Last year I found myself deep-diving into feminist theory. It began with reading “The Handmaid’s Tale” and then following it up with the first book by French comic book artist Emma, “The Mental Load”. After that I was hooked, and finding my world of male privilege reeling from it all. I’d read my fair share of feminist theory at Uni, but last year a mixture of life experience and the clarity of what I was reading meant that things my wife and other women around me had tried to get me to see for years began to make sense. Recognising in Emma’s comics so many statements that I had unthinkingly made myself, I started on a quest to recognise all the things I have been ignorant to in my life because my culture has allowed me and other men to be ignorant to them. Phrases like “weaponised incompetence” cut deep when I recognised myself in them, and Emma’s comic entitled “You Should’ve Asked” made me see how many times I had been guilty of waiting to be asked when the women around me simply saw what needed to be done and did it.
But there’s a complicating factor in all of this. You see, I also think I probably have ADHD. I have not yet been diagnosed, and it’s possible that I am able to function at such a level that I wouldn’t be diagnosed anyway. That remains to be seen. But I have begun to realise things about myself that have made life – especially adult life – difficult for me in ways that I have not previously been able to articulate: the ways I vague out over verbal instructions, how I move on from one task to the next without completing what I started, how easily I become distracted, how much I struggle to organise myself, how easily I lose track of time or where I put my glasses or my keys. And some of these struggles make things like domestic responsibilities and parenting extra challenging. What might at times look like I’m failing to take responsibility, or assuming that it isn’t my job to do as the man, is often actually me becoming distracted on a side-quest or being overwhelmed by a multi-step task and not knowing where to start.
But here’s the thing. I wouldn’t grow so easily overwhelmed with domestic responsibilities if I’d been trained all my life to do them. When I learnt as a teenager to do my own laundry or cook basic meals, I felt I deserved a medal, and was often treated like I did, because I was being “one of the good ones”. But I was never trained to manage all domestic operations, never taught about home-making or hospitality, certainly never taught that other people’s comfort was my responsibility. I learnt from a young age what jobs I simply never had to put my hand up for, learnt quickly what things I could simply assume a woman would do. No-one ever used those words with me; no-one had to. I could see it all readily by myself: the way all the women at family Christmas would go into the kitchen while all the men went into the loungeroom to read their new books. No-one ever taught me this was the way it should be; but neither did anyone ever teach me to hold my keys between my fingers when I was walking at night, nor did anyone teach me to be quiet in meetings so I wouldn’t be taken as bossy, or tell me that the way I dressed would control how others acted. I learnt what I could take for granted the same way I learnt to walk or breathe. It took nearly forty years for me to see that it could be, should be, any other way than this.
So yes, some domestic tasks may be extra hard for me because my brain tends not to brain very well when it feels overwhelmed, or because I was lost at the second step in the verbal instruction and distracted by the poem I started to think about writing while you were in the middle of your sentence. But they’d be a whole lot easier for me if society had begun teaching me from birth to do them the way it taught most girls my age how to do them. Instead, I learnt at a young age what jobs I could simply compartmentalise out of my mental load; and now I’m having a hard time, as a neurodivergent 40-year-old dad of three, to learn to do things differently.
But let me tell you what I’m planning to do most differently. I’m planning to teach my three boys to take responsibility for their home and their community. I’m planning to teach them about the power they will wield as men, and the responsibility they have to be different as men. I’m planning to teach them to notice a messy room and not to leave it for someone else to clean up. And I’m planning most of all to teach them to make space for others and to listen to people who aren’t like them. Because I only began to see what I was missing when I tuned in to others who experienced the world differently to me, and I wish I’d been able to have a forty-year headstart on all that I’m trying now to learn.
I want my boys to learn early what I am only now beginning to understand.
The Consolations of Writing 