Just Imagine I’m a Husband

I don’t do seasonal decorations or bake sales or, most importantly, guilt

In October, I was asked weekly if I had gotten my Halloween decorations up yet.

In November, a lot of the small talk among my friends was focused on what everyone was cooking for Thanksgiving. We also discussed getting the Christmas cards ready.

In the past weeks, I’ve fielded a lot of questions about when I was getting my tree up and decorated, whether or not I’d finished my shopping, and when I planned to do my wrapping.

Can you guess how many times my male partner was asked any of these questions?

I bet you can.

My good friends know I’m under-invested in a lot of the activities that they enjoy, such as holiday decorating or volunteering for school fundraisers. I admire and appreciate their commitment to these activities, and in turn, I feel that they respect my disinterest. That said, it’s fascinating to me that mothers are still so often consistently assumed to be solely responsible for all holiday preparations.

This goes beyond house decorating, of course. Mothers are the ones who are expected to perform a laundry list of tasks during the holidays, including creating Christmas cards and managing their distribution, baking and giving out cookies, managing gifts for teachers, babysitters, and coaches, and sometimes buying all the gifts not only for their own immediate families, but for their in-laws as well.

This is the 21st century, so of course there are many wonderful exceptions. Not everybody is straight or married or in a heteronormative relationship. And not everybody has the luxury to stress out about Halloween decorations or the Instagram-readiness of kids’ apple-picking outfits. And I have nothing but the most sincere admiration for the moms and the dads who have the energy and interest in doing this stuff. It just isn’t for me.

I swear I’m not a grinch. Christmas and Hanukkah are fun! I love giving people presents. Lights are pretty. Cookies are delicious. I love to enjoy them. The work that goes into them, though? Not so much.

I tell my close friends, “Think of me like a husband. Would you ask a husband if he had ordered matching outfits for the Christmas card this year? If he had arranged a trip to see Santa yet? Would you ask him if he was baking cookies for the teachers? Would you ask him what he had gotten for his wife’s brother’s kids this year?”

Maybe we can and should start asking the men in our lives to take more responsibility for these aspects of family life. Or maybe this is one of those areas in which we could all just give each other a little bit of a break. If we simply had the same (lower) expectations for mothers as we have for fathers, we might even start to value all of the incredible, time-consuming, and enriching things that many of the women in our lives are already doing all the time.