Working From Home Makes Me Feel Like a Housewife and I Hate It
A letter to female remote entrepreneurs who might not know what’s coming.
I’m a strong independent woman. I make my own money, I pay my own bills, I keep my cats luxuriously housed in ludicrously expensive cat trees on my own dime.
But when my husband and I moved to Boston and I found myself alone, working at home, for long silent stretches of time, I began to struggle. All of a sudden, I’d turned into a housewife.
Because I was home and I had the time, I took on most of our house duties even as I managed my own freelance writing business. I vacuumed, I swiffered, I cleaned surfaces, I took the trash out. I planned the meals, wrote the shopping list, stayed home to take care of the delivery, and decided who would cook on which nights.
I organized our social calendar, reaching out to mutual friends to meet up and reminding him of upcoming events when he forgot.
Back when we both worked in offices, we split the household chores more or less equitably. However, I found that when I worked from home, I did more of the home-work purely by virtue of being at home more.
This really distressed me. I didn’t handle it well. It manifested me passive-aggressively harping at my…
