Honey, I'll Make Dinner. Wait. What?

by Erica and Karen

Like lots of mothers, when our children were young we made family dinner whenever we could.

We learned quickly that “making dinner” is a continuous process. First you figure out what people will eat and what they will refuse to eat and what you must persuade them to consider, and of those options what is at least moderately healthy. Then you figure out what to cook, what to shop for, when and how to shop, and how to get stuff home. Often you make dinner in advance, on weekends, so a caregiver can reheat and serve when you are at work. And if you are lucky enough to be there to share dinner with the family, then you do cleanup.

It is a lot of work. And it is work that is seldom seen by anyone else, as was the focus of a recent essay that went viral soon after it was published. Upon hearing that her husband was bringing a friend home for dinner, a woman declared she was too busy at work to cook. Her husband graciously offered to do it. She was thrilled. When her husband came home to actually make dinner, he started by asking what was in the refrigerator.

The woman was crushed.

Why did she take it so hard? We think because it became crystal clear that her husband had absolutely no idea what “making dinner“ actually entails. And therefore had no appreciation of the effort involved.

Many of us have probably been in the same place. We don’t want to complain, we want to do all of our jobs as well as we can—but, once in a while, we want people to at least realize that it is actual work.

What do you think?

PS: A recent IMF study pointed out the global economic costs of devaluing “women’s work.” The report cited some startling statistics, like a UNICEF estimate that every day women world wide spend 200 million hours fetching water. Obviously making dinner is not exactly fetching water, and in the U.S. women do 3.8 hours of unpaid work per day while men do 2.4, which is not a bad comparison as a global matter. But we wonder what the global daily total would be if we counted all the hours that go into “making dinner”?