My Wife Is Incredibly Hands On

Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash

I am wondering if I have ever heard anyone say this. I dig deep. Have I ever heard anyone say these words, “my wife is incredibly hands on”. But I’m not much in conversations where people discuss the merits of their wives and so I ask my husband if he has ever heard anyone say their wife is incredibly hands on, maybe on the golf course because four hours is a lot of chit-chat time to kill, or on a night out, or in a team meeting, or at that dads and toddlers thing he used to go to where they got a sit-down and a full continental breakfast. Perhaps he has partaken in a wife comparing notes activity when he's been away child-free at a conference in another country on another continent. He ponders this for a millisecond. “No,” he replies.  

I have been listening to a podcast. The guest is an executive director in an international bank. She is also a charity trustee. She does video tutorials to help people make canapés for their dinner parties. She has two children and a third on the way. She is still only in her thirties. I am full of admiration. I am yet again thinking I have wasted most of my life, that canapés for me usually involved Marks and Spencer, that I tend to avoid dinner parties along with most other social occasions. I can sense us building up to it. We are heading in that direction. I am holding my breath. I can feel THE QUESTION coming. “Can you share a bit about how you’ve balanced parenthood and work?” asks the interviewer. I await the response, eager for some novelty or some admission of neglect. “My husband is incredibly hands on,” she says. I roll my eyes.

“Everyone should have a Russell,” used to do the rounds in our group of friends when we all had small kids and were surviving on vapours of sleep and thought we needed to be godly citizens on the side, giving up our Sunday mornings to entertain other people’s kids. The wives wanted to shame their husbands into doing a bit more, the husbands wanted Russell to stop making them look so bad. I was mainly bemused. What was he doing that was so exceptional? The fact that he did some cooking seemed to wildly excite them. The fact that I organised the ingredients, less so. What does an incredibly hands on husband actually do? Does he see things without them being pointed out to him? Does he make lists? Does he just man the fort? Does he know his children’s shoe sizes? Does he forward-plan around multiple schedules? Does he get added to the WhatsApp groups?

My husband was on a podcast too this week. He is (whisper) a CEO which apparently is something some people aspire to, usually those who are on the non-creative spectrum. I looked at the blurb and decided I wouldn’t bother listening. The focus seemed to be on his difficult start in life growing up on the North Coast in Northern Ireland. I knew it would cover his professional journey, that this would be in isolation from his personal one. I knew we, his family, would not be discussed. It would be as if we didn’t exist. There would be no “how have you balanced work and parenthood”. There would definitely be no “my wife is incredibly hands on”. I will never be mentioned because the question will never be asked.

“You’re self-obsessed,” said the daughter who has just started politics at A-level. And I think, yes indeed, I am. I have done nothing but moan for the last twenty years about my lot, perhaps because I have always felt short-changed, thrown into a domestic management role that demanded much servitude and little cerebration. Of all the things I could have been given to do in life, I ended up doing a lot of the things I was least good at. What was it the novelist, Doris Lessing, said? “There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children”. I watch an episode of My Brilliant Friend. It is Season 3, the 1970s. Lenu has escaped her violent Naples neighbourhood. She has published her first controversial novel to much acclaim. Now, she is a mother of a small baby in Florence. We watch her walk aimlessly pushing a pram whilst her husband, a professor, continues with his academic career. She yearns to write more. “I need to focus, to study,” she says. She wants to get some household help so she can use her brain. “I don’t want slaves in my house,” says her husband. “So, you think I should be the slave?” she replies. And I think how one of the biggest crimes of the twenty-first century is that it is still alright to starve the world of women’s intellectual ability.

As we approach the end of August, I decide a minor miracle may have occurred because in the midst of endless school holidays and endless interruptions and endless laundry and endless queries like “Who left the Febreze on the worktop?” and “Who put the milk in sideways in the fridge?” and “Who walked the dog?”, I seem to have managed to write 40,000 words for my book about leaving various institutions. I conclude that whilst I may have hit a quantifiable milestone, I have no idea about the quality. The essays on marriage and motherhood may have been written under the influence of endless school holidays rage. I emphasise how I want to spend the next month editing, refining, polishing, even though I’m not sure anyone is listening. My husband tells me he will be away for a week in September. I consider what I can control to ensure my intellectual freedom. “The dog will have to go into kennels,” I say.

I decide I may need to do something about this rage which keeps surfacing or at least isolate the source. I am reading one of those devotional morning emails that pops into my inbox, the ones I skim-read because I can’t identify with them, perhaps because it’s mainly holy theory, and I prefer my own version of unholy lived experience. On Thursday, bleary-eyed, I am faced with a synopsis of the ‘Wife of Noble Character’. I can feel a creeping boiling fury under my skin. I can’t quite put my finger on it, perhaps it’s because a man is telling me I may feel overwhelmed by the description of this ideal wife or that husbands should take a few moments to notice the positive character traits their wife possesses and praise her for them or because the wife of noble character is clearly a strategist and a businesswoman and a leader yet she is only relevant in the context of her husband’s reputation at the city gates or because sometimes there are two wives in a relationship or one woman who has to be both wife and husband or many women who operate very effectively at the modern-day city gates or because despite much searching, I can find no Biblical passage on the husband of noble character.

On the podcast, not the one with my husband of course, but the one with the executive director in the international bank, they mention imposter syndrome. There was an event at Buckingham Palace that all these women had been invited to because of their very significant contribution to public life. And every single one of them when asked about their contribution said, “I don’t know why I’m here” and a journalist wrote a piece saying, “if that was a group of men, leading financiers, leading politicians, leading authors, scientists, actors, there would not be a single man who opened with, “I don’t know why I’m here””. And I decide enough is enough with this being socialised into having imposter syndrome or being grateful for incredibly hands on husbands or not noticing our own positive character traits. I know why I’m here and what the source of my rage is and if I don’t use my intellectual ability, the rage will never go away. The dog will love the kennels. The book will be finished by October. It will be launched in March. Maybe I’ll see you there!