running grocery list we keep on a notepad next to the fridge, not having expected to do a full grocery run when I ran out to meet a friend, pick up a chicken at the butcher, pick up challah at the bakery, pick up my husband at the train, and pick up my daughter at daycare. I had a list of tasks to execute so that we could roast a chicken for shabbat dinner, but I had not been thinking about what lay on the periphery of those tasks. I was thinking like … a husband.

@jimmyonrelationshipsMental load/Domestic labor debate #mentalload #domesticlabor #wivesoftiktok #relationshiptips #arguement #husbandandwife

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

I’ve long suspected that I am the husband in my relationship. It’s my husband who shoulders the vast majority of the cooking and grocery shopping in our household. He also takes on all of the gardening, and was doing more of the cleaning until we hired a twice-monthly housecleaner. He’s the one more likely to say, “I’m going to go vacuum the basement,” or tackle the piles of mail accumulating on the kitchen counter. In my defense, it’s true that some or most of the time, I am performing childcare while he tackles these tasks. But it’s also true that he is performing all of this domestic labor on the margins of a very demanding full-time job.

There is a well-worn trope of a husband standing in the aisle of the grocery store, staring mystified at a list. He calls his wife to say that he sees red onions and yellow onions and white onions, but no green onions. On the other end of the phone, she rolls her eyes, resentful that a man can live on the earth for 40 years and enjoy the kick of green onions on a weekly basis without knowing what they look like. I am the husband. I may know what green onions look like, but I can never remember a jalapeño versus a serrano, or what kind of canned tomatoes we use to make tomato sauce. I will proudly come home with two boxes of Israeli couscous only for my husband to tell me that he bought two boxes yesterday. I most recently induced an eye roll by coming home with red wine vinegar instead of rice vinegar (though I blame this mistake on my husband’s illegible scrawl).

Though I may be a husband, I am also a mom. I am the one who keeps track of things like where the swim diapers are, and what a swim diaper is, and whether we need the reusable kind or the disposable kind. I am the one who buys her clothes and gives away her clothes and labels her clothes for daycare with tiny custom stickers that I ordered online. Sometimes it feels like my job as a mom is 50% shopping. I make sure we have things like Pedialyte pops and miniature forks (not plastic!). I carry things like a three piece secondhand kitchen set down three flights of stairs and order a third back-up baby doll from Amazon. I know where both baby dolls are at any given moment as if they are also my children. I check Facebook Marketplace every day for Melissa & Doug food sets. I research the best sunscreens for toddlers and buy extra for daycare. I have a bin in the basement of sticker books I am saving for air travel.

I read toddler cooking blogs—if you can call it reading when a web page is 95% ads—and blend lentils and carrots into a tomato sauce with an immersion blender in the hope I will get my child to eat a gram of protein with her pasta. I study Babylist’s weekly list of recent baby and kid recalls. I follow Dr. Becky and am inundated with toddler parenting content as a result. I click on things, like TODDLER FRIENDLY SNACKS AT COSTCO, or TOYS I WILL NOT BUY FOR MY TODDLER, VOL. 2 (BY A PEDIATRICIAN), or “AT 18 MONTH’S ZOE WASN’T MEETING HER SPEECH MILESTONES. WHEN HER MAMA CALLED ME…(SWIPE FOR MORE).” My mom friends and I text about the fact that “lol my kid hasn’t eaten a vegetable in 27 days” and trade kid-approved recipes.

I’m a mom. But am I a wife?