In my head, I know “Honey Do” lists are one of the worst things ever.
Partially because no one tells you to create “Honey Do” lists when they give you unsolicited marriage advice during an engagement and early days of marriage. People told me to not let myself go or to never go to bed angry or always tell each other our story of us. No one ever said “create a laundry list of tasks you’d like your spouse to complete and pass it along whenever possible”.
The other reason I know that my “Honey Do” lists are horrible is because whenever I attempt to give one to Brian the response is usually something along the lines of “I refuse to submit to your unreasonable list of demands”. And while I did not think my lists were unreasonable, I have to respect Brian’s desire to not receive those lists.
Lately, I’ve been sending him renovation lists which are remarkably similar to Honey Do’s but usually include items such as “build and install custom kitchen cabinets”, “obtain 4 quotes from heating and oil specialists” or “remove wall that is visually displeasing to my eyes”. Since he is a contractor, none of these requests are particularly unreasonable but would probably be entertaining to outsiders if the list fell out of his pocket.
But with work slowing down (okay, screeching to a bitter and painful stop) in the construction industry, I’ve started sending Honey Do lists to him again. Because on the days he is a stay at home husband, I can’t come home and do everything. That’s not to say that he doesn’t do things around the house to begin with but it just really sucks to come home and have to cook dinner when someone else was home from work for the day.
The recession is redefining our gender roles within our marriage. Which is entertaining because we previously believed that our gender roles were much more fluid than they actually were. And that was a surprise.
We also didn’t expect that I would be the primary source of income. Or rather the steady source of income. When work is available, my husband makes considerably more money than I do. I’ve got to admit, it was a terrible blow to my ego when we first were married and I was very angry about. Now the roles have been reversed and I still don’t like it.
So I cope by making lists. Lists about laundry and lists about cleaning and lists about how someone other than me should be spending his time. I hope that wall is out when I get home.
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