Scanning for Mary

The other day Mary needed something scanned, so I scanned it for her, filed it and sent it back to her as an attachment to an email. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

Time was, it used to piss me off a bit that I was the person that had to do all of that kind of thing. Not only that, but handle all the finances and support all the devices and do a bunch of other shit. All while being guilt-tripped because I wasn't very helpful ideating about what we should have for dinner on Thursday.

I was listening to Derek Thompson's podcast this week as he talked to a woman who had written a book on "Dadbrain," ways in which guys' operating systems have been changed over time through more intensive parenting. Interesting stuff. As part of their discussion they talked about a game called "Fair Play," which is a deck of cards describing various household tasks that couples have to do. Couples pick them and allocate them out and discuss them, something like that.

One of the opening premises of the game is that "all time is created equal," one partner's time is equal in value to the other's. On the one hand, yes, in a transcendental sense this cannot be argued. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, none of it matters in the end anyway. On the other hand, in an economic sense, this is prima facie false. The primary breadwinner's time is more valuable. It's not a value judgment to state this. It just articulates what the market tells us and households are at some level economic units. The key thing is that couples and families need to develop an internal culture of how they value money, the extent to which they accept the market valuation of time, what they want, and how much risk they are willing to bear if they largely eschew market valuation and say something like "we value our time equally." 

Much was made in the podcast discussion of the concept of "mental load" (meal planning, Dr's appointment scheduling, getting kids to practice etc.) that is disproportionately born by women. I get that. Over short time scales this is true and much of that shit is a pretty boring and soul-deadening. I did not hear a lot about the mental load of planning over longer time scales (career development, complex skills building, network development, contingency planning) that allows a household to maintain and grow earnings capacity and finance things. I can't imagine it's not discussed in the book.

At any case, here at our house is that we are by now by now largely beyond all that, though Mary still does appreciate some help in meal planning and I get it. Generically, I'm not fully sure that on the liberal side of the spectrum contemporary discourse has really thought this through. Or maybe it's me that hasn't.