Division of Labor

Denisa and her brother are off on a trip to New York City today through Sunday, and I realized as she was preparing for the trip that I need to do a better job of involving her in the process of trip planning. Typically it’s something I bear the brunt of, figuring out the schedules and the logistics. How will we get there? What will we do when we arrive? How do we get where we’re staying? How much does it cost? How do you pay? What’s the public transportation like?

These are all things I’m fairly familiar with at this point, and even then I stress about them a fair deal when it’s time for us to actually go. (It took a while this past time when we were in Chicago, for example, to figure out how to buy the transit passes I wanted from the airport machines.) For Denisa, however, it’s mostly new.

This isn’t to say Denisa isn’t an active participant in our travel plans. But there’s a big difference between going over the plans as a proposal once they’ve all been created, and actually creating the plans in the first place.

That said, Denisa and I definitely have divided some tasks between us naturally over the course of our marriage. I’m over trip planning, ticket purchasing and the like. She takes care of groceries and laundry. I’m tech support and random handyman. She’s in charge of runs to the dump. It’s not like we sat down and took turns picking tasks. It’s just sort of grown that way organically. I wonder if it would be different if we took time to do it the other way. How have other people done their division of labor in their marriage?

In any case, she and Miloš are staying at an Airbnb. They’ll be heading over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art tomorrow to check out their medieval collection, then walking around Central Park and Times Square. Taking the bus there and back from Portland. She’s skeptical that she’ll have fun, but I’m pretty confident she’ll have a blast. Being in a big city can feel quite liberating when you’re there on your own without kids. So many things to do and places to see. Yes, it’s a real pain to get there sometimes, but I’m almost always happy to be wherever I am, once I end up there.

Though I don’t blame Denisa for being skeptical about the Airbnb. You never know what you’re going to get until you get there . . .

What will I be doing at home with the kids? Movies, video games, board games, and more*!

*”more” in this case means I have to do writing and a bunch of chores, and I’m going to enlist the kids to help with that. If we get the chores done, we might be able to do all the rest. But there are a lot of chores . . . Wish us luck!

Leave a comment

×