Chip Chick
This 46-year-old woman is a stay-at-home mother, and her husband, 47, is a self-employed HVAC technician. She and her husband have two daughters, 16 and 12, and a 14-year-old son. A month ago, their younger daughter needed them to sign a permission slip and fill out forms before a class field trip.
Unfortunately, she lost track of time and forgot to do so before the deadline for students to submit the permission slips and forms. She’d written a reminder about the upcoming deadline because she knew it would take time to complete the forms and required her undivided attention. However, it slipped her mind when she prioritized other tasks at the beginning of the month.
“That’s when I do most of the shopping and tracking household bills/subscriptions. I do daily cleaning, but we use a service for deep cleaning/landscaping that I had to supervise,” she said.
On the day of the field trip paperwork deadline, their older daughter picked up their younger daughter from school. Their older daughter called her husband to let him know that their younger daughter was devastated and sobbing because she missed the deadline and couldn’t attend the trip.
Her husband drove to their daughter’s school and pleaded with staff members in the office to allow him to fill out the paperwork so that his daughter could go on the field trip. Because it was the day of the deadline, they allowed it. She was grateful her husband could do this and told her husband and daughter sorry multiple times.
During a conversation about the issue, her husband scolded her for her mistake. He pointed out that while he works, he takes several phone calls and has to multitask other duties like administration and accounting, so he thought she should also be able to juggle several things simultaneously.
She screamed at him that his job is more focused, while doing housework and childcare involves a multitude of tasks at the same time, including emotional labor. Plus, she acknowledged that much of her work goes unnoticed. Her husband doubled down on his point of view that she wasn’t as overwhelmed with work as she claimed to be, and she needed to get tasks accomplished in a timelier manner.
“I found out my husband put a hidden camera in our living room to ‘prove’ that I’m lazy and worthless. It was a small, disguised camera hidden inside what looked like a charging block,” she explained.
Her husband put the camera in one of the outlets in the living room, and since their children have a ton of chargers plugged into the outlets, she didn’t think anything of it. A week after the ordeal with their daughter’s field trip paperwork, her husband started an argument with her. He needed her to mail checks to his employees, and he was upset that she hadn’t done it that day (she was planning to mail the checks the next day instead).
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