By the end of the night, he was yelling, “How dare you do this to me?”
Chapter 2: The “Nothing” I Did All Day
Let me tell you what Derek thought I did all day, because the whole lesson lives in the gap between what he imagined and what was actually happening in that house.
In Derek’s mind, I sat home with two babies who apparently cared for themselves, watching television, doing — his word — nothing. He went to his job, which was real work, and came home to relax, which he’d earned, and the fact that the house was clean and the babies were fed and his dinner was on the table happened by some domestic magic that required no one’s effort and certainly no acknowledgment. He had constructed, as a lot of people do, a complete fiction in which the labor that held his entire life together was invisible because it was done by his wife.
Here is the “nothing” I did all day, with a broken arm. I woke every two to three hours all night with two infants who do not coordinate their schedules, which means I was never asleep for more than ninety minutes at a stretch. I fed them, burped them, changed them, soothed them. I did this one-handed, with a cast, which if you’ve never tried to manage a squirming five-month-old with one arm, I invite you to imagine. In the daylight hours I did it all again, plus the laundry two babies generate, plus the cooking, plus the cleaning, plus the doctor’s appointments, plus keeping two human beings alive and developing and loved, which is not nothing — it is arguably the most important work happening in that house, and I was doing all of it injured while the other adult who created these children told me it wasn’t his problem.
