I was a homemaker for about two decades, then I got divorced and got my first full-time job when my two sons were in their late teens. It was a corporate job at a Fortune 500 company -- Fortune 200 for part of the time I worked there.
At some point I sat my sons down and said "I am no longer a full-time homemaker. I have a full-time job. Yet, I still load the dishwasher and washing machine at least once a day, I still buy all the groceries and I still do all the cooking. Either one or both of you needs to get a job OR you two need to take over the women's work."
I then explained my reasons why I would rather they take over the women's work. They agreed with me and we set about making this happen.
I was a divorced single mom with health issues and at some point my car was repossessed and I was walking to work. Only mostly NOT because I usually was offered a ride within about ten minutes, so in reality I was catching rides with various people, many of them people who also worked where I worked but often they didn't really know me.
There were like 2000 employees in my building and another 700 in the building next door where I chose to get lunch much of the time, once that building was finished. People "saw me walking all the time" so I seemed familiar to them, but, no, they didn't really know me.
People get very chatty on short car trips sitting side-by-side. Side-by-side conversations are less threatening than face-to-face ones and people tend to feel free to let their hair down because of the limited time scope and I'm a chatty Cathy anyway.
In the course of making conversation with these strangers who happened to work where I worked, it often came out that I was a divorced single mom and no longer had a car and etc. If they picked me up to take me home at the end of my workday, they would get me to my apartment and say "Oh, you poor thing! And NOW you have to cook dinner after working all day!"
I would say "No. I might need to peel potatoes, but dinner has probably already been started. My son cooks dinner. I will peel potatoes and shower and he will serve me my dinner."
They would turn green with envy and stutter and stammer and backtrack. Apparently, THEY needed to start dinner when they got home after working all day if they were women. I did not.
These were mostly women with better-paying jobs than mine who had worked at the company longer than me and had nice cars and so forth. These women were the best of the best of the best, SIR!" and yet most of them likely still did the lion's share of the women's work at home -- sometimes even cooking dinner while their husband was unemployed, though he still had "male privilege" for picking what car to buy or whatever.
Nutrient Dense is one of my blogs and it grows out of the fact that I successfully handed off the women's work to my sons after leaving my marriage and transitioning from full-time homemaker to full-time corporate employee, something most women seem to be failing to pull off. But my reasons for writing it are more complex than the above story likely suggests.
I wanted my sons to learn to do the women's work in part because my oldest son has the same condition I have. I was convinced that if he didn't learn to cook and clean, I would be his prisoner for the rest of my life and there would be no hope of him ever moving out. I also felt strongly that this meant that if I died, his death would soon follow.
In Japan, during some period of extended peace, the samurai class apparently had too little to do. They began writing poetry and making up nonsense about stuffing your helmet with flower petals so that when your enemies decapitated you, the smell of your head rolling past their feet wouldn't offend their sensitive noses.
I think women's work has become a bit like that. It's sort of jumped the shark in that most families no longer have eight or twelve kids, so most families no longer really need a full-time wife and mom cooking and cleaning and dedicating herself to the women's work and I think we've begun essentially making crap up to justify having some man continue to pay our bills.
When I was on Metafilter, I sometimes tried to tell women "Some portion of what you do is make work and isn't necessary and you won't know what part of what you do is unnecessary until you STOP doing it and find that it doesn't matter." I think women didn't want to hear this in part because it's too painful to bear to hear that so much of your time is straight up WASTED and spent POINTLESSLY.
The idea of women's work is rooted in a pattern of living where men have paid jobs and women cook and clean and raise kids. With most modern women having only one or two kids, a lot of the rules for how to make life work and what men are supposed to do and what women are supposed to do simply no longer make sense.
Nutrient Dense grows in part out of the fact that my son straight up told me he would NEVER cook the fancy, complicated meals I cooked when he was little, yet he is a better cook than I am and we eat better than we used to. Our meals are simpler and no one is "chained to the stove" to make them happen, but we eat even BETTER than we used to eat.
Nutrient Dense is intended to capture a new paradigm for how people can take proper care of themselves, regardless of gender, in a post-heteronormative world where full-time homemakers are mostly a thing of the past. It is intended to set women free of the need to be chained to a stove and set men free of the need to own a personal maid and cook who provides slave labor but gets the spiffy title of "wife and mom" to make it sound respectable.
To be clear, wife and mom as a profession is perfectly respectable. It's what I did for about two decades.
And then I got divorced. I didn't continue to claim that title while having too little to do to fill my day and too much to do to also pursue a real career.
If you have been married a long time and you and your spouse are both happy with your current arrangement, I am not trying to say there is something wrong with it. But if either of you isn't happy with it, I am saying that it's possible to eat well and have a clean house and let both partners have full lives pursuing paid work or hobbies or what have you.
And I am saying that if you are one of the many, many people today who lives alone or is part of a childless couple and both of you work and neither of you really cooks from scratch and you are frustrated with spending too much money on food while eating terribly, it's possible to find better answers than that.
I'm not the only person who has noticed that this is a big issue for a LOT of people. There are MANY businesses trying hard to meet this inadequately met need, many of them meal delivery services of some sort.
I'm just trying to do it by adding information to the system at this point in time. I'm trying to change people's minds and perspective mostly.
At some point I sat my sons down and said "I am no longer a full-time homemaker. I have a full-time job. Yet, I still load the dishwasher and washing machine at least once a day, I still buy all the groceries and I still do all the cooking. Either one or both of you needs to get a job OR you two need to take over the women's work."
I then explained my reasons why I would rather they take over the women's work. They agreed with me and we set about making this happen.
I was a divorced single mom with health issues and at some point my car was repossessed and I was walking to work. Only mostly NOT because I usually was offered a ride within about ten minutes, so in reality I was catching rides with various people, many of them people who also worked where I worked but often they didn't really know me.
There were like 2000 employees in my building and another 700 in the building next door where I chose to get lunch much of the time, once that building was finished. People "saw me walking all the time" so I seemed familiar to them, but, no, they didn't really know me.
People get very chatty on short car trips sitting side-by-side. Side-by-side conversations are less threatening than face-to-face ones and people tend to feel free to let their hair down because of the limited time scope and I'm a chatty Cathy anyway.
In the course of making conversation with these strangers who happened to work where I worked, it often came out that I was a divorced single mom and no longer had a car and etc. If they picked me up to take me home at the end of my workday, they would get me to my apartment and say "Oh, you poor thing! And NOW you have to cook dinner after working all day!"
I would say "No. I might need to peel potatoes, but dinner has probably already been started. My son cooks dinner. I will peel potatoes and shower and he will serve me my dinner."
They would turn green with envy and stutter and stammer and backtrack. Apparently, THEY needed to start dinner when they got home after working all day if they were women. I did not.
These were mostly women with better-paying jobs than mine who had worked at the company longer than me and had nice cars and so forth. These women were the best of the best of the best, SIR!" and yet most of them likely still did the lion's share of the women's work at home -- sometimes even cooking dinner while their husband was unemployed, though he still had "male privilege" for picking what car to buy or whatever.
Nutrient Dense is one of my blogs and it grows out of the fact that I successfully handed off the women's work to my sons after leaving my marriage and transitioning from full-time homemaker to full-time corporate employee, something most women seem to be failing to pull off. But my reasons for writing it are more complex than the above story likely suggests.
I wanted my sons to learn to do the women's work in part because my oldest son has the same condition I have. I was convinced that if he didn't learn to cook and clean, I would be his prisoner for the rest of my life and there would be no hope of him ever moving out. I also felt strongly that this meant that if I died, his death would soon follow.
In Japan, during some period of extended peace, the samurai class apparently had too little to do. They began writing poetry and making up nonsense about stuffing your helmet with flower petals so that when your enemies decapitated you, the smell of your head rolling past their feet wouldn't offend their sensitive noses.
I think women's work has become a bit like that. It's sort of jumped the shark in that most families no longer have eight or twelve kids, so most families no longer really need a full-time wife and mom cooking and cleaning and dedicating herself to the women's work and I think we've begun essentially making crap up to justify having some man continue to pay our bills.
When I was on Metafilter, I sometimes tried to tell women "Some portion of what you do is make work and isn't necessary and you won't know what part of what you do is unnecessary until you STOP doing it and find that it doesn't matter." I think women didn't want to hear this in part because it's too painful to bear to hear that so much of your time is straight up WASTED and spent POINTLESSLY.
The idea of women's work is rooted in a pattern of living where men have paid jobs and women cook and clean and raise kids. With most modern women having only one or two kids, a lot of the rules for how to make life work and what men are supposed to do and what women are supposed to do simply no longer make sense.
Nutrient Dense grows in part out of the fact that my son straight up told me he would NEVER cook the fancy, complicated meals I cooked when he was little, yet he is a better cook than I am and we eat better than we used to. Our meals are simpler and no one is "chained to the stove" to make them happen, but we eat even BETTER than we used to eat.
Nutrient Dense is intended to capture a new paradigm for how people can take proper care of themselves, regardless of gender, in a post-heteronormative world where full-time homemakers are mostly a thing of the past. It is intended to set women free of the need to be chained to a stove and set men free of the need to own a personal maid and cook who provides slave labor but gets the spiffy title of "wife and mom" to make it sound respectable.
To be clear, wife and mom as a profession is perfectly respectable. It's what I did for about two decades.
And then I got divorced. I didn't continue to claim that title while having too little to do to fill my day and too much to do to also pursue a real career.
If you have been married a long time and you and your spouse are both happy with your current arrangement, I am not trying to say there is something wrong with it. But if either of you isn't happy with it, I am saying that it's possible to eat well and have a clean house and let both partners have full lives pursuing paid work or hobbies or what have you.
And I am saying that if you are one of the many, many people today who lives alone or is part of a childless couple and both of you work and neither of you really cooks from scratch and you are frustrated with spending too much money on food while eating terribly, it's possible to find better answers than that.
I'm not the only person who has noticed that this is a big issue for a LOT of people. There are MANY businesses trying hard to meet this inadequately met need, many of them meal delivery services of some sort.
I'm just trying to do it by adding information to the system at this point in time. I'm trying to change people's minds and perspective mostly.