Herein lies a chart that could potentially save your marriage from death by parenthood.
Once upon a time, mothers didn’t work in the public space; there was literally a whole other job for them to do at home and all of society could at least agree on the magnitude of that job.
There were magazines dedicated to Good Housekeeping. Books to study. Classes to take. But as time went by, and the world began to change, women started to enter the workforce – moms started to enter the workforce – and suddenly, miraculously everyone stopped talking about / acknowledging at-home labour. They slapped a name on it (housework) and delegated it overwhelmingly to one family member. (Can you guess who??)
Of course, when labour is both unpaid and invisible it’s easy to simply label it “housework” and assign it to the family member who was raised to believe that because of her gender, “housework” would always be associated with her role in society.
But it’s 2019. It’s time for everyone to unlearn all that shit. It no longer serves our best interests. We know how hard that is to do, though – enter: THE CHART.
The chart below is meant to act as a base for a chart of your own (we saved you the emotional labour of creating it from scratch – you’re welcome). It outlines all the things that need to happen in order to maintain a happy, healthy, clean, organized, punctual household.
When you sit with your family and look at the grand sum of all those “household responsibilities” all on paper, broken down task after task, it’s impossible for anyone not to see that these jobs are real and they’re draining and they’re time consuming and they need to be fairly split between members of a household – especially if both parents are also working outside of the home (you’ll see outside work is accounted for in the chart as well).
The most important thing to note before you take this chart and put it to use is: this is not intended to track what you’ve done in the past. The past is the past and you shouldn’t carry any hard feelings from it into the future… The future is the focus. Whose responsibility will these tasks be going forward…
The future starts tomorrow.
xx RM
| Frequency | Task | Partner 1 | Partner 2 | Child | Outsource |
| Always (daily) | |||||
| Tidying Beds | |||||
| Breakfast Prep | |||||
| Dressing Kids | |||||
| Dropping kids at school / daycare | |||||
| Lunch Prep | |||||
| Dinner Prep | |||||
| Dishes | |||||
| Picking up misc | |||||
| Surface cleaning | |||||
| Working to contribute financially | |||||
| Vaccuming / sweeping | |||||
| Playing | |||||
| Often (weekly) | |||||
| Buying Groceries | |||||
| Changing Linens | |||||
| Laundry | |||||
| Taking out Trash | |||||
| Cleaning bathrooms | |||||
| Dusting | |||||
| Mopping | |||||
| Vaccuming furnature | |||||
| Snow Shovelling | |||||
| Chauffeuring kids to activities | |||||
| Play Dates | |||||
| Cleaning Car Interior | |||||
| Outdoor space upkeep | |||||
| Sometimes (monthly) | |||||
| Chauffeuring to doctors appointments | |||||
| Paying bills | |||||
| Visiting family | |||||
| Pet upkeep | |||||
| Occasionally (annually) | |||||
| Planning birthdays | |||||
| Buying Xmas Presents | |||||
| Mailing Xmas Cards | |||||
| Cleaning the garage | |||||
| Cleaning out the basement | |||||
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Feature Image by @jstersurf
via @themabooks
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