The other day I was getting lunch with a few fellow mamas.  We each had at least one kid in tow, so our public lunch was quite the spectacle. In the conversation that we were able to sustain between the tantrums and random crying we got on the topic of who does what in each of our relationships. Who does the laundry, the dishes, makes the bed or vacuums.  Who bathes the kids, who tucks them in at night and so on. I realized that all of us, myself included, kept referring to our husband’s efforts with the qualifier of “he helps” before everything we stated our husbands did.  I started getting annoyed with myself for talking like this because my husband doesn’t “help” me.

Using the word help implies that all of these tasks are mine to do and that my husband is making it easier for me by offering his services. Our marriage is a partnership.  We are together working towards the same goals. Financial goals.  Cleanliness goals. And the goals that we have set for raising our babies. He owns and lives in this house with me, so he should also clean the house.  He eats food on our dishes in the house, so he should also cook and clean those dishes.  The children are his children, so he should also provide care for them.

I got lucky in the husband department. My husband cleans and folds his own clothes, our towels and our bedding each week.  He unloads the dishwasher each time that it is run, early in the morning before I even wake up. On Fridays, he vacuums all of the floors and even uses the wand to get the edges between the floor and the walls.  He makes our bed in the mornings.  He wakes up our toddler and gets him ready for daycare while I do the same with our new baby.  At night, he tucks Riley into bed, while I nurse Adalyn to sleep in the other room. He mows the lawn each week and gets the mail every afternoon. Your husband may do more, or he may do less and that is okay.  Each marriage has to find a balance that works best for both individual involved.

By referring to my husbands efforts as him “helping” me, I am belittling his actions. I am making it sound like everything that he has done, was done because I asked.  As if he couldn’t have figured out on his own that our child needed to eat or needed to have his diaper changed.  My husband is fully capable of determining these things on his own.  Referring to my husband as helping me also implies that he is in some way doing me a favor by completing these actions. Don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate him doing all these things, BUT he isn’t doing me a favor by being an equal participant in our life.

So I challenge myself and I challenge you.  Stop referring to everything your husband does as “helping” you.