Ignacio Pereyra's avatar
Ignacio Pereyra
nacho@nos.social
npub1daaj...8w5z
Journalist and writer. Recalculating is my newsletter about masculinity, fatherhood and identity crisis. Men and fathers, let’s talk! https://ipereyra.substack.com/about
Ignacio Pereyra's avatar
npub1daaj...8w5z 11 months ago
Irene was off on a trip, and many new questions came into play: how was baby León going to sleep when he had never known bottle nor dummy? How was he going to sleep without the breast at 21 months? What was going to happen to Lorenzo, aged five, to have to wait for me to put his little brother to sleep first? #parenting #fatherhood
Parenthood’s small battles. The horrible and the positive aspects of the "terrible twos." From adorable baby to mischievous little goblin. Recipes, frustration, and strategies. A small victory on a chaotic morning. If you know strategies that work well for you or have ideas triggered by this text — tricks? resources? — please hit reply and share!
Women are not only ahead in planning the family’s tasks, but they also remember (and organize) those of the rest of the family members: "Did you call the pediatrician?", "Did you find out if we can take the dog or where to leave it for the vacations?", and a long list of etceteras. This leads to what is commonly referred to as "hidden mental load". And no, my friend, women do not have a factory setup that makes them better at these tasks than men. It's not much of a mystery: these are skills that are acquired and developed with practice. There is no special female biology, which men were denied in their DNA that comes with remarkable domestic or caregiving skills (or for everything we men don't do because they supposedly do it better). More here:
On a global level, women do 76.2% of all of the care work which is not remunerated, dedicating 3.2 times more time to these tasks than men, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO). As an exercise, let’s ask ourselves: Who is researching, looking for, finding, choosing and closing the deal on a specialist, pediatrician or therapist to cover the range of needs at different stages of childhood? Who skips work when a child gets sick and can’t go to school? And why is it like this?
A good start is asking ourselves several questions: Why does one of us do the job better than the other? Do I have a natural talent for cleaning bathrooms? Why doesn’t the other one want to learn how to do that? And what’s behind it? A lack of trust? Reproducing co-dependency conditions? A rush of territorial control? If what I do — remunerated work or knowing everything about my children — gives me a determined role and space in a relationship, what happens if I let it go? Can I become expendable, or less desirable?
It’s hard to strike a balance between how hard it is to be a father versus the joy and wholesomeness of having children. The yin and yang to paternity always fall short: either you whinge too much, or you’re too much of a romanticist. How do you avoid the binaries which are so definitive of this era - that you don’t have to be A or B, but rather A and B (and C, and all of the alphabet together). How to achieve stability and harmony between the opposing, different, complementary and interconnected forces that coexist in #parenthood?
U.S. psychologist Joshua Ziesel described his effort to be more egalitarian by organizing his daughter's birthday. How hard could it be? It is basic arithmetic: if the man takes over more tasks, the other person will do less. Why? Because it is the just and equitable thing to do. What is the invisible work that we men have trouble seeing?