h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

SBE, I think the fact that others came on and said that yes, men really are that bad helped. Like I mentioned, I don't really know any man (well, with one or two exceptions) who won't pitch in around the house. My dad doesn't do ironing mind, but he's quite happy to do everything else Mind you, when I was in Australia my then boyfriend was waited on hand and foot by his mother which encouraged him to be lazy!

I think that happens a lot fords
I've lived away from the parental home for 20 years but when I visit home my mother will still do everything unless I make the effort to help out (which I usually do)
My father does almost nothing around the house although he is now retired and I don't think it ever occurs to him that he should

The Man makes wonderful home-made bread. He phoned his Mom for the recipe. She was surprised, he'd been raised like most boys of the 1950's - that housework and cooking was the mom's job. He was on the internet the other day looking at fancy bread recipes. I guess his creativity is flowing again!! I'd have had to do more if our child had been much younger. Because he was a pre-teen, I could relax after work, My Boys had the household, including cat and dog, under control.

SBE - homemaker is a horrible word!
Let's pretend I never used it... however, it is difficult for me to refer to this entry (which I like, as I mentioned in PR) without having this overwhelming feeling of:

"HA! Now you lot know what it's like."

As I do whenever -hubs (who is extremely housetrained) has the gruesomes for a day and does about 20 seconds of housework before banishing them to their rooms and collapsing in front of the TV watching because "it's all too much". I would if I didn't have to do dinner, packed lunches, ironing, washing, mow the lawn etc etc.

Oh yes: packed lunches. Only a complete masochist would make them in the morning! I do 3 every evening, we all get the same thing (raw veggies, a bit of a sandwich or some crackers and some fruit. And twiglets if I still have a supply of them)

I have been a male person who has been characterized as a "lazy bum" for sticking around and taking care of the house and the child for years.
My esteemed spouse, Uvula, who is a professional nurse, and works odd hours in far locations, has been counseled by "concerned" family members to divorce me unless I get a job and give the child a key to the house.
Uvula doesn't have a homemaking bone in her body.
Shnooks, who just learned to use the stove without setting fire to the house last year, is a better cook than both of us.
Uvula is a white Texas female who has been taught at her mother's knee that she is Queen of the household and what she thinks and does about it should not be questioned by anyone, particularly the bearded one who should be off making oodles of money doing manly stuff.
She has no home-making skills whatsoever. She belongs to the "flat surface society", which means that any reasonably level surface, including the floor, is fair game whenever she is done with whatever she is reading, eating, wearing or just happens to have in her hand.
She also has no sense of cause and effect when she moves things or drops them in precarious situations.
Her notions of dishes and laundry are mostly philosophical and based on my dealing with it since I have plenty of time, since I'm not "doing anything".
Despite years of potential experience, she still hasn't figured out how to pay bills on time or how to avoid situations where she has to write her name on pieces of paper that will lead to more debt.
She believes that since she is the wage-earner, any feelings she has about money should be respected whether backed up by facts or not.

I, on the other hand, have been trained in restaurants, mess halls, and worked off and on in the retail and janitorial fields.
I have also had to learn, by laborious methods, how to create a family budget, get the bills paid on time, and throw away any tempting credit card offers I find in the mail before Uvula gets to open them.
While the 14-year-old, Shnooks, is almost half-trained in picking up after herself (or at least skillfully hiding the fact that she hasn't), the fifty-year-old child still believes that a completed shift in her chosen field of paid endeavor allows her to come home with her brain switched off and all her critical faculties in abeyance and make messes and create crises that would get her fired at work.

While I love the poor thing dearly, trust me when I say that the crime scene that was her house when we first got married took me almost a year to get straight.
After fifteen years of effort, I almost have a system that is wife-proof. Now if I can just get her to put her shoes up.


So, I think the ultimate sexism is expecting anything out of anyone based on whether they have an x or a y.

I've gotten so tired of people who ask me how I liked "babysitting" my own child. At one point, when Infantis Rodentia (Shnooks in an earlier incarnation)was about four, I got into the habit of pointing to the individual and telling the child, "Kill!"
I have also gotten tired of people assuming that a professional career woman who is accomplished in her chosen field would require a "big, strong man" to relieve her of the burden of her career.
When I met Uvula she was already a decade into her history of consistent work in the same field.
I, on the other hand, am a writer, and a relatively "unskilled" laborer whenever I'm out irritating the workplace.

One female family member in particular, who has been agitating for my firing from the job of husband and father for over a decade, has never lifted a finger to clean her own house or arrange the piles of bumpf that she keeps shoveling in with the aid of mail order catalogs and credit cards, yet she believes that I should let Uvula do what she wants in her "own house" and with her "own child" and just shut up and go to work and leave the women stuff to the women.
Of course, this particular person doesn't let me into their house because the last few times I was there, year's ago, I started taking out the trash. Not the stuff on the floor, the ironing board, the kitchen counter, the bed, the bathroom counter, the top of the TV, under the couch and covering the dining room table. No, just the stuff in the trash cans and waste baskets and the stuff in the plastic bags leaning against them. I got castigated. Apparently it was none of my business.
So be it.
But my house and how I run it ain't none of hern, nither!

Oh, and she also thinks I talk too much...

What you need is a and a

Ta! Thanks.

I ask this in purely idle curiosity.

Did Uvula keep her own name (perhaps making your child a Schnooks Comeuppance-Revenge ) or take yours?

As of today, she's taken almost everything.

"Wild rose - please have the courage of your convictions. To introduce this subject under 'Don't take offence' then describe the entry as old fashioned etc. etc. etc. is a copout. I would rather see it titled 'I hated it..' or something similar."

The title is not addressed to the author, but to the reader.

Please accept my humble apologies, then. Sorry to misconstrue your title, but this has been rather explosive since it blasted into PR!!
SBE