Porn for Devis with Babies

Household chores are the number one thing that couples with children fight about, according to a survey I read recently. Indeed, in today’s society where gender roles have become largely undefined, it’s up to each couple to figure out the division of labor. Will you cook while your husband cleans, or vice versa? Who will do, fold and put away the laundry? How about the bills, the grocery shopping, the light bulb that needs changing?

You may have read Lisa Belkin’s New York Times article over the summer about couples who do everything equally. They "work equal hours, spend equal time with their children, take equal responsibility for their home.” This small group of people understand “that this would mean recalibrating their career ambitions, and probably their income, but what they gained, they believed, would be more valuable than what they lost.”

I read the article with avid interest, and then thought of whether I actually know any desi couples who practice “equally shared parenting.” You already know my answer, don't you?

The vast majority of Devis with babies still take on most of the housework. We usually cook and clean more, spend more time with our kids than our husbands do, and have more responsibilities around the home. Even if our husbands share the household tasks, we are still the proactive ones who know when the laundry needs to get done, what the diaper bag needs to be packed with, what’s for dinner. At parties, we're usually the ones in the kitchen, setting out the plates and making sure the food is warm. I also realized that among most of the desi couples I know, the husband/father spends more time working. So it could be argued that both female and male roles among second-generation desis are more traditional. Either way, we usually get stuck with the mundane daily tasks.

This may be an obvious observation, but it interests me nonetheless. What is it about us Devis that makes us more prone to embrace traditional gender roles? Is it because our parents were more traditional, and we’re just once removed from the homeland? As far as I know, we didn’t know when we got married, or had kids, that it would inevitably be this way. Many of us planned for it not to be so.

Also, it doesn't come easily: most of us go through periods of figuring it all out (a.k.a. fighting), and then arrive at some imperfect yet livable situation for awhile, until we get sick of it and try to find a better solution again. A friend of mine jokingly told me that while her husband uses porn to get off, all she needs is a house that he helped her clean to get her in the mood.

Why, all these years after women's lib and migrating from the homeland, are we still stuck with the housework? And, perhaps as a more productive discussion, what works and doesn't work with the division of labor in your home?

Sugar & Spice and Everything Nice...GRRRR

For the majority of my daughter’s life, the gender issue hasn’t really come up. She’s not into princesses yet, she doesn’t play much with dolls, and although we did buy her a little kitchen, we would have done so if she were a boy, too. She does wear a lot of pink, but it’s hard to avoid pink clothes for girls.

Lately though, I’ve begun to notice the gender difference at the playground. She will avoid areas where a group of boys are playing. A couple of weeks ago, she told my husband she couldn’t go down a particularly steep slide at the playground because “only boys do that slide” – and of course, nobody had ever said that to her. Twice in the last week, she’s been kicked or yelled at by a boy because she took too long going down the slide. Once, she wanted to go down a slide but there was a boy at the bottom. He didn’t move when he saw her, so she went to the adjoining slide where there was a little girl at the bottom. The girl, of course, moved.

I’ve seen it a bit at school, too. A boy sitting next to her at snacktime tried to take her crackers. With me there, she yelled “No, Bobby, no, don’t take my crackers!” and he went away. But she told me later that before I came, he had taken her crackers anyway.

All of this makes me pretty upset. Logically, I can think about the way I’m supposed to handle this. I’m supposed to have a long talk with her about how she’s capable of doing anything boys can do (and I did do that.) I’m supposed to teach her to fend for herself, to assert herself verbally, and to yell for an adult if the pushing, kicking, or cracker-stealing continues.

I realize any other girl could do these things to her as well, but for some reason it makes me really mad when it’s a boy. I also realize some of this is just “boys will be boys” behavior – it’s not their fault that they were born with something called testosterone. They’re just usually more rambunctious.

But in reality I want to go over to that kid, and tell him to GET THE HELL AWAY FROM MY DAUGHTER. Get off the slide, can’t you see she wants to go down? Where are your manners – eat your OWN crackers! And who told you it was okay to kick someone else, you little monster?!!

At this point I’ve obviously lost it, so if you have any constructive advice for me on how to handle these situations, give it to me!