Often I think about why men never seem to understand the heavy burden that the women in their life shoulder when it comes to cooking, cleaning, and basically managing the household.
Even for those women who enjoy cooking or like tidying up - the tedium of doing these tasks repeatedly from now unto forever is not especially enticing. In fact, I'm sure I am not wrong when I say the women would appreciate it if they didn't have to do these things at all. If they could reserve these things as a hobby or as a fun way to decompress.
But as surely as we must breathe, we must eat and we need a certain standard of hygiene. So there starts the endless cycle of sorting through meals according to taste and health needs, and the picking up of socks and washing bed sheets.
There are, of course, men who do take up their share of household chores. Men who cook. Men who clean. Men who remember to make calls to fix things. But I have never seen men become frustrated or angry or sad at the prospect of having to do these things which, to me, demonstrates how these tasks are not something that men think about deeply or plan their days around. For instance, a woman might be enjoying some time outside the house with her friends but she could be thinking about the right moment she needs to leave so that she can go home and get her laundry and start dinner.
Or maybe I am wrong and men do have the ghost of household management responsibilities following them around like women do.
Nowadays I think of my mother and my aunt who manage our house and who do the thankless tasks of cooking, cleaning, replenishing, etc. I say thankless because everyone automatically assumes the food will be cooked, the dishes will be washed, laundry folded, toilets cleaned, kitchen rolls and rubbish bags replenished. It can seem like small tasks to buy and replace the toilet paper. And sure enough they are when compared to working in a lab to find the cure for cancer or whatever! But oh, the daily grind that activates the tedious work of living must be one of the biggest curses of the gender divide.
Our meals are not the simple sandwich/omlette variety. There is rice - to be washed, steamed. There is daal - washed, steamed in the pressure cooker, sautéed and seasoned. There is the meat dish and the vegetable dish - washed, measured, cut, fried. There is the salad. There is the chutney. Even the quickest, most experienced cook will take at least one hour. For mere mortals like me, it takes up to 3 hours to prepare dinner. This is then followed by serving food, washing up the huge amount of utensils that went into fixing up the meal, cleaning up the kitchen and throwing away the rubbish.
I am planning to cook dinner this weekend to give my mom and aunt time off from the kitchen. I have been going through a mental list of dishes I can cook, checking the ingredients since Thursday morning. These are not some fancy meals I'm planning to make. This is the reality for most women.
All this laborious chore is time-consuming, physically draining. I don't want accolades if I can have time and peace instead.
My dad works long hours. He comes home tired.
My mom stays home. She prepares his food.
When my dad asks if there is more salad or more daal, I feel affronted for my mother's sake because it means that perhaps the dinner in front of him is not really up to his taste. That something is missing.
Mothers who work all their lives - at the office, at home, at managing different relationships out in the society - never really retire. Because (you guessed it!) families need to eat, houses need to be cleaned, items need to be replenished.
This gendered inheritance - I hope we can stop passing it on to our daughters.
