If you don't have a paying job, you don't work. Vacuuming, laundry, making the bed, doing the dishes are chores, but they are not work. vacuming the entire house: 30 minutes. make a bed: 3 minutes. laundry: 15 minutes of hands on labor, 5 minutes to load washer, 5 minutes to move from washer to dryer, 5 minutes to unload dryer and put clothes away. dishes: 10 minutes, 5 minutes to load dishwasher, 5 minutes to unload. I can do the household chores in less than 2 hours a day, and yes I am a man who can sort his own laundry. If it were 200 years ago and you spent your time making clothes, building a fire in the oven to bake bread, grinding the wheat to make flour, churning the milk into butter after milking the cow, collecting the eggs from the laying hens, boiling a tub of water on an open fire to do laundry, going to the hand pump well and getting water, making chicken dinner involved plucking the feathers off the bird, getting reading lights meant making the candles, getting clean meant making the soap and getting to town required hitching up the horse; those would all be work. The effort it takes to run a household when your food is available at Safeway, your wardrobe is available at TJ Maxx and your transportation is made by Toyota is a joke. And yet in this supposedly modern world we keep an antiquated view on these traditional rolls for men and women. Men go to the field and plow or to the woods and cut the lumber and women keep the household together raising the children and making the meals. Lets admit that we consume our survival, we don't make it from raw materials. If you owned and fed the cow that produced the milk that fed your kids, made the broom that swept the floor so your kids had a clean floor, or crafted the blankets or shoes that kept your children warm please have my heartiest congratulations. However, you didn't do any of that. You bought the milk in the dairy department, you bought the vacuum cleaner at Sears and your designer bed linens were bought on credit with the Macys charge card. Your house has a thermostat so you don't have to get up 3 times a night to throw another log on the fire to stay warm. Your garden is watered on an automatic timer not from buckets drawn from the creek 400 yards away. Your hardest decision about sanitation is whether to get the hand soap with or without fragerance not how to keep your kids from dying from cholera, measles, mumps, rubella, scarlet fever or the infections from an accidental axe wound. About a hundred years ago in the US, women got the right to vote, it became legal for them to wear pants, to drive an automobile and attend the same educational institutions as men. This was about the same time that arduous labor to keep a household intact began declining. Also about the same time that the agricultural life of most people began transitioning into urban and industrial. So the role of "homemaker" as an idealized Donna Reed spinning through the ultra formica kitchen of the 1950's like a balerina keeping the house clean, the kids fed and ready with a pipe and slippers for dad after a long day of work was the pornography that you were sold. Porn is something that doesn't really exist the way its portrayed. The truth is since the home-maker doesnt actually make anything, the position should be called a home-consumer. Consumers need money and money doesn't magically arrive in the bank account every payday. So the man still goes out the door every morning, but instead of chopping firewood or plowing the field to keep the family warm and fed he goes to his job to earn the money to buy the heat from the gas company and the organic arugula from Whole Foods. Meanwhile its somehow perfectly acceptable for the woman to not be a part of that money producer equation since she is busy nesting and consuming, drawing money off the stack but not putting any back. Any woman who stays at home after her children reach school age is living some fantasy where they are denying the fact that they are consumers and are living off the charity of their husband's paycheck. Homemakers are delusional about the economic reality of how they live today, and the real word for home-maker shouldn't just be changed to home-consumer, the word should be "unemployed-and-not-looking". So all you homemakers out there, if you can't support yourselves to the standard you expect to live on when your husband comes home one day to find your vapid stories about what was on Oprah or how the line at the store was so tragically long or how the minivan is making a funny sound and they wake up that you are a consumer of both their time and money and your contributions to the family are not beneficial; you had better have a plan B. While you produce value to the family by educating children or managing household needs more than a maid service sure you can keep the title of homemaker, but lets not try to fool anyone into believing that its work. And the title homemaker doesn't come with tenure, unless you greet me at the door after my long day of work with a martini in a chilled glass and you are wearing nothing but the back aisle from Victoria's Secret. If you can live in your porn fantasy world then I should get to live in mine too.

NEWS FLASH: you don't work. No matter how tough you imagine your stay-at-home duties to be, it's not a job.

That last comment was for James. You shouldnt be married.

My wife is extremely lazy and selfish. I do all of the housework, work 60+ hours a week at multiple jobs. Do all of my own laundry and many times hers, and not once do I ever so much as get a "thank you". She takes everything I do for granted and if I ask her to help she states she "works" too. Working to her means screwing around on Facebook all day and avoiding doing anything other than making a complete mess of the house and leaving junk all over the place. With all that being said she "feels" she puts in just as much if not MORE than I do. Most of her friends do nothing around the house all day just like she does and talk down to their husbands. I certainly don't think this behavior is typical of all women, but somehow I ended up with the worst possible fate known to man. I have to pay for everything and do all of the housework as she thinks that it's sexist to make her do housework. Feminism has killed the modern woman and turned MANY of them into completely useless human beings. I pay for ALL of the household bills, ALL of her stupid credit card bills and don't get an ounce of appreciation. I made a terrible decision picking out a partner. The amazing thing is that prior to shacking up, she used to take care of herself and home as well as have a job. The only reason that I do not kick her ass out is that I know she will be homeless as no one I know would EVER take her in. We don't have any children together but I do completely support her son while she blows her child support payments on clothes. I am not the only one in this situation and I KNOW many men feel the same frustration that I do. Divorce is a bad deal for a man, much worse than for a woman and I sure as shit know I would be paying her for the rest of my life if I decide to do so. I should have married a woman outside of America, you know, one who actually appreciates a man and has not been poisoned by feminism. FML

Probably not, but the point was made, non the less. I don't think my husbands job is any more challenging than the work i do at home. he has it in his head that it is, therefor i needed to level the playing field. If truth be known, the only part of the above that i don't do daily is the shopping, bathing the animals, changing sheets and weeding. the rest is daily and can take the entire day to accomplish. keeping a household, a demanding husband, and children going is not an easy job, but for some reason has become a thankless one in todays society. i was just trying to impart a little humor into my otherwise tedious day

I'm sorry, but I was a stepmother to toddler twin boys for 3 years, worked full time (40 hour plus) and still maintained my house (cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc). Here is where you stay at home whatevers get it confused. While your spouse is out there working to support you, and your bitching about how you cook and clean all day, your forgetting one dynamic: YOU CAN STOP AT ANYTIME TO TAKE A NAP. THE WORKING SPOUSE CANNOT. YOU HAVE THE OPTION TO SLEEP IN. YOUR SPOUSE CANNOT. YOU CAN TAKE TIME OUT OF THE DAY TO DO SOMETHING FOR YOURSELF. YOUR WORKING SPOUSE CANNOT! Sorry to pop the floats in your parade ladies, but coming from a woman who's husband worked on Saturdays and I was home with our babies, I was able to get laundry for 4 done, breakfast cooked, dinner planned, house spotless before noon. When my kids were asleep for their nap, I was playing Call of Duty on Xbox (3 times prestiged, yea I had time for that too). And when stay at home whatevers say their job is never done, STOP LYING. You have someone paying for you. When you tell a working mother how you clean and do laundry all day, you wanna know what goes through her head? Wow, your house must be really filthy if that's an all day thing for you. All the time. The working mothers can get into Molly maid mode, get it done, and still have time to spare to be with her family. #TeamWorkingMom

Kind of funny that you had him do a whole week's worth of work in 2 only days... if you stretched it out over 7, i'm sure he wouldn't have found it so challenging.