I Don’t Want to Become Jess Zimmerman’s “Good Wife”
I really don’t want to do any more chores.
I love my fiancé very much, but the love is less all-consuming than my younger, single self assumed it would be. Now that we are fully committed—months away from getting married, living together, our lives growing more and more intertwined with every passing day—we’ve moved on from the merry-go-round splendor of early love into the reliable contentment that allows us both to turn outward again.
Our relationship is no longer a world unto itself; it’s now a home within the actual world. It’s more launching pad than universe; safe haven instead of escape. This is what it means, I think, to have decided that we will marry rather than leave our love to its own recognizance: to consciously invoke a social institution, with all its baggage and import, is to willingly make our love into scaffolding, joining it to preexisting structures rather than insisting that it stand apart, a self-sustaining island sufficient unto itself.
To get married is to allow our uniqueness—that particular us-ness that feels so revelatory while actually being quite mundane—to recede into the background. It’s stable enough to serve as stage-dressing now. It no longer needs to be the action at the center of the show.
I am afraid, quite frankly, that to be the mother of a family is to take on a job more onerous than the already questionable, patriarchally-inflected one of “wife.”
I’m happy with a love like this, but I will admit that it leaves a void. There is now an empty spotlight shining its circle on stage. The choice of what to fill it with seems to me to be, in at least some respects, a choice of direction or orientation, a choice about what kind of couple we will be. Will we fill the void with a child and thereby become a family, turning away from the world once more, at least for a little while, in order to choreograph our lives anew around this being, the physical representation of the ineffable chemistry between us? Or will we refuse to do that, instead leaving the stage open, a structure upon which we can act out any number of dramas, trading off stardom or coming back together again, showcasing our souvenirs of the world?
When I ask myself this question, I must admit that I possess a particular fear. It’s the fear—not, I think, at all unfounded—that the former course of action will be more work for me, specifically, than the latter one. I am afraid, quite frankly, that to be the mother of a family is to take on a job more onerous than the already questionable, patriarchally-inflected one of “wife.” And when I fear that there will be more work, I mean this not just theoretically or metaphorically, but quite literally: I already feel, in some ways, that becoming my fiancé’s betrothed has meant agreeing to manage him, and I feel no little amount of dread when I consider multiplying this management duty by one or more further persons.
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Jess Zimmerman’s recent Women and Other Monsters, an essay collection that interweaves personal reflection with sociocultural musing on the mythology of female monsters, captures my fear well. In the chapter entitled “Deep Houses,” Zimmerman introduces the idea of the “good wife,” the behavioral archetype that so often plagues women, whether they choose to wed or not. She writes,
“Women are supposed to wife our partners (especially male partners), our bosses, even our male friends—to carry the burden of organizing, planning, remembering the plan, repeating the plan, enacting the plan, thinking ahead, tidying up, keeping track, maintaining friendships, hearing grievances, noticing what needs to be done and doing it, all of it with an even voice and a smile lest our resentment sour the air.”
Zimmerman goes on to expound upon the idea, detailing and discussing the responses she got to a 2015 essay she published on the now-defunct The Toast, a piece that dealt with the “categories of difficult work that women are expected to perform without reward or acknowledgement.” Such categories are so expansive and often so invisible as to feel impossible to list exhaustively, but some of the more obvious ones are those that I fear yoking myself to if we decide to have children: they are the burdens of keeping a home (distinct from a house) running—the chore scheduling, thank-you card writing, birthday-remembering, domestic-supply inventory taking—that I too often find I’ve been socialized to care about immensely, even as I also care about other, grander things too. As Zimmerman quotes a commentator on her Toast piece saying,
“It’s a substantial amount of overhead, having to care about everything. It ought to be a shared burden, but half the planet is socialized to trick other people into doing more of the work.”
I can see already, even with our marriage ceremony still waiting in the wings, that there are things I care about more than my future husband does. Predictably, most of them align with exactly the kinds of unpaid emotional labor that Zimmerman allocates to the “good wife.” In our house, I do the future planning, the doctor’s appointment scheduling, the grocery list making.
Even now, this very minute, I am watching my soon-to-be husband sit at our counter (on one of the stools I purchased and constructed to outfit our new apartment) and procrastinate the completion of his taxes, which, as any responsible reader knows, are due tomorrow. As I watch him and avoid being a nag—after all, his procrastination does not yet impact me—I am already adding to my mental to-do list an item that reads: “Do research about whether filing jointly will be advantageous; if so, make sure to collect all his documents.” I know, already, that I will be the one doing our taxes—that the research and planning and tiny-box-printing will fall to me.
In the context of this as-yet-unrealized unpaid labor, it’s no wonder that I feel trepidation about bringing a child into our waiting spotlight. I can just picture myself backstage, pulling all the cords and levers, keeping the lights switched on. It’s one thing to get married and open a theater. It’s quite another to resign myself to becoming the one-woman producer of a family spectacle. I’d like, I know for sure, to at least be in the show—to have at least a few credited lines.
And I certainly don’t want all of them to be something along the lines of Honey, could you help me with this?