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This is a little rambling and incoherent, sorry!
During a three hour drive yesterday, I waylaid R. with a concern I have. We are in the middle of a very expensive construction project and if we are successful, in a few years we will be living in that house with my sister and her family.
Not my son, tho. He’s adamant he wants his own mid-century modern house and a partner and maybe kids some day. Which, sure, fine, happy to support you in that project. Also, today I got a call from the doctor’s office. He apparently dropped off a form for them to fill out, they filled it out and then, despite the fact that he is 19 years old and he dropped the form off and they have his contact information, they called me to ask where to deliver the form. I thought to myself, see, T., this is what happens when you do stuff in person and on paper. But what I said out loud was, do you have his email? They did. Can you send it to his email? They could. And now it’s back to not being my problem again.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years bouncing tasks back to the person that originated the task or was managing the task but which somehow migrated to me for reasons that are super unclear. Part of this problem is whose phone number or whatever is attached to which account, and the fact that at some point, I got so annoyed about the land line having calls on its messages and no one picking them up that I just forwarded it to my cell phone so that would never happen again. R. never answered the landline or picked up the messages, so when his calls went there, they were either ignored or I answered them. Over time, he’s gotten better about giving out his cell for stuff that is his.
But a lot of the problem is that organizationally, things like schools and doctors and so forth want contact information for both parents, and no matter what you tell them or what you do, they are prone to contacting the mother first and/or only. It’s annoying AF, but as bad as it is for me, I know in detail how much worse it is for all my friends who are fathers, who are the person dealing with all the kid / doctor / etc. stuff, and who struggle with all the information getting routed to the mother. Depending on the situation, it may just annoy the mother, but in some situations, it gets really lost because she isn’t available or lacks the capacity or whatever, and things can go horribly wrong.
Over time, I’ve gotten really, really, really good at abandoning tasks that other people expect me to do that I don’t want to be doing. I do still pay my taxes, on time, altho to be fair, I actually value paying taxes more than the vast majority of people, so that may not be the best example. My general attitude is that the floor is the floor and it isn’t expected to be clean because people walk on it, and I’ve had a lifelong habit of walking barefoot in all kinds of inappropriate to walk barefoot type places so walking on a mildly crunchy surface bothers me not at all (I will clean up anything sticky that I encounter. I don’t like ants.).
Between refusing to do things that I don’t want to do, and bouncing tasks back to the person who originated them, and just flat insisting that R. fill out forms and telling everyone who asks for a form to be filled out (I’m not talking about taxes here, more like those screening / medical history forms) that forms enrage me so can we maybe discuss why they want the form filled out? It’s surprising how many forms don’t need to be filled out at all. It’s even more surprising how sympathetic people are to hearing that forms enrage me. Anyway. This combination, in conjunction with simplifying and routinizing a lot of daily tasks (plus the kids getting older) has gotten Keeping Life Ticking Along down to a point where I took on this insanely expensive construction project (why, walkitout, why. I mean, I know why I did it, but JFC) which has unsurprisingly turned into a full time job plus.
I’ve been careful with the construction project to make sure that there are defined areas that are the responsibility of the person or persons living in that area. There’s R. and my space, and the stair down to A.’s space and the guest bedroom. The three of us do okay together, so I figure that’ll run fine. There’s my sister’s space, and she runs a house, so that’ll be fine. My nieces’ space I expect will be fine, and I’ll make sure they understand that the part of their sitting area visible from the top of the stair should be “presentable” to people coming up the stair or out of the elevator, and we will negotiate what “presentable” means (nightly or first-thing-in-the-morning clearing out of plates/cups/etc, and if random piles are a problem we’ll negotiate storage furniture and hopefully we never have to have a conversation about Please Don’t Leave Underwear Strewn About When We Have Guests / Between the Hours of 10 am and 10 pm or whatever we settle on). I’m already planning on getting them a multi-panel standing screen which should help out with any sightlines that generate chronic issues.
But even with all that, and even assuming I’ll manage the main living / dining and R. will manage the music room and the neighboring bathroom, we’re still stuck with the feature stair, connectors connected to it, and things like the pool and exercise areas. I don’t want to take that on personally, and I don’t want to dump it on someone else permanently. So after talking it over, I went looking for an approach for managing a household among multiple adults.
What I wound up looking at was Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play, and I’m reading that. It’s good, altho not precisely what I was looking for. I have to laugh, because it’s clear from within the book, and reviews of the book, that a whole lot of people care about things like thank you cards and their kids participating in spirit days and so forth and are willing to do things like volunteer at the school. A lot of women and a few men are having to make hard choices between what kind of job / career they can have and actually keeping up with this stuff. I’m not going to say I have never sent a thank you note (altho I have definitely latched onto the take a picture and text a thank you with it, because wow that’s just easier AND better, and I’m super happy to see that many in my kinship network have adopted this pattern as well) or made sure my kid was wearing some weird thing for school, but I absolutely sacrificed that shit early and often. And I don’t even have a job.
Sidelight — that’s a really weird thing, reading Rodsky’s book from the perspective of having kids post-retirement. I really don’t fit into that book at all. I like her “Unicorn Space” idea, and as I look back over my time as a parent, and consider the number of books I’ve written, languages I’ve learned, genealogy I’ve done, legos I’ve built, etc., well, I’m pretty sure that one has worked out pretty well for me. R. reduced his bicycling miles this year, because last year’s 10K was a little too much. OTOH, I have literally never traveled without my children, unless you count a night at one hospital giving birth to Thing 2, and a night at another hospital having my appendix removed.
The kids were my project — my longest project — and I went into the project extremely consciously. There’s no way I would have done this if I had still needed to have a job, and I pretty much always resented R. working, especially as it became increasingly unnecessary to maintaining our lifestyle.
ETA:
Reading “Fair Play”, in “Beauty & Wardrobe (Her)”, an example of Things That Absolutely Fucking Infuriate Me”:
“Even if you’re a DIY kind of woman, it still takes time to slather on moisturizer, pluck your eyebrows, style your hair, and put on lipstick.”
Does it take time to do these things? Sure. Does everyone woman want to do these things? Absolutely not.
Fuck. This. Fucking. Author. Gah.
I think the underlying mechanic (a set of cards, a Minimum Standard of Care, redealing) is pretty solid. Everything else about this book is a flaming pile of shit.
During a three hour drive yesterday, I waylaid R. with a concern I have. We are in the middle of a very expensive construction project and if we are successful, in a few years we will be living in that house with my sister and her family.
Not my son, tho. He’s adamant he wants his own mid-century modern house and a partner and maybe kids some day. Which, sure, fine, happy to support you in that project. Also, today I got a call from the doctor’s office. He apparently dropped off a form for them to fill out, they filled it out and then, despite the fact that he is 19 years old and he dropped the form off and they have his contact information, they called me to ask where to deliver the form. I thought to myself, see, T., this is what happens when you do stuff in person and on paper. But what I said out loud was, do you have his email? They did. Can you send it to his email? They could. And now it’s back to not being my problem again.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years bouncing tasks back to the person that originated the task or was managing the task but which somehow migrated to me for reasons that are super unclear. Part of this problem is whose phone number or whatever is attached to which account, and the fact that at some point, I got so annoyed about the land line having calls on its messages and no one picking them up that I just forwarded it to my cell phone so that would never happen again. R. never answered the landline or picked up the messages, so when his calls went there, they were either ignored or I answered them. Over time, he’s gotten better about giving out his cell for stuff that is his.
But a lot of the problem is that organizationally, things like schools and doctors and so forth want contact information for both parents, and no matter what you tell them or what you do, they are prone to contacting the mother first and/or only. It’s annoying AF, but as bad as it is for me, I know in detail how much worse it is for all my friends who are fathers, who are the person dealing with all the kid / doctor / etc. stuff, and who struggle with all the information getting routed to the mother. Depending on the situation, it may just annoy the mother, but in some situations, it gets really lost because she isn’t available or lacks the capacity or whatever, and things can go horribly wrong.
Over time, I’ve gotten really, really, really good at abandoning tasks that other people expect me to do that I don’t want to be doing. I do still pay my taxes, on time, altho to be fair, I actually value paying taxes more than the vast majority of people, so that may not be the best example. My general attitude is that the floor is the floor and it isn’t expected to be clean because people walk on it, and I’ve had a lifelong habit of walking barefoot in all kinds of inappropriate to walk barefoot type places so walking on a mildly crunchy surface bothers me not at all (I will clean up anything sticky that I encounter. I don’t like ants.).
Between refusing to do things that I don’t want to do, and bouncing tasks back to the person who originated them, and just flat insisting that R. fill out forms and telling everyone who asks for a form to be filled out (I’m not talking about taxes here, more like those screening / medical history forms) that forms enrage me so can we maybe discuss why they want the form filled out? It’s surprising how many forms don’t need to be filled out at all. It’s even more surprising how sympathetic people are to hearing that forms enrage me. Anyway. This combination, in conjunction with simplifying and routinizing a lot of daily tasks (plus the kids getting older) has gotten Keeping Life Ticking Along down to a point where I took on this insanely expensive construction project (why, walkitout, why. I mean, I know why I did it, but JFC) which has unsurprisingly turned into a full time job plus.
I’ve been careful with the construction project to make sure that there are defined areas that are the responsibility of the person or persons living in that area. There’s R. and my space, and the stair down to A.’s space and the guest bedroom. The three of us do okay together, so I figure that’ll run fine. There’s my sister’s space, and she runs a house, so that’ll be fine. My nieces’ space I expect will be fine, and I’ll make sure they understand that the part of their sitting area visible from the top of the stair should be “presentable” to people coming up the stair or out of the elevator, and we will negotiate what “presentable” means (nightly or first-thing-in-the-morning clearing out of plates/cups/etc, and if random piles are a problem we’ll negotiate storage furniture and hopefully we never have to have a conversation about Please Don’t Leave Underwear Strewn About When We Have Guests / Between the Hours of 10 am and 10 pm or whatever we settle on). I’m already planning on getting them a multi-panel standing screen which should help out with any sightlines that generate chronic issues.
But even with all that, and even assuming I’ll manage the main living / dining and R. will manage the music room and the neighboring bathroom, we’re still stuck with the feature stair, connectors connected to it, and things like the pool and exercise areas. I don’t want to take that on personally, and I don’t want to dump it on someone else permanently. So after talking it over, I went looking for an approach for managing a household among multiple adults.
What I wound up looking at was Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play, and I’m reading that. It’s good, altho not precisely what I was looking for. I have to laugh, because it’s clear from within the book, and reviews of the book, that a whole lot of people care about things like thank you cards and their kids participating in spirit days and so forth and are willing to do things like volunteer at the school. A lot of women and a few men are having to make hard choices between what kind of job / career they can have and actually keeping up with this stuff. I’m not going to say I have never sent a thank you note (altho I have definitely latched onto the take a picture and text a thank you with it, because wow that’s just easier AND better, and I’m super happy to see that many in my kinship network have adopted this pattern as well) or made sure my kid was wearing some weird thing for school, but I absolutely sacrificed that shit early and often. And I don’t even have a job.
Sidelight — that’s a really weird thing, reading Rodsky’s book from the perspective of having kids post-retirement. I really don’t fit into that book at all. I like her “Unicorn Space” idea, and as I look back over my time as a parent, and consider the number of books I’ve written, languages I’ve learned, genealogy I’ve done, legos I’ve built, etc., well, I’m pretty sure that one has worked out pretty well for me. R. reduced his bicycling miles this year, because last year’s 10K was a little too much. OTOH, I have literally never traveled without my children, unless you count a night at one hospital giving birth to Thing 2, and a night at another hospital having my appendix removed.
The kids were my project — my longest project — and I went into the project extremely consciously. There’s no way I would have done this if I had still needed to have a job, and I pretty much always resented R. working, especially as it became increasingly unnecessary to maintaining our lifestyle.
ETA:
Reading “Fair Play”, in “Beauty & Wardrobe (Her)”, an example of Things That Absolutely Fucking Infuriate Me”:
“Even if you’re a DIY kind of woman, it still takes time to slather on moisturizer, pluck your eyebrows, style your hair, and put on lipstick.”
Does it take time to do these things? Sure. Does everyone woman want to do these things? Absolutely not.
Fuck. This. Fucking. Author. Gah.
I think the underlying mechanic (a set of cards, a Minimum Standard of Care, redealing) is pretty solid. Everything else about this book is a flaming pile of shit.