We’ve had a nice division of both house and baby chores this year because we’ve each spent one semester (we’re both in academics) as more of the “housewife.” This fall, my wife was working full time and I was on primary house/baby duty while working part-time from home. This semester it’s exactly the opposite. We’ve gained a lot of empathy from this arrangement. In the fall, when she would come in at the end of the day and kind of space-out, not really making herself useful, I’d get a little frustrated….but now I do exactly the same thing. Come to find out that end of the day transition is really disorienting. We do also work very hard to make sure that the primary-baby duty parent is not on 24/7. As soon as we’re both home (after the brief space-out) it’s pretty much 50/50. We do also benefit from being similarly situated on the neatness spectrum…and it isn’t the super-neat end of that spectrum.

Kristin and I have also had some HUMDINGERS over housework.

Kristin’s tolerance of messes is much lower than mine, so she does most of the cleaning… but she resents it. I do most of the childcare and am tired after interrupted nights of sleep and then a full day of work, so I don’t want to clean when I get home, or when I get Julia down for the night.

For us it’s an interesting division. You’d think housework goes with childcare, but for us it doesn’t. I take care of Julia in the evenings and weekends and Kristin follows us around cleaning up. And yes, we both bitch at each other for not being more helpful.

Neat freak, packrat butch handles all dishes, dusting, sweeping, taking out garbage, hosing down terrace, takes care of lovebirds. Not as neat, hates clutter femme mops, does the bathroom, the laundry, cooks, waters plants.

Mikey does the lion’s share of the housework because she has a much lower tolerance for messes although now that she has a new job that she has to do a real commute for as opposed to riding in a car pool she finds she has much less energy to clean and is now beginning to understand why I don’t feel like mopping when I come home from work.

And I’ve read Orten and others on queer housewives, division of labor, etc and ALL seems to say a child being born tips the balance for queer couples just like for hetero couples. It sucks. It happens. It happened to us. (Though in fairness it probably made me more equal to Beth… closer to 50-50 from 80-20 in my favor)

Both of us feel totally overwhelmed at times, and the place often goes too many days without vacuuming considering that we have two large dogs that like to shed like tumbleweeds.