I BROKE MY ARM AND ASKED MY HUSBAND TO HELP WITH OUR 5-MONTH-OLD TWINS. HE SAID, “MOMS DON’T GET SICK DAYS. YOU STAY HOME ALL DAY AND DO NOTHING.”
SO I PUT A PRICE ON “NOTHING” — AND WHEN HE SAW THE INVOICE, HE WENT WHITE.
Chapter 1: Moms Don’t Get Sick Days
I broke my arm and asked my husband to help take care of our five-month-old twins, but he refused and coldly said, “Moms don’t get sick days.” So I made sure he learned his lesson.
My name is Hannah. I broke my arm falling down the stairs, and with twin five-month-olds and a cast, I asked my husband Derek to help sometimes. He rolled his eyes. “You’re the one who wanted kids. Moms don’t get sick days.” When I couldn’t bathe the babies one-handed and asked again, he said, “You stay home all day and do nothing.”
So the next evening, Derek came home to a professional nanny in the living room, a housekeeper in the kitchen, and a folder with his name on it — a full invoice for every task I’d been doing alone, priced at market rate, totaled by the month. An enormous number.
“You said moms don’t get sick days,” I told him. “So I hired people who do. It comes out of our joint account. You can help raise your own kids, or pay someone to do the job you refused to do for a woman with a broken arm.”
By the end of the night, he was yelling, “How dare you do this to me?”
Chapter 2: The “Nothing” I Did All Day
Let me tell you what Derek thought I did all day, because the whole lesson lives in the gap between what he imagined and what was actually happening in that house.
In Derek’s mind, I sat home with two babies who apparently cared for themselves, watching television, doing — his word — nothing. He went to his job, which was real work, and came home to relax, which he’d earned, and the fact that the house was clean and the babies were fed and his dinner was on the table happened by some domestic magic that required no one’s effort and certainly no acknowledgment. He had constructed, as a lot of people do, a complete fiction in which the labor that held his entire life together was invisible because it was done by his wife.
