No man quits work to unblock toilets at home (2024)

I was reading an article online about Mairead Ronan’s choice to quit her radio show to spend more time with her family, as research for a piece on the different work-life options for men and women, when I was diverted. Up popped an item titled “Dublin mum shares genius hack for making mashed potatoes without washing, peeling or chopping”, and I was off like a terrier down a rabbit hole.

I’ve been a single parent since my youngest daughter, now 18, was just ten months old, and in that time I reckon I’ve peeled and mashed several tons of spuds and boiled mountains of pasta; spent months overseeing homework and attended 70-plus parent-teacher meetings; organised children’s parties, dental appointments and holidays; managed illnesses, strops, domestic crises and five Leaving Certs; extracted bushels of hair from the shower drain, fixed washing machines, bled radiators, pumped bike tyres, made half-a-dozen runs to Crumlin hospital’s A&E; provided hours of free counselling, dispute resolution and taxi services; tended — and buried — at least ten pets; done thousands of grocery shops and hoovered miles of stair carpet. All fitted in round the business of earning a living.

I own a chainsaw, electric screwdriver and drill, angle grinder, reciprocating saw and sander, to minimise the time I have to spend waiting for handymen to do minor household jobs. I work as a barrister as well as a journalist, and I couldn’t help wondering, as I chased a mashed spud recipe, how many of my male colleagues would have interrupted their professional research to check out a time-saving household hint? How many, I wonder, came in from a day’s work last Tuesday and put on rubber gloves to unblock a leaky dishwasher, before heading out for a white-knuckle spin around Tallaght with a daughter who’s learning to drive, prior to cooking a dinner for six hungry people?

I seriously doubt that Ronan, who is happily married to a multimillionaire, will face quite that level of domestic obligation when she packs in her radio gig, while still keeping her haircare business and presenting Ireland’s Fittest Family. But some of the mood music over her decision seemed to imply the option of being a stay-at-home mother was the easy one, akin to deciding, as one commentator put it, that you never want to hear the alarm clock again.

Then there’s the unspoken suggestion that giving up a successful career to look after children and run a household is an option unfairly denied to men, who must stay at their desks all their working lives without ever having the chance to be domestic gods. As Pee Flynn might have said: “Guys, try it some time.”

Ronan’s decision coincided with Prince Harry’s ocean-going witlessness in urging people to quit jobs that don’t “bring them joy”. There speaks a man, who has never unblocked a toilet in his life, obliquely defending his decision to flee his wretched existence as a minor royal to live like a king in California. In the real world, very few jobs bring unconfined joy. Only a privileged minority have the option to abandon the workplace to fulfil themselves, and they’re usually extremely rich men, or married to one. Even then, I can’t recall the last time I heard a wealthy man say he was abandoning his career, or even part of it, to stay home with his children.

So spare us the lamentations on behalf of all those imaginary men who’d love to do what Ronan is doing: give up a challenging career in favour of childcare, school runs, homework duty, household management and assorted domestic troubleshooting. No matter how much help you’ve got, there’s really no delegating the decision-making, problem-solving, empathetically engaged parenting bit. Unless, of course, you are a man with an important job and a partner who is happy to absolve you of the messy stuff — what Hillary Clinton dubbed the “emotional labour”.

Whether you’re coupled up or single, rich or poor, working or stay-at-home, that’s still the toil that falls almost exclusively to mothers, and international studies on the division of household labour suggest that men aren’t exactly storming the domestic fortress to take it from us.

So, back to the spud-peeling for me. The “genius hack”, since you’re wondering, involved microwaving the unpeeled potatoes and scooping them out. Nigella Lawson did it years ago.

brenda.power@sunday-times.ie

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