I think there are three easy questions you can ask yourself to determine if you’re pulling your weight as a coparent.
1) what meal can you make, using only the ingredients you have in your house right now, that the whole family would eat without complaint?
2) what is the shoe size of all your children, and how close are they to outgrowing it?
3) what are the names of your child’s close friends, and what activity did they last do together?
Why these questions? I’ve never been a parent, but I have spent 15 years total in 2 different long-term relationships where I did the majority of the cooking, but also the meal planning, grocery shopping, and food prep. Even days when my partner would cook, they typically spent their time asking me what ingredients we had and where to find them. In their own home. In a room they used multiple times a day. It was fucking exhausting. This gets exponentially worse when you introduce children to the family and have to contend with different food aversions.
Sidenote: I was single for a month when I realized that grocery shopping was no longer stressful, because I didn’t have to guess which foods my partner would want to eat, since neither of them ever participated in making a grocery list, and rarely contributed any thougths or opinions on meal planning. It’s not easy-going to say “whatever you want” when someone asks you what you want to eat for the next week, it’s lazy, and it’s bullshit and if your partner has issues with anxiety and a desperate need to please, you’re basically torturing them with this crap.
The shoe question pinpoints which parent does the bulk of the clothes shopping, which isn’t just a case of swinging by the mall once or twice a year. It’s a background process on one parent’s mind at all times, which kid needs what clothes, and to dump all of that on one person because we’ve all been socialized to believe that “women love shopping, lols” is bullshit. Question three is much the same – which parent is typically in charge of arranging playdates?
If you can’t answer these questions, it’s part of why you aren’t getting laid, because you’ve forced one parent to carry the weight of all the people in the house. Your idea of “helping” is probably maxed out at asking what needs done. Even if you do it immediately, you’re still making your partner act as the household project manager, administrator, & HR department, while you float around thinking you’re working hard. There’s a reason I’ll never get married again and the inequal distribution of household and emotional labour is a huge factor.
limaindiasierra 