Knocking It Out of the Park

On the value we derive from paid labor, and how I'm bad at cleaning my house

Years ago, I had to take a work call while visiting my mom and dad. It ended up that the call was going to come in while my mom was driving me and my daughter, who was probably 4 or 5 at the time, to the airport. 

So I’m sitting in the passenger seat of my mom’s car, going down the highway, on a conference call with my colleague and my boss about a major shift that’s coming to our workplace, and we’re figuring out how we’re going to navigate it. We talked for probably 20 or 30 minutes, and when I got off the call, I remember my mom saying something about how I sounded while I was on the phone. I don’t remember the words she used, but the message I got was that I had sounded like someone who was competent. Someone who was in charge. Someone who knew what she was doing. 

Since the pandemic, I’ve been working from home, and my husband and daughter have gotten a front-row seat to my work. Like so many of us whose work and home boundaries have crumbled or shifted, I’ve had an audience for about a zillion work Zooms since March 2020. And both of them have made similar observations: that when I’m working, I sound in charge. Like I know what the hell I’m doing. Like I’m competent. 

The implication here is that this is not how I usually sound. The implication here is that Work Mom is a different species than Home Mom, someone else, someone with different properties and abilities. And I have to say, I don’t disagree. 

I have been thinking about the book “Work Won’t Love You Back.” Well, OK, more specifically, I have been thinking about the title of the book “Work Won’t Love You Back,” because I have not actually read it yet. So please understand that what I am about to say is not actually about this book, which I haven’t read, but about this idea, an idea of being deeply, maybe unhealthily, wedded to work, and wanting work to love us back. 

I know that I’m not supposed to derive my self-worth from the work that I’m paid to do. I know that this is a road to ruin, and heartache. But I can’t escape the fact that there are ways that work will, if not love me back, then at least reward me in ways that I will never, as a woman, a mom, and a wife, otherwise be rewarded. 

Some of those ways are — well, you could say that my vanity is being stroked. To put it clearly: I have won awards at work. I have never yet won an award for vacuuming the carpet or putting away my child’s laundry. As a former high-achieving student, who was used to good grades and glowing report cards and gold stars and all those other neat tidy little metrics of self-worth, I find it quite nice to win awards. 

Awards, of course, are not love. My awards will not care for me when I need help, comfort me when I feel lonely, or put away my laundry. And I am extremely fortunate and grateful to be in a relationship with someone who notices and values the things I do around the home, however incompetent they may be.  

Because home is not a place where I have ever felt particularly competent. Mess seems to pile up everywhere I go without me knowing how it got there. Deep cleaning is something of a mystery to me, and even regular cleaning often leaves me feeling distracted or overwhelmed. I am not particularly handy, and haven’t learned how to use many tools beyond a hammer and screwdriver (and neither of those particularly well). 

And home decor is a language I simply don’t speak. I see what your houses look like, in the backgrounds of the videos you share on social media. And let me tell you: my house does not look like that. And I know what you’re going to say, which is that people stage those things so that they’ll look cute, and that isn’t what their house “really” looks like either. But what you don’t understand is that I couldn’t make even one room in my house look that way if I tried. Not even one wall! Not even a corner. Because I don’t know how. 

And my 10-year-old sees this, too. She’s watched enough YouTube by now (ugh) and looked at enough Zillow with us to know that there are houses out there, apparently, that look pretty and have matching stuff, where the dishes aren’t chipped and the items that are sitting around are decorative, not just a pencil sharpener and a receipt and half a video game controller and a piece of mail that was delivered to the wrong address, which is what’s on my side table right now. 

I have tried to make little corners of my life cute. And I have failed every single time. But at work, no one needs me to make things look cute; they just want me to get the work done. And I do. And when it’s done, I get to do something else. 

Better yet, at work, I have a boss. I know that’s not everyone’s bliss, but I deeply appreciate having someone who can direct my efforts, clarify my priorities, and give me a gut check when I’m unsure about something. It is very freeing, in a way, to be told, “Do this and then do that.” And if I can’t, if I find that the two tasks are in conflict, I am very very comfortable at making that the problem of someone higher up the pay scale than me.

I like all of this very much, in a way that I cannot imagine ever liking laundry or tidying up the living room. But there is no one higher up the pay scale than me in my house, sadly. There is no one who can prioritize my work for me, because it’s my work.

And while my husband, who is wonderful, absolutely does say things like, “Thanks for doing the dishes” or “Hey, I saw you vacuumed the living room earlier, thanks for doing that” — which is awesome — it still hits different, as they say. Because we both know that me doing the dinner dishes is, like, the absolute bare minimum needed to ensure that we don’t descend into squalor. It is not a demonstration of my mastery or a significant accomplishment. It is just another necessary task required for our existence. It’s important, of course; but it isn’t, you know … special. There’s nothing I can do at home that’s the equivalent of really knocking it out of the park. And that’s hard for me to be comfortable with. 

All of this is very embarrassing to me. I would very much like to be someone who does not need to earn gold stars or be told she has knocked it out of the park to have any kind of self-worth, but here we are.   

I was not socialized to see a lot of value in work that isn’t performed for wages, or at the direction of someone else. Nor did I ever see or understand care work as a learnable, buildable skill. It was always portrayed as something vaguely mysterious, innate and unknowable; it just was. 

I don’t really like mysterious and unknowable. I like data. (I may or may not have created a spreadsheet to track my infant’s schedule when she was a newborn, not so much because I was collecting data, but just because I was actually completely unable to remember whether it had been five minutes or five hours since the last time she pooped or ate.) I like knowing where I stand. I like being good at things, and knowing how to get better at them. 

Work is a refuge for me in a way that I think work has long been a refuge for people who did not feel competent, valued or understood in the home — like men. Like dads. Because another aspect of this, for me, is the uneasy feeling that if I were a real wife, a real mom, I would have this mysterious, innate ability to actually clean things, and have a cute living room, and maybe even like it?? It feels like some kind of failure of femininity that I’m neither competent at, nor fulfilled by, this stuff. 

But of course, this isn’t really about me. Really, it is the stupid @#$%($* patriarchy that makes me (and maybe you?) feel less than if we have the audacity to feel unfulfilled by putting away the laundry, or if we suck at it. No one is surprised if men feel that exact same way. No one thinks men ought to find more bliss in vacuuming than they do in working for wages.

So I am not going to apologize for my relationship to work. I am not going to beat myself up over the fact that winning awards feels better, in many ways, than doing my 1,000,000th load of laundry. I am not going to participate, mentally and emotionally, in the decades-long project of the patriarchy that tries to convince me, and you, and everyone else that we’re just supposed to feel this stuff deep in our feminine bones. I’m done. I love my job, even if it doesn’t love me back, because I’m good at it. And it feels good to be good at stuff.

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I realize I have taken several hundred words to come around to the same conclusion that my mom’s generation already arrived at many decades ago, but thank you for coming along with me on this journey. I would love to hear about your relationship to wage work vs. care work!