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What did you do all day?
My partner arrived home after a hectic day at work. He flopped onto the sofa and launched into a 10-minute rant about meetings-gone-wrong and confrontations with colleagues. Finally, he wound up. Pause. Then, hastily, ‘So what have you been doing today?’
‘What, me? Oh, nothing.’
With three children under four, my day had hardly been a seamless round of manicures and reflexology treatments. I didn’t get to breakfast until 11.30am. The house looked like some crime-scene reconstruction: ‘And see how the thieves smeared banana onto every available surface and pulled all the books from the bookshelves. The owner is understandably distraught – especially as she's been trying to tidy up all day.’
By the time my partner arrived home at 7.00pm, I had been on kiddie patrol for 13 hours. Like most stay-at-home mothers, I do not expect a daily ‘well done’ or spontaneous applause from my beloved. But I wonder why I always say, ‘Oh, nothing.’
It's a tricky business, being on baby watch, while partner scoots off to his whizzy (paid) job. Our set-up feels faintly old-fashioned. Rather irksomely, it is also assumed that full-time-mother devotes a generous chunk of her day to nibbling slabs of Galaxy, while on the phone to friends. My partner once suggested that, should my afternoons gape with yawning inactivity, I might ‘knock up a few pasta sauces and freeze them.’ He appeared bewildered when I stormed upstairs, slammed a door or two and muttered the word ‘solicitor’. It's not his fault. Working fathers genuinely have not the haziest notion of what we get up to. We might share edited highlights (‘Our baby took his first steps today!’) but cannot bear to discuss the mundane (‘I used a handy sponge-on-a-stick device to shift poster paint from the rug.’).
‘My partner assumes I watch all those dreadful daytime soaps,’ shudders a friend with daughters aged three and 20 months. ‘He thinks he’s being helpful by suggesting little jobs I could do. Like, the other morning, just as he dashed out, he said, ‘If you're stuck for something to do today, perhaps you could find my dressing gown cord.’
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