So what do we (or I, as a woman) do about it?
On the ‘we’ front (ie social and collective action):
1. Campaign for Norwegian-style parental leave policies that include ‘a non-transferable “use it or lose it” period of paid parental leave’ for the non-child-bearing partner.
The personal benefits of such leave entirely aside, this sort of state-mandated approach has the happy side-effect of turning ‘taking time off to care for youngsters’ into a universal social norm. If everyone takes parental leave, it stops being a black mark on child-bearing parents in the work-force. (Working from semi-vague memory, I believe the opposite is now the case in Norway: men who don’t take parental leave are looked upon as bad fathers rather than good workers.)
The perverse notion that social structures and systems exist to support economic goals, rather than the other way round, is at the heart of almost all the attacks on the socially-oriented policies that improve the lot of people who aren’t straight, White and male.
On the ‘I’ front:
1. Take a leaf out of the ‘not in a heteronormative pair-bond’ book.
Same-sex couples, almost by definition, can’t fall into heteronormative household patterns because the genders in the pair-bond don’t match the default imposed by compulsory heterosexuality.
My partner and I don’t have formal- or gender-based divisions. Instead we have shared responsibility. For the most part we don’t divide the household labour, we do it together. Or, at worst, we do it for each other.
There’s another useful consequence of this: we do what needs to be done when it needs to be done and without much need for discussion or negotiation. When I was spending my days in an office in the city I rose and showered first. As a consequence my partner made the bed each morning and prepared breakfast. Now that I’m back to working out of my home office, my partner rises and showers first. And I’m now the one who makes both the bed and breakfast.
This sort of duty switching and the more general duty sharing is second-nature to us. And it’s not second-nature to us because we consciously questioned the heternormative default and re-negotiated our roles as a couple. It’s second-nature because it literally never occurred to either of us to run our intimate and domestic lives any other way.
Which is not to say I’m arguing for communes.
My partner and I live in our own dwelling and we did so when we were raising our children. Day-to-day, however, we spent much of our household time floating between our house, the house of the family we shared a back-fence with (to the extent we put a gate in said fence), the houses of the courtesy Aunts and Uncles that constituted our meyased zayn mishpochah (found family), and the house of my partner’s oldest childhood friend (half-a-block away).
The children in the family we shared a back-fence with were about the same age as our two, as were the children of my partner’s childhood friend. This informal kin group meant we had half-a-dozen and more people to call on to deal with the array of things that happen despite your planning.
All the way through primary school and high school, for example, I was a freelancer working from my home office. As a consequence, I was also the one who took the kids to school and picked them up from school and did the various after-school runs or brought the kids straight home. And by ‘kids’ I mean all six kids that constituted our informal kin group. Which freed the other five parents in said group to work at their more tied-to-a-place-and-set-times jobs without hassle or concern. And, on the rare occasions where my own work got in the way, we had older Aunts and Uncles to take up the slack.