You Deserve To Rest Too

Lessons on marriage, money and power from the Paleolithic

I do not generally look forward to the holidays. It’s not that I don’t like playing Santa (I do!) but I dread being home with my children for a full two weeks without any school or childcare. I gave up making travel plans long ago because one of us is always sick with some deadly infection. This year did not disappoint. We are now on Day Five of both kids being home with me, coughing up a lung.

My husband, of course, goes off to work every day. My work is more flexible, less well-paid (by a lot), and therefore more disposable. I am the default primary caregiver and probably always will be, whether I like it or not. Last night my husband had a holiday work dinner (to which I was not invited) and so while he was out making merry with his colleagues, I was wiping snot and administering Tylenol. By the time he got home, we had all gone to bed.

I love my husband and I appreciate what he does for our family. He works hard and his job is stressful. Because he brings in the dough, I am free to do the work that I love (when my kids aren’t sick), but it comes at a price. The greater the difference in our earnings, the less power I feel I have in our relationship. This is not because he is using money as a power lever, but because we have to structure things in order to protect his job. This means I always take care of the sick kids, I cancel my meetings when the nanny is unexpectedly out, and I do the nighttime care so that he is well-rested in the morning.

However, there is one thing I insist on, and that is my right to rest on weekends. If he goes out surfing for a couple of hours, then I get an equivalent amount of time to read at the coffee shop or go for a hike with a friend (sans kiddos).

A Hadza husband and wife forage together

A worrisome comment I often hear from stay-at-home moms is that they struggle to ask their husbands for time off. It never ceases to amaze me that this is still a fight even in 2024. Despite feminists’ best effort to quantify the value of unpaid domestic labor, we still systematically undervalue this work in society and in the context of a marriage. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the notion that a man’s paid work outside the home is more valuable pervades every aspect of our relationships and social structure, and it has real consequences for mothers. One mother I spoke to said she feels bad occasionally asking her husband to watch the kids on the weekend so she can catch a break. Her husband, on the other hand, has no such qualms. This woman is a self-described feminist, but she has internalized the idea that her work is less valuable and therefore she is less deserving of rest and time off. As someone who has worked a full-time corporate job and also done stints as a full-time stay-at-home-mom, I can tell you without hesitation that the work of mothering is harder, more exhausting, and equally (if not more) important to the healthy functioning of the family unit. But somehow, we ourselves still manage to consistently undervalue it.

In my personal experience, things felt slightly more equitable back when I worked a corporate job, but it was still far form being 50/50. Indeed, the data show that women who work outside the home and who earn more than their husbands still do more domestic work and childcare. I believe that a lot of the backlash we are seeing against feminism and feminist values in the modern context boils down to one simple fact: mothers were sold a lie that equal earnings meant equal division of labor on the home-front, but that’s simply not how it is playing out for most of us. Understandably, many women feel that our grandmothers were better off. If we have to do all of the domestic labor anyway, why not let the man go out and earn the paycheck? Unfortunately, many families have no choice but to bring in a double income, and even if they could opt out of the dual-earner model, is going back to the 1950s housewife dynamic really going to solve anything?