The Best Job I've Ever Had

I'm not talking about the 9-to-6 kind, I'm talking about the roles we play in our lives that, in reality, are as much work if not more than the office kind.

I'm talking about being a spouse.

It is work, y'all. Don't kid yourselves. There are days it feels like work, and there are days it feels like a dream come true.

Even with my feminist leanings I still find myself entrenched in the gender-specific role of wife. There are things I do that Scott does not do. There are things Scott does that I do not do.

Right now, for instance, Scott is on his second tech support call of the day. The first was to Comcast because our phone is being... odd. The second, which he has been on for 90 minutes, is with the TiVo folks to make the TiVo work.

These are things that are best left to Scott. Not because I am not technical, but because I am not patient. I am not willing to redo all of my initial troubleshooting with someone over the phone, and I am particularly unwilling to have someone talk to me as if I were a child simply because I am a woman, or because I am not an engineer.

But there are things I do that just seem to fall to me. Sure, there are the typical cooking duties, but there are also the neurotic issues such as worrying about everything that can be worried about. I get that one, not because I am a woman, but because I have a chemical anxiety issue and Scott could sleep peacefully through the apocalypse and when he woke up would not be worried about the charred remains around him, but would rather think that's odd.

So while Scott is on the phone I found myself in front of the mirror primping. New haircut, new make-up. Making myself pretty. Putting on my face. I'm not a girly-girl, so it amuses me that I do this. I do it for me. I do it for Scott. I don't know if Scott even notices when I put on make-up, but he always looks at me like I am pretty, and that somehow makes it more important that I make the effort.

And I start thinking how silly this is. He's fixing a problem, I am playing with make-up and it seems like a fair distribution of work. He doesn't want to primp any more than I want to talk to tech support. At this moment, I know we each feel like we got the better task. And yet I ask myself, is there any part of being married, sharing a home, sharing finances, that feels unbalanced? Is the distribution of work skewed?

Sure, I worry, he sleeps. I do the daily dishes, he scrubs the ones that can't go in the dishwasher. I notice how dirty the house is and perform the basic straightening up, he takes out the trash.

Mostly, I provide the timetable and the distribution of work. He does all the heavy-lifting (and the man even vacuums). I do the rest.

Sure, there are days it seems like he's got the better deal, and there are days where it seems like I got the better deal. Over time I think it works out pretty well.

But there isn't a job I have ever found more enjoyable, because at the end of the day we share it all, our hopes, our fears, our dreams, and yes, even our chores. It's the best feeling in the world to know that we're in this together, come hell or recent East coast flood waters.