No, Husband, I Don’t Want Your Help

It’s 8:oo PM and I have just finished making dinner. Sitting down feels rather good, and I relish in the angle of my back even if it means we are eating at the couch in front of the TV again, rather than at the dining table covered in charging devices and unfinished thank-you cards. After finishing my plate, I go to get up to return it to the kitchen when my husband silently extends his own finished plate in my direction. “Getting more?” he asks with his eyes.

It’s not that the walk to the kitchen is far or that I really mind missing that 90 seconds of a GoT episode I’ve already seen three times. While it’s merely a small ask on his part, my husband’s gesture is one that I’ve experienced hundreds of times over is a reminder that, although we share so much, the expectations we have of ourselves exist on parallel planes.

We are both ambitious people, although the word takes different meanings for us. For my husband, ambitious means chasing after his dreams with fervor, strong sense of vision, and working beyond any accepted title. For me (any many women, I sense), ambitious takes a much more Caesarean feel.

So let it be with Caesar … The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it …

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

When a woman takes on am ambitious role, there is an unspoken rule that demands that it’s permissible if she’s also able to maintain the sanity, cleanliness, and level of function in the home as well. When my husband plans his day, he looks at the meetings on his calendar, upcoming deadlines, and emerging opportunities on his newsfeed. Perhaps he even seeks out a window of time that could be used to work out. For myself and many others, this same process of taking stock also happens, but after a number of chores, taking inventory of items in the fridge, planning out meals, mentally running through a list of automatic bills are about to process, skimming Etsy for gift ideas for mother-in-law’s birthday in a few weeks, noting that we need to pick up scouring powder from Target before it runs out, timing out the schedule for this week’s six loads of laundry… You get the picture. If you’re reading this, it’s very possible you have a framed copy of the picture permanently hanging on the walls of your consciousness.

While I am running through these tasks, it’s not as if my husband is sitting on his ass and watching GoT fan theory videos (although, sometimes, that is exactly the case). Most of the time, he is working. He’s networking to make the connections that are going to grease the wheels of potential acquisitions in the future. He’s educating himself on how to best migrate his web app to mobile. He’s seeding through his company’s metrics to adjust next month’s goals in order to reach even higher benchmarks.

He doesn’t seem to notice the dishes piling up in the sink, the lowering level of the dog’s food, the approaching date of filing our taxes, or the state of the pantry. When he asks me what I’ve got going on today, does he think I’m really listing out everything I need to do that day? If and when I do, he feels overwhelmed for me, calms me, going, “Woh, woh, woh.. It’s okay if the dishes don’t get done today. Can’t we [you] just go to the store next week?”

His well-tempered response has the best of intentions but also shows that he does not have years of data to show that these things will get done eventually, and they will get done by me.

Sometimes, I’ll receive a “What can I do to help you?” which triggers me a bit. I’m not pleased with myself to admint that his well-intentioned offer ruffles my feathers, but it does. Help me? Help is what 3-year olds do when you’re baking cookies because they haven’t yet learned how to do it themselves. Help is what you offer to someone who is going through a trying time. It’s what you ask for when you don’t know the answer to something. Help is not what people do in response to tasks that are just a part of being a functioning adult. Husband, even if it’s coming from a place of love, I don’t want your help.

I want to unload half of these things that consume my mental space without worrying that it’s something unfinished that will still fall back on me. I want to be able to give deeper focus to my professional goals without having the entirety of a family’s responsibilities teeming in the back of my mind. I don’t want to have to ask my life partner to care about the tasks that keep our home together, only to then have to deal with the ramifications of his lack of coping skills when met with the unfamiliarity or difficulty of these tasks.

It is habitual for me to foresee needs in my home and plan ahead to smooth out the necessities before approaching my personal or professional goals. This habit is something that was raised into me and became a given. For my husband, this was not commonplace for him. His mother was always a step behind and a step ahead him, making sure his clothing was folded, his lunches made, and his schedule planned. This was how his mother showed him love, and I cannot fault her for that. But it has put me in a position to choose between continuing the cycle she’s set for him, or to reteach him as if he were a child, which he is not. I would be damn near offended if my partner were to ask if I knew how to fold his t-shirts or what the grocery budget was for the week, but I feel it is a position many people find themselves in.

For men to do better, it needs to be as much about their behavior in the workplace as in the home.