Call of Domestic Duty, by Declan, age forty one and a half

It’s just after ten in the morning. I’ve been awake for four hours and it feels like it should be bedtime already. After the battle of the breakfast table (cornflakes or toast Maisie? No, we don’t have smashed avocado), I dispatched the kids to school, well, I shoved them through the gates (‘Yes Alfie, you do have fish paste on your sandwiches, and yes, that’s all there is.’) and ran like my life depended on it. Since then, I’ve folded a pile of laundry, half of which I’m sure doesn’t belong to anyone in this house, fished a Lego man and one of Barbie’s shoes out of the toilet, and had a heated debate with the cat about my lack of appreciation for her gifts of deceased small creatures.

I am, in the strictest sense of the word, a househusband. Or, as my mate Toby puts it, ‘unemployed with delusions of domestic grandeur.’

It wasn’t always like this. I used to have a job, a real one in an office. If I remember correctly, through the haze of nappies and chicken nuggets, it involved changing numbers in spreadsheets, endless meetings and a lot of inane nodding. But then Tara, my wife, got promoted. She now runs a team of eighty people in something called a ‘platform’ and says things like ‘synergies’ and ‘agile’ like it’s perfectly normal. We decided one of us should stay at home with the kids, and as she was the one with the decent salary and I was the one who once accidentally dialled into a team meeting in just my underpants, the choice was obvious.

The thing is, no one tells you that staying at home is actually real work. Not work in the sense of dialling into a few calls and completing spreadsheets on time. No, this is the world of school lunches, last minute fancy dress outfits, blocked drains and the joys of the PTA Whatsapp group.

My day starts with the school run. It’s less of a run and really more a slow walk of shame behind the perfect parents and the mummy-mafia. There’s Angela, one of those tall athletic looking women with short blonde hair who have an uncanny knack of making you feel completely inferior. Her son speaks fluent Chinese, plays the cello, and makes the most amazing roast pepper hummus (so I’m told). He’s seven by the way. My son once put ketchup on his cornflakes and he’s just about got to grips with speaking basic English.” Angela always greets me with, ‘Hi Declan… you still doing the househusband thing?’ as if it’s some sort of temporary affliction that I’ll eventually get over.

Then there’s Steve, the only other dad who does the school drop-off. Steve works for the post office and likes to wear Lycra. Not because he cycles or performs gymnastics or anything, just in general. He even wears it under his postman’s shorts, like some letter-wielding superhero. He once winked at me and said, ‘Special delivery!’ I haven’t made eye contact with him since.

After the children are safely on the other side of the school gates with their hastily prepared lunch boxes (last week I accidentally packed a slice of garlic bread and a sachet of cat food, though the box was empty on return), I go back home to put order to the morning carnage and complete my domestic duties.

Our house has three bedrooms, a garage, something that used to resemble a garden, and a lingering smell of offerings from the cat - their final resting places as yet undiscovered. I do the cleaning on a rota system that I came up with after watching one of those daytime shows for people who have lost the will to live and the capacity to think. Monday is floors. Tuesday is surfaces. On Wednesdays I just sit in the garage and scream into a cushion (I Googled it - it’s actually a thing).

I’ve become quite an expert on cleaning products. I’m fairly certain it could be my specialist subject on Mastermind. I know all the names and types - biological, non-biological, sprays, creams, budget brands, ineffective middle class brands in fancy bottles, even which bleach is best for erasing any aspirations of joy. I have a great little community of cleaning cloths and scrubbers who live in a box under the sink, and I occasionally talk to the mop. I’ve named her Marilyn. She’s quite a good listener.

The neighbours are a real mixed bag. On one side, we have the Wilsons. To the delight of our children and despair of my waistline, Mrs Wilson bakes a copious amount of cake every day. Her husband is retired from the army and trims his bushes and hedges like he’s preparing for a royal inspection. The other day, he suggested that our lawn might need a bit of attention. Not sure how we’d do that given it’s barely visible under the rainbow of broken plastic ride-on toys and the collapsed trampoline. On the other side are a young couple, Tom and Zara. He has his hair in a bun and she makes her own tofu. They’re all about ‘plant based’ and ‘dairy free’ and refer to their sourdough culture as their ‘bread-baby’. She once told me I had ‘earthy vibes.’ I assume that was a compliment and not an observation about my personal hygiene.

My wife, Tara, returns home from work at around seven in the evening, drained from a day of systems thinking, rituals, putting skin in the game and touching base. She’s assured me that none of that involves actually touching any skin and calls me her ‘Product Owner of Domestic Operations,’ which I think is meant to be flattering, though I’m still waiting for a pay-rise and better working hours - I’ll raise it with her in my next performance review!

Tara tries to help out as much as she can, though, as she’s the one who once microwaved a salad, she’s no Nigella. Last week she offered to cook dinner. We had something called ‘fusion lasagne,’ which involved organic pasta, home fed beef, and desperation in equal quantities. I said it was great, something Jamie Oliver would be proud of. I’m not completely stupid.

We have two kids. Alfie, who’s seven and thinks he’s a ninja (the kicking, leaping sort, not a kitchen gadget), and five year old Maisie who has decided she’s a horse. We had to go to a meeting with her teacher Miss Truegood, to discuss why she won’t answer to anything but ‘Lady Clippity-Clop.’ I said it was just a phase and Tara said Maisie was enjoying her oats and carrots, but that we were drawing the line at buying her a saddle. Miss Truegood looked at us with something resembling pity, sighed, and told us not to worry, she would do her best to ‘foster Maisie’s self expression,’ whatever that means.

Speaking of school, I recently attended a school assembly. If you’ve never sat in a room full of chairs designed for people under three feet tall, while watching twenty-seven children sing, well, shout really, about saving the planet, then you’re lucky. The mummy-mafia were all on the front row having arrived two hours early, and the dads, that’s me and Steve and some other bloke who kept on going outside to take ‘important phone calls’ were wedged in at the back. At one point during the performance, a child fell off the stage and was applauded for his embodiment of the diminishing rainforests. It was Alfie. He got a certificate for ‘creative improvisation.’ That’s my boy.

I don’t know about other places, but at our kid’s school, the PTA is definitely some sort of cult. I’m not really sure how it happened, but I am now a member of this cult, the token, or perhaps sacrificial male, amongst the highly strung, sensibly shoed mothers. I brought a cheese and onion quiche to my first meeting. That caused a few raised eyebrows. At the coffee break, a woman who smelled of garlic, with a flouncy sort of scarf around her neck, told me that vegetable sticks and hummus were more appropriate, vegan vegetable sticks and hummus at that, and perhaps some lentil crisps. She took the offending quiche and left it in the staff room. I never saw it again.

Away from school life, my in-laws are another regular joy. They only live down the road so admittedly make useful baby sitters for when Tara and I want to escape for an evening. But Tara’s mum has got a technology obsession, even though she’s hopeless with it. I blame Covid19. She still insists on having video calls nearly every evening without fail, just before the kid’s bedtime. You’d think after all this time, she’d be a master at the technology, but she still doesn't understand how the camera works, so we usually spend the time looking up her left nostril. I’m convinced it’s why Maisie keeps on having nightmares about being lost in an underground tunnel.

Along with the dreaded mother-in-law calls, laundry is the other thing that sends a shudder down my spine. There’s a sense of dread as I approach the washing machine with my offerings of ominous smells and stains in various shapes and sizes. There’s rarely an occasion when nothing fades or shrinks or comes out a completely different colour to when it went in. I swear our washing machine is a portal to another land where the inhabitants do some kind of clothes swap and then send back what they don’t want.

It’s not all bad though. The highlight of my week is the supermarket. The freedom as I travel down the aisles, the bright lights, colourful goods and strange things in packets that I’ve never seen or heard of in my life… it takes me back to those university parties… Sometimes I walk slowly past the cleaning aisle and whisper, ‘Soon, Marilyn, soon.’ But then I come down from my high as I reach the checkout to stand behind Maureen who can’t find her purse and doesn’t know why she’s got a bottle of Reggae Reggae sauce in her basket.

Tara said I need a ‘development opportunity’ - when I raised my eyebrows, she changed it to ‘hobby’. I tried baking but that ended with a minor fire and something that wouldn’t have looked out of place at the Tate Modern. Against my better judgement, I gave yoga a go, but the instructor said if I just wanted to lie on the floor in child’s pose and sleep for an hour, I could do that at home and dribble on my own carpet.

So when I have the time, I stick to writing. I write short stories mostly. There’s not much damage I can do with that, except for the other week, when my notes for an erotic thriller titled ‘Whispers in her Thighs’ ended up in Alfie’s homework folder. The next time I saw his teacher, I’m sure she was wearing a lower neckline than usual, and a more crimson shade of lipstick.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to go back to work. Wearing real trousers and having a shave every day. Chats around the water cooler and free pizza when we hit a deadline. But then I remember about being ‘outcome focused’ and pretending to understand the corporate values and mission statement. The office politics, printer jams, quarterly reviews, living breathing documents… and Kevin, the host engineer who ate cheesy Doritos all day, breathed through his mouth and sounded like Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons.

So I stay at home and I clean and I cook. I host an imaginary radio show while I’m scrubbing the bathroom, ‘So, Janet from Nottingham, tell us about your favourite bleach product…’ or ‘Hey, Derek from Doncaster, I hear you’re having problems with ground-in stains…’ I’ve learned to conquer the kitchen and am a master of spaghetti bolognaise, Chicken Tonight and anything else that you can make with a jar. And I know my way around the internal workings of our Henry vacuum cleaner so well that it’s almost embarrassing. I’m sure he blushed the last time I had my hand up his pipe.

I may be a househusband, but I’m a professional one. And if anyone asks me what I do all day, I tell them that I’m the glue in the ointment, the fly in the machine, the cog in the linen basket. I’m an enigma. I don’t know how I do it, but I do. My kids are still alive and my wife hasn’t left me. I’m doing something right and that’s good enough for me. Now if you’ll excuse me, Marilyn and I have a date with a bottle of bleach.