This week, I'm double parenting

On invisible labor and being one down

An entrepreneur, a futsal coach, and a parasailer log onto a Zoom…

Not a joke! It’s my next coaching circle lineup (so far).

We start February 9. A few spots left. Reach out if you want to join them!

Years ago, I was telling a friend’s parent that my spouse had been out of town a lot.

She nodded and said, “We call that double parenting. Because you’re doing double the work you’re used to.”

The phrase stuck.

This week, my husband has COVID.

So this week, I’m double parenting.

It’s hard, not because I don’t know how to do things, but because there are entire categories of labor in our house that belong to him. I sometimes help with them, but I don’t carry them. I rely on them being done.

This week, they all became mine.

Getting up early and making breakfast every day. He does that.

Shoveling and salting the driveway and walkways. Digging out the mailbox. Making sure the trash and recycling bins are accessible. These are things I might assist with, but I don’t own them.

Speaking of trash and recycling: emptying every bin in the house the night before pickup. That’s another job my 13-year-old and I absorbed this week.

We’ve also been keeping the wood pile stocked in the living room. Starting the fire. Stoking it. Making dinner every night. Laundry. Usually his domain. This week, mine.

And then there are the things that fell through the cracks.

We forgot the 13-year-old’s cello lesson. Second to last one ever. It was a half day of school and somehow neither of us remembered he still needed to be home by 3:30. I let him go downtown with friends. He missed the Zoom lesson.

Today the dog had a haircut.

Pet care is not usually my responsibility (I don’t even know who the vet is).

My husband was well enough to drop the dog off. I volunteered to pick him up. As I approached the parking lot, I realized I had no idea how this works. When do you pay? How much do you tip? Do you tip before? After? I had to call him from the car to ask. He didn’t answer. Turns out he was on the phone with Amazon negotiating a return of a box full of broken pint glasses. I called again. He texted, as if reading my mind: “I tip $17. But might need to be more this time because he got teeth brushing.”

On the first day he was sick, I was also taking care of him. Hot soup. Congee. Breakfast upstairs on a tray.

“You’re a good wife,” my 13-year-old said, watching.

He’s been unusually affectionate this week. When I ask why, he says, “I just see everything you’re doing. All the extra you’re doing while Dad is sick.”

What he’s really seeing is labor.

This week has made me acutely aware of how much labor goes into making a household run. On a normal day, I mostly see the work I do. Admittedly, I don’t always see the work I’m not doing, until the person who does it is gone.

I’m not even sure “double parenting” is the right phrase. It’s not just parenting. It’s the dog. The house. The systems. The net effect is that with him in bed, we are short a lot of labor.

This afternoon, he emerged long enough to take out the recycling because the cleaning ladies we appreciate (and who are coming tomorrow) tend to throw it in the trash. He put a fresh bag in the trash bin we’d remembered to drag back from the curb. “Did you check the mail?” he coughed through his mask (usually that goes with bringing back the trash bins).

Nope. We had forgotten the mail entirely. Several days had piled up by the time he made it to the curb.

What strikes me most is this: if the genders were reversed, none of this would surprise anyone. We’d nod knowingly about how families can’t function without all the invisible things moms do.

But that’s not what’s happening here.

Someone in a coaching circle once exclaimed, in a moment of frustration, “I do all the shit that makes our life good!”

I laughed, and also knew I couldn’t make the same claim (anymore).

My spouse does an awful lot of the shit that makes our life good.

This week, I’m double-parenting.

And I see him.

🕊️

SAM

Dog, groomed

Fire, made. Whew.